History
According to Hegel, "World history... represents the development of the spirit's consciousness of its own freedom and of the consequent realization of this freedom". This realization is seen by studying the various cultures that have developed over the millennia, and trying to understand the way that freedom has worked itself out through them. Hegel's account of history begins with ancient cultures as he understood them. His account of the civilizations relied upon 19th century European scholarship, and contains an unavoidable Eurocentric bias. At the same time, the developmental nature of Hegel's philosophy meant that rather than simply deprecating ancient civilizations and non-European cultures, he saw them as necessary (if incomplete or underdeveloped) steps in the outworking of absolute spirit. Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history contain one of his most well-known and controversial claims about the notion of freedom:
World history is the record of the spirit's efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself. The Orientals do not know that the spirit or man as such are free in themselves. And because they do not know that, they are not themselves free. They only know that One is free.... The consciousness of freedom first awoke among the Greeks, and they were accordingly free; but, like the Romans, they only knew that Some, and not all men as such, are free.... The Germanic nations, with the rise of Christianity, were the first to realize that All men are by nature free, and that freedom of spirit is his very essence.
In other words, Hegel maintains that the consciousness of freedom in history moves from despotism, to a sense that freedom is a privilege of a few, to a robust notion that humanity is free in and of itself. Hegel believes that the spirit of human freedom is best nurtured within a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch embodies the spirit and desires of the governed, and his reading of history locates the rise of such forms of government in the Germanic nations of, for example, the United Kingdom and Prussia after the Protestant Reformation. Hegel's "one, some, and all" proposition follows the basic geographical metaphor Hegel takes throughout his philosophy of history, namely, "World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning." When referring to the east, Hegel generally has in mind the historical cultures of Persia, though at times he does reference China and spends a great deal of space discussing India and Indian religions.
However, he has also said that any view of history (including his own) should be open to change based on the 'empirical facts' available.
