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Lydia Moland, Terry Pinkard. Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1635–1636, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy293
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Humans are, Terry Pinkard suggests in a new book on G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of history, “finite creatures facing an infinite problem” (20). We act for reasons; we also want to know whether our reasons make sense. History is an arena where this desire takes on particular urgency. Hegel himself gave the fear of history’s senselessness one of its most famous images. What if, instead of progress toward enlightenment, there is only the “slaughter-bench of history” (Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree [1991], 21) where our aspirations are shown to be futile and meaningless? In the face of this threat, Hegel, so the narrative goes, erected a towering metaphysics that makes sense of everything and ensures both meaning and progress. Across multiple volumes over three decades, Pinkard has developed a field-defining interpretation of Hegel that rejects such implausible claims. In Does History Make Sense?, he argues that Hegel should be read neither as ascribing necessity to history nor as guaranteeing progress understood in any conventional sense.
