In brief: It has an order, and the order is directed — but it is more a circle than a ladder. What comes first is the poorest, not the most important; what comes last is the richest, but it contains everything earlier. And at one point the order really does become a ranking of human beings — that is where the real problem lies.
The order: from the poorest to the richest
Hegel formulates the principle in passing in the philosophy of nature, and there it is at its clearest:
In a system the most abstract is the first, the true of each sphere the last; but equally it is only the first of a higher stage.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 249 Addition
In the Groundlines the same holds: the more abstract a right, the more limited — and hence the lower. § 30 says so expressly, and from it follows the consequence that matters most to lawyers: in case of collision the later takes precedence. Whoever takes the order of the book for an order of worth is reading it backwards (at length: Why does property come before human dignity in Hegel?).
And § 32 Remark records that this order is conceptual and not temporal: the family logically presupposes the concept of property — historically it was there first.
Why „ladder“ is the wrong image
A hierarchy in the ordinary sense has a summit from which everything else is governed. Hegel’s system does not. His own image is the circle:
What is essential for science is not so much that a pure immediate be the beginning, but that the whole of it is a circuit within itself, in which the first is also the last and the last also the first.
Science of Logic I
The beginning is accordingly not the foundation but that which is only grounded at the end — see Where does a system begin that may presuppose nothing? To this comes that the earlier does not disappear in the later: property and contract continue to hold in the state; they are only no longer the last word.
Where the hierarchy becomes uncomfortable
Three places. In § 347 one nation at a time has the right to be the bearer of world history: „Against this its absolute right […] the spirits of the other nations are without right.“ In § 351 there follows from this the treatment of others „as barbarians, with the consciousness of an unequal right“. And in § 166 the position of woman in the family is fixed conceptually.
Here the order of stages really is a ranking — and one of human beings, not of concepts. That cannot be defused by pointing out that it is all a circle. How this edition deals with it is set out in What does Hegel say to readers from non-European traditions? and Does Hegel exclude women from the state?
The answer in one sentence
The system is graded, not stacked: each stage is the truth of the previous one and the beginning of the next. As an order of concepts that is a methodological claim which can be tested. As an order of peoples and sexes it is an overreach that does not sit with Hegel’s own concept of recognition.
Sources. Groundlines § 30 and Remark, § 32 Remark, § 33, § 166, § 347, § 351. – Science of Logic I, „With what must the beginning of science be made?“ – Encyclopaedia (1830) §§ 15–18, § 249 Addition. – Literature. Ludwig Siep (ed.), Klassiker Auslegen, Berlin 1997; critically on world history Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Pittsburgh 2009. – In the glossary: sublation, concrete universality, world history.