The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. Though it may seem contradictory that the Absolute should be conceived essentially as a result, it needs little pondering to set this show of contradiction in its true light. The beginning, the principle, or the Absolute, as at first immediately enunciated, is only the universal.
Spirit . . . has shown itself to us to be neither merely the withdrawing of self-consciousness into its pure inwardness, nor the mere submergence of self-consciousness into substance, and the non-being of its difference; but Spirit is this movement of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels this difference between objectivity and content. . . . Spirit, therefore, having won the Notion, displays its existence and movement in this ether of its life and is Science.
Eric Michael Dale, Hegel, the End of History, and the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Michael N. Forster and Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2015), especially ‘Philosophy of History’ by Sally Sedgwick
G. W. F. Hegel (trans. J. Sibree), The Philosophy of History (Dover, 1956)
G. W. F. Hegel (ed. Johannes Hoffmeister), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History (Cambridge University Press, 1975)
G. W. F. Hegel (trans. H. B. Nisbet), Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
G. W. F. Hegel (ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, volume 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822-3 (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Gunnar Hindrichs and Axel Honneth (eds.), Freiheit: Stuttgarter Hegel-Kongress 2011, (Klostermann, 2011), especially ‘Freedom in History’ by Michael Rosen
Peter C. Hodgson, Shapes of Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy of World History in Theological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Stephen Houlgate, Hegel: Freedom, Truth, and History, 2nd edn (Blackwell, 2005), especially Chapter 1
Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (eds.), A Companion to Hegel (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), especially ‘Hegel and Ranke: A Re-examination’ by Frederick C. Beiser and ‘“The Ruling Categories of the World”: The Trinity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History and The Rise and Fall of Peoples’ by Robert Bernasconi
Jean Hyppolite (trans. Bond Harris and Jacqueline Bouchard Spurlock), Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History (University Press of Florida, 1996)
Thomas A. Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Joe McCarney, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel on History (Routledge, 2000)
Angelica Nuzzo, Memory, History, Justice in Hegel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
George Dennis O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History (Chicago University Press, 1975)
Terry Pinkard, Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2017)
Sally Sedgwick, Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
Rudolf J. Siebert, Hegel’s Philosophy of History: Theological, Humanistic, and Scientific Elements (University Press of America, 1979)