很多人引用这句话——黑格尔在《历史哲学》中说过；“中国的历史从本质上看是没有历史的，它只是君主覆灭的一再重复而已。任何进步都不可能从中产生。”

但《中国没有历史吗？》说找不到。

我来找找看。我不懂德语，但我略懂英语，英语译本有也算。并且我还可以找到对这句话的解析：

João Feres Jr《Political philosophy, ethnology, and time: a study of the notion of historical handicap》

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0100-512X2002000100004&script=sci_arttext

No author has formulated the notion of historical handicap with more eloquence and force than Hegel. In the Philosophy of History he writes the following passage to comment on the Oriental Empires:

For outside the One Power — before which nothing can maintain an independent existence — there is only revolting caprice, which, beyond the limits of the central power, roves at will without purpose or result... On the one side we see duration, stability — Empires belonging to mere space, as it were [ as distinguished from Time] — unhistorical History; — as for example, in China, the State based on the Family relation; a paternal Government, which holds together the constitution by its provident care, its admonitions, retributive or rather disciplinary inflictions; -a prosaic Empire, because the antithesis of Form, viz., Infinity, Ideality, has not yet asserted itself. On the other side, the Form of Time stands contrasted with this spatial stability. The States in question, without undergoing any change in themselves, or in the principle of their existence, are constantly changing their position towards each other. They are in ceaseless conflict, which brings on rapid destruction… This History, too is, for the most part, really unhistorical, for it is only the repetition of the same majestic ruin.

Hegel classifies different societies in the ' history of the world' by first asking "whether [ the individuals'] actual life is an unreflecting use and habit combining them in this unity (the state), or whether its constituent individuals are reflective and personal beings hav[ e] properly subjective and independent existence." Through the application of this criterion, Hegel concludes that History traveled from East to West — from its childhood in the Orient to its maturity in Germanic Europe. Despite being the first stage of the History of Spirit, the Orient stayed, according to him, eternally trapped in the "childhood of history," a condition in which only "One is Free" — in contrast with the condition achieved by the Teutonic people in which "All are free."

For Hegel, both India and China were incapable of having history, of progressing into something different from what they have always been: a despotic state. The subjective will of the Oriental is not rational (and thus not free) but bound to the state by faith, "confidence, and obedience." In those societies, reason exists only in the objective organization of the state that revolves around the figure of the sovereign, the patriarch. In other words, the condition of the Oriental, according to his own will, is that of a subject. Violent disruption, usually caused by the invasion of barbaric hordes, might bring the ruin of the previous traditional order only to replace it with another despotic state. In other words, Orientals are incapable of truly transformative action; they are eternally trapped in an ahistorical space of sameness.

In Hegel's Philosophy of History one can find the association between Orient and despotism connected with the idea that Oriental societies are incapable of history. The quasi-descriptive style of Hegel's narrative in this book does not provide the readers with a tight causal explanation for this state of affairs. Coherently enough, the "fact" that Oriental societies are incapable of history is treated by the author as an observable datum, a given. Another important datum is the Orientals' willingness to be subjects of a despotic ruler. Hegel sometimes phrases the Oriental lack of free will in terms of knowledge: "The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit (Man as such) is free". Those "observations" are in fact connected: in Oriental societies there is no contradiction between the individual will and the state, thus the state is not only despotic, it will stay despotic for ever. At this point, one might be tempted to ask: but why is it so? What is the ultimate cause of this state of affairs?