The machinery of Hegel's historical philosophy is the dialectic, the mode of movement by which Geist develops through contradiction and synthesis. The dialectic is often presented as a neat three-step: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hegel himself rarely uses this formula (it was Fichte's), and the reality is more organic and harder to schematize. The movement Hegel describes is this: a concept or a historical reality reaches a point where it contains an internal contradiction, it has pushed its own principle as far as it can go and generated its own negation. The contradiction cannot be resolved within the existing terms; it requires a new concept or form that simultaneously cancels the contradiction, preserves what was valid in both sides, and elevates the whole to a higher level.
In history, this movement shows up as the rise and fall of civilizations. Ancient Greek Sittlichkeit, the immediate, unreflective unity of the individual with their community, contained within it the seed of its own dissolution: the individual conscience. The figure of Socrates, who asked his fellow Athenians to submit their inherited traditions to rational examination, embodies exactly this contradiction. Socrates is both a product of Greek spirit and the force that begins to dissolve it. Athens could not tolerate him, rightly, from the standpoint of its own logic, and executed him. But the principle Socrates represented did not die with him; it drove the development from Greek particularism toward Roman legal universalism and eventually toward the fully self-conscious individual freedom of the modern world.
Hegel introduces the concept of World-Historical Individuals, figures like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, to explain how Geist moves through individual human beings. World-historical individuals are those who have an intuitive grasp of the next necessary stage of Geist's development and embody it in their actions. They do not know they are instruments of Spirit; they believe they are pursuing their own passions and ambitions. But their passion happens to align with the next necessary stage of historical development, which is why they succeed with the extraordinary force that ordinary ambition cannot match.
They are great men, because they willed and accomplished something great; not a mere fancy, a mere intention, but that which met the case and fell in with the needs of the age. This mode of looking at it is the innermost truth of it.
— Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (trans. J. Sibree)
Napoleon famously struck Hegel as the embodiment of the World-Historical Individual at the height of his power. In 1806, watching Napoleon ride through Jena after his victory, Hegel wrote to a friend that he had seen "the World-Spirit on horseback." Napoleon was, for Hegel, history becoming self-conscious in a specific person, though even Napoleon would be overtaken when his historical mission was complete.
The most provocative concept in Hegel's historical philosophy is the Cunning of Reason (List der Vernunft). Geist does not work by directly imposing its purposes on events. It works indirectly, allowing human passions, interests, and even destructive forces to serve as its instruments, and then discarding them when they have done their work. The individual who believes they are pursuing their own interests is, from the standpoint of world history, serving reason's purposes without knowing it. This is not manipulation; it is the structural principle by which the infinite realizes itself through finite means.
The philosophical and political implications of this doctrine are deeply contested. Marx read Hegel's dialectic as fundamentally correct in its structure but upside-down: rather than Geist developing through material history, material (economic) relations drive history, and the apparent realm of ideas is the superstructure. Popper condemned Hegel's historicism as paving the road to totalitarianism, if reason is already fully present in history, dissent becomes irrational and opposition to the state becomes self-contradictory. Feminist critics note that Hegel's world-historical figures are all men, and that his schema places the family (the sphere of women and particularity) at a lower stage than civil society and the state.