Since the modern-turn, no topic has provoked more speculation—from as many angles and at the nexus of so many disciplines—than that of modernity itself. We speculate as to when it really started, where it has as of yet taken hold, what its fundamental character is, and—perhaps most profoundly—why it is at all. And in turn these speculations have engendered a remarkable array of heavy-handed schools of thought, each typically more dismal than the last.
But relative to our distinguished predecessors, we, for better or worse, not only have more experience with the thing in question, but also a fundamentally different relation to it. For us, searching through the tangle of facts and the foregoing schools of thought for the solution to the seeming enigma of the ‘End of History’ is not so much a matter of making sense of an end, but a beginning.
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In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, G.W. F. Hegel argues that History is the progress of the consciousness of Freedom:…
