Metaphysics

Lectures on the Philosophy of History

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1837

Based on lecture notes from Hegel's Berlin courses and published posthumously, this is his most accessible major work and the clearest statement of his philosophy of history. Hegel argues that history is not a random sequence of events but the self-development of World Spirit toward the consciousness of freedom — each civilisation embodying a stage of Spirit's self-understanding, from the Oriental world through Greece and Rome to the Germanic world. The book introduced concepts — the cunning of reason, world-historical individuals, the end of history — that would shape Marx, Nietzsche, Kojève, and Fukuyama.