Hegel and the universal historiography

Hegel’s commentary on the so-called universal history (Allgemeine Geschichte) is one of the established interpretative presuppositions in the scholarly approach to his Lectures in the Philosophy of World History. The term “universal history” first appeared in the editions of Eduard Gans and Karl Hegel. Both editions were based on the editing and compiling of different manuscripts and transcriptions. The term was further transmitted in later editions. However, in the preserved materials, this term does not emerge in the chapter on the modes of reflective historiography. With the emergence of new critical editions of Hegel’s Lectures, through comparative analysis of different sources, it is not only possible to show how the term universal history is not emergent in Hegel’s account of the varieties of historiography, but it is also possible to trace how it appeared in the first editions of the Lectures. The absence of universal history in preserved texts on varieties of historical writing raises the question about the status of the first mode of reflective historiography, which Hegel describes through the terms of surveys and compilations, describing it as the historiography of a people, a land, or the whole world. This multitude of possible definitions opens up space for new interpretations of Hegel’s theory of historiography.