Hegel's Philosophy of History and the Cunning of Reason

Hegel's Philosophy of History reaches modern readers through his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Lectures on the Philosophy of History), which he delivered at the University of Berlin across several lecture cycles between 1822 and 1830. Hegel left behind only a manuscript of the introduction in his own hand; the body of the lectures survives through students' transcriptions (Nachschriften), which his student Eduard Gans compiled and published posthumously in 1837, with a further revised edition prepared in 1840 by Hegel's son, Karl Hegel. The work is therefore, strictly speaking, a reconstruction rather than a text Hegel himself finalized for publication, a fact that has occasionally complicated efforts to establish precisely which formulations are Hegel's own and which reflect a particular transcriber's phrasing.