Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each statement: does it speak Hegel’s teleological grammar, or is it a non-teleological historical claim?
Groups: Teleological grammar · Non-teleological claim
- Liberal democracy is the final form of human government
- That regime is on the wrong side of history
- This society is not yet ready for democracy
- Grain prices rose sharply in the three years before the revolt
Hints
- One grammar assumes a destination and ranks by distance from it.
- The other explains without assuming where history is going.
Show the answer
Teleological grammar: That regime is on the wrong side of history, This society is not yet ready for democracy, Liberal democracy is the final form of human government
Non-teleological claim: Grain prices rose sharply in the three years before the revolt
Why
The first column assumes history has a destination and rates people by their distance from it. Hegel’s metaphysics was discredited a century ago; his sentence structure is in every newspaper this week.
Practise Hegel and Historical Teleology
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Hegel and Historical Teleology
- Complete the account of Hegel’s engine.
- Put Hegel’s stages of world history in his order, from earliest to latest.
- Match each Hegelian term to its meaning.
- For Hegel a synthesis preserves what was true in both thesis and antithesis rather than splitting the…
- Teleological history makes the winning path look inevitable. What does that do to the losers of the story?
- Which are standing objections to Hegel’s philosophy of history?
- Hegel, Marx and Fukuyama each name a different endpoint for history. What structural problem do all three…