Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel knew all about the disasters of modern war. In October 1806, he was scrambling to complete a long overdue manuscript when Napoleon’s army turned up outside Jena. They shelled its most prestigious street, which caught fire. After smashing a Prussian army nearby, they pillaged its university and filled its buildings with their wounded.

After fleeing his lodgings Hegel returned to find his papers scattered like a heap of “lottery tickets” by pillaging soldiers. Such shattering experiences, which were the universal lot of civilians during the Napoleonic Wars, could not shake his trust that the history of the world was at once explicable and progressive. Although he didn’t finish The Phenomenology of Spirit for several more months, it proclaimed when finally published in 1807 his belief in a deepening harmony between the human mind and the world it surveyed.

Can Hegel’s startling optimism, expressed in his famously challenging prose, still speak to modern societies? Historian Richard Bourke suggests it can. Hegel’s World Revolutions rather startlingly presents Hegel as a kindred spirit to its author, sharing his instinct that the study of intellectual history can revive the confidence with which we face the darkling present. The political thought of past ages may be locked up with the circumstances of vanished societies, but the problems it framed, yet couldn’t fully resolve, generated concepts that shape our understanding today.