The Best of All Possible Histories in Lectures on World History seems confusing at first blush, but it is the implication that they do utilize their will that makes this feature important. The imagined lack of will is brought in even to physical wants, as “at Midnight a bell had to remind them even of their matrimonial duties.”45 This is a unique feature of Amerindians as Hegel directly contrasts them with Africans, saying “negroes [have] become competent clergymen. . . while only a single native was known whose intellect was sufficiently developed to enable him to study, but who died soon after the beginning through excessive brandy-drinking.”46 The implication being that no civilizing effort on the part of Europeans is able to make indigenous peoples’ will develop an objective reality. Due to the extreme brevity of his discussion of the Americas, it is slightly unclear whether Hegel believes indigenous people have even an abstract will though he justifies their genocide regardless of this detail. The lack of a finitely determined will is sufficient in Hegel’s eyes to reduce Native people to the level of animals and places no restrictions on their extermination.47
4.3
Slavery
Hegel’s defense of Atlantic slavery is confounding for a few reasons. First is that Hegel is generally hostile to blatant disregard for a person’s freedom and natural rights. His discussion of Rome in particular hinges on his contempt for slavery and inequality, he says of Roman caste divisions and slavery “the consecrated inequality of will and private property. . . involves a duplicate power, the sternness and malevolent isolation whose components can only be mastered and bound together by a still greater sternness, into a unity maintained by force.”48 From this, one might expect Hegel to differentiate Atlantic and pre-modern slavery, as that would give him a basis to justify one rather than the other. Hegel, however, chooses the opposite course, likening slavery to other institutions he resented, such as serfdom, saying “slavery is in and for itself injustice,” while still stubbornly arguing that slavery “is the cause for the increase in human feelings among Negroes.”49 The key to unraveling Hegel’s seemingly contradictory conception of slavery lies in his Philosophy of Right, specifically his conception of wrong. Criminal wrong is the final stage of abstract right in the text and is the element that draws pure right 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 82. Ibid. Hoffheimer, "Hegel Race Genocide." Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 295 Ibid., 98-99.
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