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.