Hegel and World History

Abstract History, for Hegel, is the history of the ‘spirit’. It is the history which the spirit itself creates and in which the spirit takes on an ‘objective’ shape in the world. The objectivity of what Hegel calls ‘objective spirit’ is realized in the form of world history. The term ‘world history’ refers less to the history of the whole world, and more to the historical sequence of ‘worlds’, or epochs. World and history thus have an asymmetrical relationship in the Hegelian understanding of ‘world history’: it is one history, which divides everything on earth into many worlds, into local and temporally limited world cultures. What makes it one history—what makes it unified—is the unitary concept of the spirit. The contributions brought together in this special issue discuss Hegel’s theory of world history, taking different approaches to the question of the relationship between the incomplete and the completed, between ‘actuality’ as a rational state and ‘existence’ as a reality that lacks rationality. In all texts, Hegel’s method of developing a philosophy of history represents a central problem.