Karl Marx
The father of communism, author of Das Kapital, and one of the most significant figures of the 19th century, Karl Marx is one of the central characters in the book. He is situated a believer in the concept of the evolution of society as having an end point rather than being open-ended. For Marx—according to the author—the “end of history” arrives with the permanence of the communist state in which class conflict is dissolved and equality is reconciled.
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel is another primary character because, like Marx, his philosophy also maintained that history has a destination. The end point for Hegel is essentially worldwide liberal democracy. He identifies the struggle for equality with acquisition of recognition and that it is this longing for recognition that has been the engine driving the forces of history. This concept stands in contrast to Marx who famously asserts that the class conflict has been the engine.
Immanuel Kant
The third central player in the idea that history has an end point for the civilizing of mankind is the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. It was in a 1784 essay title An Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View that Kant this radical notion that history is an evolutionary narrative moving inexorably toward a climax. Kant’s suggestion of what this end point looks like is simplicity itself in theory and perhaps irreconcilably complex in execution: the realization of universal freedom for all mankind across the globe.
