The expression „end of history“ does not occur in Hegel. It comes from the reception – from Alexandre Kojève, who read Hegel in Paris in the 1930s, and through him from Francis Fukuyama, whose essay of 1989 made the formula world-famous. What is claimed there is not what Hegel claimed.
What Hegel says
World history is in him the progress in the consciousness of freedom (§ 342). With the principle of the modern state – that all are free, not one and not some – this consciousness has reached its concept. With that a principle has been found, not a condition completed.
Between the two lies, in Hegel, the whole rest of the book. He describes a civil society that produces poverty and a rabble and cannot solve the problem out of its own resources (§ 245), constitutions that do not correspond to their peoples, states that lag behind their concept. An author who held history to be concluded would not have written these chapters.
Where the impression comes from
From two peculiarities. First, Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history end with the present – simply because one gets no further. The closing sentence is a retrospect, not a prognosis: „Thus far has consciousness come.“
Second, it follows from his understanding of philosophy that it cannot anticipate. The owl of Minerva „begins its flight only with the falling of dusk“: a shape of life is recognised when it is finished. Whoever takes this for a conclusion of history confuses the limit of cognition with a limit of what happens.
Scholarship
Jon Stewart lists the „end of history“ as a legend of its own; Philip Grier and H. S. Harris show that Fukuyama takes over an idiosyncratic reading of Kojève without examining it, and Reinhart Klemens Maurer separates the different meanings of the formula and shows that none of them fits Hegel.
Sources. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 1947 · Francis Fukuyama, „The End of History?“, 1989 · Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends, 1996, there „The Myth of the End of History“. – In the edition: § 341 to § 360. – In the glossary: The End of History, The World Spirit.