Kant and Hegel stand astride the fluorescence of German Romanticism like two colossuses. Kant's significance continues today insofar as his epistemology placed the mind back into the body that Descartes had attempted to discard. Hegel is best appreciated as a Kantian (yes, a Kantian) who attempted to work out the social-psychological implications of Kant's intervention in Cartesian metaphysics. As Charles Taylor wrote in his brilliant study, Hegel: "The Hegelian notion of Geist is thus essential here. Spirit is necessarily embodied. Integrity thus cannot be achieved through an inner retreat, in which self-consciousness would cut itself off from the bodily" (Taylor, p. 149).
Hegel's explicit embodiment of "spirit" strengthened Kant's implicit turn in that direction. What Hegel intended, however, as a philosophy of history is better understood as a psychology of human relations--with the lordship/bondage dialectic at its core. That dialectic--which Hegel envisioned as a predicament peculiar to a "raw and undeveloped stage of history" (Taylor, p. 153)--is more likely a regularly occurring feature of human relationships. For all of its regularity and predictability, however, it is not a feature that must be presumed to be unavoidable.
In other words, human societies can (and, I would argue, must) be forever on the lookout for evidence of these relationships and to try to address them, wherever they are found, in a manner that will neutralize their effects. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Regrettably, Marx is not particularly helpful here--enamored as he was of Hegelian philosophy of history. Nietzsche and Freud cannot take us where we need to go with Hegel either; Nietzsche, because he found a way to privilege the lordship side of the equation, Freud (or was it really the followers of Freud?) because he (they) offered psychoanalysis as a method by which one could learn to accept as inevitable whatever side of the equation one should find oneself on and/or forget (something Marx would never allow one to do) why it mattered in the first place.
The reader of Hegel who is perhaps most helpful at this juncture is Leo Tolstoy, whose late novella Master and Man makes clear in no uncertain terms that the neutralization of the effects of the lordship/bondage relation (what I will term "liberation") must be accomplished through a two-fold or double-movement: Man must be liberated from the oppressive nature of the Master's relation to him, and Master must be liberated from the repressive nature of his relationship to himself--a relationship which precludes his ability to re-cognize the bondman as his fellow man. Unless and until that repression is interrupted, the presumption of intractability with which the lordship/bondage dialectic has been endowed (most frequently by Masters, but also by bondmen) will never be disrupted.
As Hegel pointed out, the Master is no less enslaved than the bondman. But the Master does not experience his bondage in the same way that the bondman experiences his. Norman O. Brown achieved this insight in the late 1950's and it was this achievement that prompted his turn to Freud as a means to make new sense of Marx (and vice versa). Unraveling the Master's self-repression is the key to human liberation--Brown believed that and dedicated his intellectual life to articulating (in his idiosyncratic way) how such an unraveling may be accomplished.
Tolstoy, on the other hand, suggests in Master and Man that it will take a cataclysmic event (and what may amount to divine intervention) to pry loose the Master's fingers from the Man's neck. Tolstoy was arguing from what Brown had termed the "Prophetic Tradition." For his part, late in life (and fighting despair, perhaps), Brown appears to have abandoned the Prophets and hitched his hopes to Dionysian chance...
