PROMENJIVA SUDBINA POJMA FILOZOFIJA ISTORIJE
THE CHANGING FATE OF THE PHENOMENON PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Summary/Abstract: The author traces the course of understanding of the expression „Philosophy of history” from Voltaire and Hegel, till Raymond Aron and the modern confusion attributed by the publishing of the Fukuyama’s book on the End of History with the triumph of western democracy upon the Easteuropean socialism. The anglosaxon culture has always been suspicious toward the philophising the human past. The author quotes the criticism of Hegel’s „Philosophy of History” published in „The British and Foreign Review” XXXI, London, 1843, in which Hegel was admired by describing the features of history, and not its philosophy. Fukuyama was not the first to claim that history ended in his triumphant country. Count Szecheny described in his memories how his countrymen in the initial phase of the revolution 1848. believed that the tirany of feudalism had fallen and the „la fin de l’histoire” came about, just on the streets of the Hungarian capital. Arnold Toynbee, too, quotes the atmosphere in the British paublic opinion at the end of XIX century that the history ended by the triumph of the „Pax Britanica” of that times. Fukuyama misunderstood the Hegelian concept of liberty which in any case was not planted into the western parliamentarian democracy. Before his death, Hegel published an essay on the preparation of the Reform Bill in Britain, in which this type of government had been highly underrated. Hegel’s end of history - the author is solidar with certain modern authors - should be looked after in the „internal beauty of history”, a harmonised state of the future. The result of the appearance of the literature on the philosophy of history was the improvement of the methodology of history by which it became a modern science. The result of modern American teachings on the end of history is advancement of political ideology and the theories on the history as conspiracy (Richard Hofstadter).

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