The expression \u201eend of history\u201c does not occur in Hegel. It comes from the reception \u2013 from Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
World history<\/a> is in him the progress in the consciousness of freedom (\u00a7 342<\/a>). With the principle of the modern state \u2013 that all are free, not one and not some \u2013 this consciousness has reached its concept. With that a principle<\/em> has been found, not a condition completed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between the two lies, in Hegel, the whole rest of the book. He describes a civil society that produces poverty and a rabble<\/a> and cannot solve the problem out of its own resources (\u00a7 245<\/a>), 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From two peculiarities. First, Hegel\u2019s lectures on the philosophy of history end with the present \u2013 simply because one gets no further. The closing sentence is a retrospect, not a prognosis: \u201eThus far has consciousness come.\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, it follows from his understanding of philosophy that it cannot anticipate. The owl of Minerva<\/a> \u201ebegins its flight only with the falling of dusk\u201c: 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jon Stewart lists the \u201eend of history\u201c as a legend of its own; Philip Grier and H. S. Harris show that Fukuyama takes over an idiosyncratic reading of Koj\u00e8ve without examining it, and Reinhart Klemens Maurer separates the different meanings of the formula and shows that none of them fits Hegel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sources.<\/strong> Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve, Introduction \u00e0 la lecture de Hegel<\/em>, 1947 \u00b7 Francis Fukuyama, \u201eThe End of History?\u201c, 1989 \u00b7 Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends<\/em>, 1996, there \u201eThe Myth of the End of History\u201c. \u2013 In the edition: \u00a7 341<\/a> to \u00a7 360<\/a>. \u2013 In the glossary: The End of History<\/a>, The World Spirit<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhere the impression comes from<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Scholarship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n