Directional meaning

Above all in Hegel, history has a direction: not a string of accidents but the rational unfolding of Spirit, "the progress of the consciousness of freedom". Peoples and great men are the instruments through which the universal advances, often unbeknownst to them, by the cunning of reason. This philosophy of history, in which contradiction is the engine, will be the movement's most explosive legacy: Marx keeps its directed march while substituting the relations of production for Spirit.

Hegel, Reason in History (Lectures on the Philosophy of History)

The mainspring of historical change is located in a material contradiction: at a certain stage the productive forces come into conflict with the relations of production that constrain them, and that tension is resolved by a social, usually revolutionary, transformation. History thereby ceases to be a chaos of events or the work of great men: it obeys a discernible logic in which each mode of production (feudal, bourgeois, communist) prepares its own supersession. This turns against the idealism of history (that of Providence or of Spirit) an explanation drawn from economics, and grounds the forecast of a classless society not on a wish but on a "law of social motion."

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, preface (1859) · Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

History ceases to be a succession of reigns or a decline from a golden age and becomes the directed development of reason. Condorcet divides it into ten epochs marching toward emancipation; Kant reads in it the unfolding, through the very « unsociable sociability » of men, of a design of nature toward a cosmopolitan society. Meaning is not conferred by an external providence but is immanent to the movement of societies, legible to whoever can interpret it. This philosophy of history will be inherited by Hegel and Marx.

Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim · Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind

History is not a chaos of accidents but an oriented process: progress in the consciousness of freedom, from the Orient where one is free to the modern world where all are. Yet its direction is not imposed as a linear fate: it is accomplished through contingency and passion. This is the cunning of reason, which uses the private ends of great men to realize, unbeknownst to them, its universal end. The court of history, a phrase borrowed from Schiller, judges the peoples.

Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (Lectures) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §340-342

If one seeks the engine of history, it is neither Providence nor the march of ideas that must be questioned but a contradiction internal to societies: the productive forces that men develop eventually clash with the inherited relations of production, and this collision, lived as class struggle, carries one mode of production over into the next. Marx draws from this a direction from feudalism through capitalism to communism, guaranteed by no design but extracted from the analysis of material conditions, which sets him apart both from Hegel's theodicy of history and from providential narratives: hence a strongly directional reading, with no transcendent teleology.

Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 1 · Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

Kant reads history as the unfolding of a plan of nature: through the "unsocial sociability" of human beings, the species advances toward a perfect civil constitution and a peaceful federation of peoples. This is a directional history, conceived as a regulative idea rather than as sheer contingency.

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose