The notion of the end of history is not an original one. Its best known
propagator was Karl Marx, who believed that the direction of historical
development was a purposeful one determined by the interplay of material
forces, and would come to an end only with the achievement of a communist
utopia that would finally resolve all prior contradictions. But the concept of history
as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by
Marx from his great German predecessor Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
For better or worse, much of Hegel's historicism has become part of our
contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progresses
through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present,
and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization,
such as tribal, slave owning, theocratic, and finally democratic egalitarian
societies, has become inseparable form the modern understanding of man.
Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science,
insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social
environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection
of more or less fixed "natural" attributes. The mastery and transformation of
man's natural environment through the application of science and technology
was originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists
whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout court, however, Hegel
believed that history culminated in an absolute moment -- a moment in which a
final, rational form of society and state became victorious.