ABSTRACT
The end of history is a secular eschatology identifying a particular political, social, or economic arrangement of a given society as the telos of human striving, beyond which no further development of the life-world is possible or desirable. The “end” of history is not an end to events but an historical end to human “progress,” however defined. It is a wholesale translation of religious eschatological expectation into a present secular utopia: Secular because it aggrandizes some particular result of human historical striving; eschatological because it encodes religious language about future hope within its secular framework. This chapter traces two great arcs, beginning with Augustine’s warnings following the sack of Rome against the futility of secular ends of history, and culminating in the writings of Gerard of Borgo San Donnino and the medieval Joachimites, embracing a thoroughly historical end of history for the first time. The second arc chronicles the re-emergence of Gerard’s Joachimite ideas in the Enlightenment with G.E. Lessing and Lessing’s influence on G.W.F. Hegel. Often considered the originator of the idea, Hegel’s “end of history” is the result of later interpreters, particularly Nietzsche and Engels, who develop the end of history trope in their own criticisms of Hegel. Finally, it is Kojève’s Marxian reading of Hegel that influences all subsequent end of history theories, including the popularization of the idea in Fukuyama’s paean to liberal democracy. The chapter concludes by discussing the role that the concept might play in future trends in the philosophy of history.
