From Azuma text page 66: "In Hegelian philosophy, which was first developed in the early 19th century, the "Human" is defined as existence with a self-consciousness, who, through a struggle with the "Other" (also endowed with self-consciousness), will move toward absolute knowledge, freedom, and civil society. Hegel called this process of struggle "History." So Hegel claimed that history in this sense ended for Europe in the beginning of the nineteenth century . . . he declared that, when the modern society was about to be born, this very birth was "the end of history" . . . society as the conclusion of history has since been thoroughly criticized as being ethnocentric. However . . . this historical perspective is very difficult to refute. 
From wikipedia entry: "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.
Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", of Absolute idealism to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he developed the concept that mind or spirit manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other. Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence and transcendence."