Perhaps more than anywhere else, The Lectures on the Philosophy of History clearly brings out the philosophical significance of Hegel's way of thinking - his idiom and his style of composition. In a "lecture," it is very tempting indeed to try and "condense" one's points into a convenient, memorable formula. Hegel resists this temptation, and the result is that every formulaic sentence reads as a genuine part of the whole flow of his thoughts. In other words, Hegel resists the limits of formulaic prose by inserting formulas into contexts which dissolve the former's very formulaic character.
Bearing in mind this stylistic move, one could extract a few ideas in this work which hint at not only a stylistic revolution in philosophy, but also a total broadening or displacing of the proper content of philosophy.
Hegel works through the dichotomy between logic and history. This split morphs into several other splits such as idea/time, concept/time, thought/action, etc. The "Introduction" to the Lectures essentially outlines this morphology. For example, not every action belongs to history, Hegel claims, and then, because of this, actions are only actions in so far as they are historical. This double movement - first, limiting the number of actions that can be considered historical, then re-constituting the concept of action in terms of the historical - is repeated for other concepts such as nature, time, freedom, state, etc.
Of these concepts, the idea of the "state" occupies a special position. The state is, according to Hegel, the point at which freedom first comes into existence. There are no doubt more than one way to interpret this thought, and I will here only present one. Freedom is, for Hegel, to unify the manifold of implicitly existing things under a system of necessity. In this way, the necessity of the past becomes explicit, which then allows the mind to rationally claim that it has conquered its environs as well as its own unruliness. In this way, the mind then hands over its own work, the system of necessity, to the "future," the next thing that is to come. It can be anything - a capricious act, a natural phenomenon, or even an unnameable x. Now the state is the external figure of this system of necessity. Science, ethics, art, religion, and philosophy are all subordinate to the state, in the sense that while not all people can become adept at all of these domains, each member of the state nonetheless knows - perhaps through trust, or perhaps through outlines - that they are part of a larger mind which exists as the melding-together of these subjects. To take a mundane example, although one has absolutely no knowledge of aerodynamics, one nonetheless recognizes the existence and work of the engineer who does have such knowledge by comfortably boarding a jumbo jet. It is the idea of the state which makes such an absolute trust and a sub-conscious extension of the mind possible. For Hegel, only by cognizing the state in its totality can the mind really grasp the system of necessity, which will then in turn liberate the mind towards a radical re-configuration of this system.
It is very rarely the case that such a cognition happens. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that for Hegel, the state can never be fully cognized by an individual member. However, there are nonetheless individuals who embody the system of necessity which is the state, and this individual is precisely what Hegel would have called the incarnation of Zeitgeist. It only makes sense that the person who is the Zeitgeist remains unconscious of the full implications of his or her own existence, for what makes him or her a Zeitgeist is not his or her thoughts or intelligence but rather actions. Just like the trust expressed in boarding a jumbo jet is the historical component of the state which gives a place to the engineer, so is the act of war or an act of resistance played out by a key leader a sign of his or her freedom which only becomes apparent as such once the deed is done and its freedom is dead.
Although the "Introduction" is a brilliant and clear explanation of Hegel's thoughts, the rest of the book is filled with empirically flawed claims. In particular, Hegel's discussion of the "geographical conditions" of history and of the "East" is highly problematic to the point where it becomes unreadable. However, this does not mean that one must ignore Hegel and return to empirical history, which is merely the gathering of data and a timid construction of an almost unrecognizable story. One must be bold and assert that history is indeed the path towards freedom, and that the state is the condition of all history, and that anything which does not belong to a state or does not have a state is not part of history. This framework is still quite feasible. The real job of the Hegelian historian is to sort out the empirical mess created by the rest of the Lectures. Or, more fundamentally, since history is the science of Time, as Hegel himself notes, the other task of a Hegelian is to move to a higher level of abstraction and re-interpret Hegel's Lectures through the language of temporality in order to name the movements of Time(s) which still remain implicit in history.
