ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to show that there is ample textual evidence to demonstrate that both Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx are acutely aware of this fact, that each figure takes his own thought to be historically determined and envisions not an end of history as such, but the end of a particular historical development. In Hegel's view, civil society is a realm defined by the irreducibility of its "disorganization". Marx agrees with Hegel that capitalist society the moment of absolute contradiction. The people have a distinction between Hegel's conception of the modern state as autonomous from civil society and Marx's conception of the modern state as subordinated to bourgeois society and its production. Hegel's transition from the state to world history should be read as reflecting the position that a particular historical development has ended, culminating in the modern state form, but history necessarily progresses beyond that form.
