The state, the unity of the family and civil society, is the completed actualization of freedom.  Its organs are the political powers (which are to be divided, but not to be made independent):  the legislative power determines the universal, the executive subsumes the particular thereunder, the power of the prince combines both into personal unity.  In the will of the prince the state becomes subject.  The perfect form of the state is constitutional monarchy, its establishment the goal of history, which Hegel, like Kant, considers chiefly from the political standpoint.

History is the development of the rational state; the world-spirit the guiding force in this development; its instruments the spirits of the nations and great men.  A particular people is the expression of but one determinate moment of the universal spirit; and when it has fulfilled its commission it loses its legal warrant, and yields up its dominion to another, now the only authorized one:  the history of the world is the judgment of the world, which is held over the nations.  The world-historical characters, also, are only the instruments of a higher power, the purposes of which they execute while imagining that they are acting in their own interests—­their own deed is hidden from them, and is neither their purpose nor their object.  This should be called the cunning of reason, that it makes the passions work in its service.

History is progress in the consciousness of freedom.  At first one only knows himself free, then several, finally all.  This gives three chief periods, or rather four world-kingdoms,—­Oriental despotism, the Greek (democratic) and the Roman (aristocratic) republic, and the Germanic monarchy,—­in which humanity passes through its several ages.  Like the sun, history moves from east to west.  China and India have not advanced beyond the preliminary stages of the state; the Chinese kingdom is a family state, India a society of classes stiffened into castes.  The Persian despotism is the first true state, and this in the form of a conquering military state.  In the youth and manhood of humanity the sovereignty of the people replaces the sovereignty of one; but not all have yet the consciousness of freedom, the slaves have no share in the government.  The principle of the Greek world, with its fresh life and delight in beauty, is individuality; hence the plurality of small states, in which Sparta is an anticipation of the Roman spirit.  The Roman Republic is internally characterized by the constitutional struggle between the patricians and the plebeians, and externally by the policy of world conquest.  Out of the repellent relations between the universal and the individual, which oppose one another as the abstract state and abstract personality, the unhappy imperial period develops.  In the Roman Empire and Judaism the conditions were given for the appearance of Christianity.  This brings with it the idea of humanity:  every man is free as man, as a rational being.  In the