In brief: The question rests on a false opposition. History is not either the one or the other. It is the process in which a necessity actualises itself through nothing other than human passions – and which, in Hegel, is expressly neither blind fate nor mere accident.
The material: yes, made by human beings
The agents, the material and the driving force of history are exclusively human beings. Its motor is their interests, desires, ambition, avarice, love and hatred; they act in order to attain their particular ends, and believe in doing so that they are making their own history. Without these deeds there would be no history. Hegel does not deny this – he denies only that everything has thereby been said. For those to whom spirit remains an empty word, he says, history remains
a superficial play of contingent, so-called merely human endeavours and passions.
Groundlines, § 343 note
The form: yes, necessary – but not fate
Behind the seemingly chaotic activity a necessity is at work. But it is neither a blind doom nor an external God making puppets dance. § 342 excludes both in a single sentence:
World history, furthermore, is not the mere court of judgement of power – that is, the abstract and non-rational necessity of a blind fate – but … the development, necessary solely out of the concept of its freedom, of the moments of reason and hence of its self-consciousness and its freedom – the exposition and actualization of the universal spirit.
Groundlines, § 342
The necessity is therefore a conceptual one: spirit cannot skip a stage of its own self-understanding, any more than a proof can skip a step. What develops is the consciousness of freedom – and with it the institutions in which freedom becomes actual.
How the two come together: unconscious tools
What joins them is not a plan that someone knows, but the structure of action itself. § 344 says it without circumlocution: states, nations and individuals pursue their own principle, of which they are conscious –
… and in whose interest they are absorbed, while at the same time they are the unconscious tools and members of that inner business in which these shapes pass away, even as spirit in and for itself prepares and works out its transition to its next higher stage.
Groundlines, § 344
This is the state of affairs that Hegel elsewhere calls the cunning of reason – the expression itself does not occur in the Groundlines, but in the Science of Logic (the doctrine of the end) and in the lectures on the philosophy of history. The matter itself stands in § 344.
World-historical individuals – a Caesar, a Napoleon – are the limiting case. They pursue their own power and their own fame; what they are really doing remains, according to § 348, expressly hidden from them and is „not their object or end“. In living out their passion without regard, they destroy an old order and create the precondition of the next – without knowing it and without earning thanks for it.
The price
One should read § 345 alongside this before finding the thought consoling. Justice and wrong, guilt and innocence, the good and ill fortune of states and of individuals have their meaning, according to Hegel, „within the sphere of conscious actuality“ – and world history falls outside these points of view. That is no justification of the victims; it is the soberness with which Hegel says that the governing point of view of world history is not that of happiness. Whether one is willing to accept this is one of the hardest questions to put to him.
Conclusion
History is made by human beings, for its only motor is human action and passion. It is at the same time necessary, for its inner logic – the unfolding of the consciousness of freedom – is not a sum of accidents. The two do not exclude one another: the necessity has no material other than human action, and it is precisely by pursuing only its own ends that such action becomes the instrument of something it did not intend.
Sources. Groundlines § 341–§ 360 (world history), in particular § 342 (no blind fate), § 343 and note (history as the deed of spirit; against the mere play of passions), § 344 (unconscious tools), § 345 (world history falls outside good and ill fortune), § 348 (world-historical individuals). – On the expression „cunning of reason“: Science of Logic, the doctrine of the end, and the lectures on the philosophy of history. – In the glossary: The Cunning of Reason, The World Spirit, World History.