linguistic:voice_change, structural:summarization
Philosophy of history

"History," Frederick Beiser writes, "is central to Hegel's conception of philosophy." Philosophy is only possible "if it is historical, only if the philosopher is aware of the origins, context, and development of his doctrines." In this 1993 essay, titled "Hegel's Historicism," Beiser declares this to be "nothing less than a revolution in the history of philosophy." In a 2011 monograph, however, Beiser excludes Hegel from his treatment of the German historicist tradition for the reason that Hegel is more interested in the philosophy of history than in the epistemological project of justifying its status as a science. Moreover, against the relativistic implications of historicism narrowly construed, Hegel's metaphysics of spirit supplies a telos, internal to history itself, in terms of which progress can be measured and assessed. This is the self-consciousness of freedom. The more that awareness of this essential freedom of spirit permeates a culture, the more advanced Hegel claims it to be.

Because freedom, according to Hegel, is the essence of spirit, the developing self-awareness of this is just as much a development in truth as it is in political life. Thinking presupposes an "instinctive belief" in truth, and the history of philosophy, as recounted by Hegel, is a progressive sequence of "system-identifying" concepts of truth.

Whether or not Hegel is a historicist simply depends upon how one defines the term. The importance of history in Hegel's philosophy, however, cannot be denied.

German has two words for "history," Historie and Geschichte. The first refers to "the narrative organization of empirical material." The second "includes an account of the underlying developmental logic (the 'intrinsic ground') of deeds and events." Only the latter procedure can supply a properly universal or philosophical history, and this is the procedure Hegel adopts in all of his historical writings. According to Hegel, humans are distinctly historical creatures because, not only do they exist in time, they also internalize temporal events so that they become, in a profound sense, part of what and who people are, "integral to humanity's self-understanding and self-knowledge." This is why the history of philosophy, for instance, is integral to philosophy itself, it being literally impossible for early philosophers to think what later philosophers, afforded all the riches of their predecessors, could think – and perhaps, with this distance, work through more thoroughly or consistently. From a later perspective, for instance, it becomes apparent that the concept of personhood includes the implication of universality such as renders contradictory any interpretation or implementation that extends it to some people, but not to others.

In the Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, simplifying his own account, Hegel divides human history into three epochs. In what he calls the "Oriental" world, one person (the pharaoh or emperor) was free. In the Greco-Roman world, some people (moneyed citizens) were free. In the "Germanic" world (that is, European Christendom) all persons are free.

In his discussion of the ancient world, Hegel provides a heavily qualified defense of slavery. As he puts it elsewhere, "slavery occurs in a transitional phase between the natural human existence and the truly ethical condition; it occurs in a world where a wrong is still right. Here, the wrong is valid, so that the position it occupies is a necessary one." Hegel is clear, however, that there is an unconditional moral demand to reject the institution of slavery, and that slavery is incompatible with the rational state and the essential freedom of every individual.

Some commentators – most notably, Alexandre Kojève and Francis Fukuyama – have understood Hegel to claim that, having achieved a fully universal concept of freedom, history is complete, that it has reached its conclusion. Against this, however, it can be objected that freedom may yet be expanded in terms both of its scope and its content. Since Hegel's day, the scope of the concept of freedom has been expanded to acknowledge the rightful inclusion of women, formerly enslaved or colonized peoples, the mentally ill, and those who do not conform to conservative norms with respect to sexual preference or gender identity, among others. As to the content of freedom, the United Nations' International Bill of Human Rights, just for instance, expands the concept of freedom beyond what Hegel himself articulates. Additionally, although Hegel consistently presents his philosophical histories as East-to-West narratives, scholars such as J. M. Fritzman argue that, not only is this prejudice quite incidental to the substance of Hegel's philosophical position, but that – with India now the world's largest democracy, for instance, or with South Africa's mighty efforts to transcend apartheid – the movement of freedom back to the East may already have begun.