Memory, History, Justice

Abstract

Among the different parts of Hegel’s system the philosophy of history is today perhaps one of the less appealing. This is due both to a shift in the general focus of the current philosophical discussion and to the particular place that history occupies within Hegel’s thought. While the issue of “universal” or “world” history (Weltgeschichte) is one of the most widely treated between the end of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, it is hardly of any interest in the contemporary philosophical debate. On the other hand, for general and scholarly readers alike the philosophy of history seems to catalyze many of the flaws that different interpretive traditions have attributed to Hegel throughout the years — from the charge of teleologism (or providentialism) and the triumphalism of a suspicious notion of progress bent toward the superiority of the Prussian national state and Protestant culture, to the charge of intellectualizing (even logicizing) material processes at the expense of the understanding of real historical transformations. All in all, it seems difficult today to take seriously, at least without further qualifications, claims such as: reason is in history; history is god’s unimpeded march in the world, or even that history is the worldly realization of freedom.¹