ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a vampire story in order to illustrate the thought of Hegel (and by extension, Rousseau and Marx). It explains the philosophy called historicism, which suggests that truth develops progressively through history. The story recounts a dinner with a million-year-old vampire. The vampire explains popular vampire myths as the antitheses of historically evolving theses such as Christianity and liberalism. In other words, his story illustrates how the truth of vampire being, like human being, politics and culture, follows the rational evolution of consciousness over time. This story follows the stages in the evolution of human consciousness that Rousseau introduced in the Second Discourse and Hegel developed in detail in his Phenomenology of Spirit. This being in history realizes the end of history. The second half of the chapter suggests that such historicism is central to the modern ideologies of both the left and right. All are out of the moment, because their partisans only see the principles, ideals and presuppositions of their ideology rather than what is in the moment.
