Georg Wilhelm Fredreich Hegel brought form and intellectual coherence to this idea of historical progress.2 Roughly speaking, history, according to Hegel, is a series of struggles between a thesis and its antithesis; the outcome of the resulting clash (or dialectic) propels the spirit of history (or “geist”) toward a better understanding of itself and its freedom. Geist, in the form of humanity, moves forward to new heights as a result of improved learning. Numerous other scholars detail Hegel’s philosophy in more detail, but for our purposes it is enough to note that in part because of
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