Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 33
World History — the Vertical Dimension
While external constitutional law concerns the simultaneity of different states, world history concerns temporal movement — the development of forms of life in which new forms emerge from older ones, new problems arise from old solutions, and new solutions are sought for new problems.
In Hegel, world history is the conclusion of the philosophy of right. It is that in which the idea of communal life comes to its full actuality by realizing itself in the historical movement of peoples. This treatment contains a tension that is foundational for our conception. On one hand, world history is the material from which the determinations of the philosophy of right are drawn — the substance on which universality becomes visible (cf. I.7, I.8). On the other hand, it is the conclusion — the movement in which these determinations realize themselves historically, or against which they must prove themselves. Both belong together and could be developed in a world history as a work of its own, which is not to be undertaken here.
That no more is said here has a reason in the subject matter itself. Hegel himself treats world history only in outline in the Philosophy of Right and in the Encyclopedia; only the lectures develop it at length. This proportion is substantively correct: the philosophy of right needs from world history only that it exists and what it accomplishes systematically — that the particular state is measured against it. How the individual forms follow one another is a different question, and it would not be answerable here but only assertable. [KF]
Three determinations of Hegel’s world history must be critically modified, without abandoning the architecture.
The geographical presuppositions. Hegel drew on Carl Ritter when developing the geographical presuppositions in the introduction to world history. He names him explicitly — the nature of the continents, he says, was only thoroughly examined through Ritter’s writing — and takes over from him the threefold division: first, the highland, an extensive mountain mass of “solid coherence” that rises high above the sea; second, the river valleys, which arise where this mass is broken open and the rivers flow down; third, the coastland and its relation to the sea, which is not merely a boundary but has “a positive relation to man.”[1] From this follow the three basic forms that this volume also adopts: mountain peoples with expanded subsistence, river-valley empires with central bureaucracy, port-city cultures with trade and science. This sketch remains fruitful; it has already been taken up in I.7 and V.5. But with the development of transport and communication technology (cf. II.3), the status of these presuppositions shifts: they are not abolished, but increasingly open to being worked upon. World history must therefore think geography not as fate but as a changing condition.
The question of progress. Hegel’s world history tends to think progress one-dimensionally — as the increasing actualization of freedom, moving from the Oriental world through the ancient world to the Germanic world. This tendency is problematic today for several reasons: because the Eurocentric schema no longer holds; because the Germanic world was not the endpoint; because what appears as progress always also brings losses with it. What is needed is a dialectical concept of historical progress that thinks achievement and loss together — what is gained in a later form (formal equality, inwardness, differentiation) and what is lost (communal bonds, commons structures, ethical self-evidence). Earlier forms are not merely superseded stages; they can contain rational elements that are suppressed in the present and may return at a higher stage.
The endpoint. In Hegel, world history seems to end with the modern state — whether as its completion or as the form in which the idea comes to itself. Marx objected that capitalist modernity is not the endpoint but is itself a historical form that will pass over into another. A world history today cannot posit an endpoint — neither the modern state nor some other telos. It can describe the movement in which we participate without closing it off. The question of what comes after capitalist modernity cannot be answered from theory but must be worked out in practice — a consequence that Hegel himself, read honestly, does not exclude: what is supposed to be rational must first become practical, and becoming practical is the affair of those who act in history.
A world history that took up these three modifications would not be a rejection of Hegel but a correction of Hegel that at the same time integrates Marx. What Marx criticized in Hegel’s world history — the conflation of concept and present-day empirical fact, the tendency toward reconciliation with what exists, the insufficient economic analysis — is compatible with the Hegelian architecture once the modifications named above are carried out. Much of what passes among Marxist authors as specifically Marxist is in fact already latent in the Hegelian form — only not worked out, because Hegel did not analyze the economic conditions of his own time with the same depth that Marx later brought to bear.
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, GW 27.1, pp. 82 f. (Hotho transcript 1822/23, with variants from Griesheim and the Handbook). Hegel refers to Carl Ritter, Die Erdkunde im Verhältniß zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen (from 1817); elsewhere to Ritter’s Vorhalle europäischer Völkergeschichten. ↩︎