Abstract

It is the specific expertise of the philosopher to glance at the affairs of humanity from the stratospheric areas of spirit. That is how a theory of the end of history first appeared in the oeuvre of Hegel. Ever since, scholars insistently addressed his work, trying to see how should, in particular, his philosophy be understood and how can one, in general, justify such ambitious and systematic projects. In the age of skepticism, relativism and positivism, of virulent historicism, the speculative systematic philosophy of Hegel fares a path parallel to the current affairs of the world. But every once in a while, it is revived and given a new life, when called to account for the larger context of the said affairs. This was the case between the two world wars, when Alexandre Kojeve transformed Hegel's philosophy of history into a potent interpretative tool, sketching the lines for a theory of posthistory. At the middle of the 1980s and, especially, at the beginning of the 1990s, in the works of Barry Cooper and Francis Fukuyama, Hegel had been again called forth to make sense of the impressive transformations of the global world order. Thus it happens that, in the aftermath of the fall of the second largest political system on the planet, Communism, the theory of the end of history infuses the political wisdom of the end of century. It is the purpose of the present essay to make a new attempt at understanding what is the significance of the theme of the end of history. The analysis finds that the major stake of the discourse about the end of history is the relationship between self-consciousness and history. There appears that the "end of history" is the expression of a peculiar form of politics: the politics of the philosopher, the politics of the long duration, the politics of the species-being of man, as opposed to the conjunctural politics of punctiliar historicity. The "end of history" is a discourse about and aiming at determining the politics of time