 The state is crucial to Hegel's philosophy of history.  For Hegel, the state is the “march of God [Spirit] in the world” (1821, §258Z).  At any point in time, a state or group of states represent the highest point achieved by humanity thus far.  Hegel thinks that at the time of his writing, the states of Western Europe play this role.  In the Philosophy of Right, he argues that these states, however imperfectly, combine individual freedom with social unity into one enduring whole.  The political constitution of the society he describes is a constitutional monarchy. It approximates the never-adopted constitution that Prussian reformers drew up in 1819 (Wood 1990, 13). 