Okay. In our last lecture, I ended up the history of ethics in a way, what would be a usual introduction ethics course, by discussing

Hegel's view of ethics with what one might call it super concept of freedom. The very large

concept of freedom as formulating those goals and desires of individuals in whatever given historical period.

And the idea that freedom represents is to see those goals and obstacles

and they're overcoming in that period and to name that activity and those sets of practices freedom.

Now, that side of Hegel's philosophy, and Hegel is perhaps the most important

philosopher in the 19th century, because of the people that I will talk about today, at least

the first two or three, react against Hegel. So Hegel's view is very important, but the

Hegel I gave you the other day is a very radical Hagle,

where freedom is the central notion, but there's another side to Hagle, as many of you may have suspected,

if you've looked at articles like Fukuyama's, the end of history, something like that,

there's another side of Hagle, a more conservative side, that argues that while his view remains historical,

that history is, as it were, the context within which all activities, truth, and so on,

gets its meaning in which human beings become what he calls spirit, the conservative Hegel,

that reading of Hegel, he argues that the culmination of this long historical process is something like the Prussian state or on an updated reading like Fukuyama's, and this is one that I think it perfectly fits what George Bush means by the New World Order.

It means that history proper is at an end.

This is a very strange notion because we still, I think, to some extent, think historically.

History proper is at an end because the human race has found the right ideas,

namely liberal democracy by which we mean the televised pseudo-state, to try to speak, and VCRs. Once you have an economy that produces VCRs and stuff, and a pseudo- that gives you the satisfaction of larding it over

the rest of the planet with a social system that doesn't work, history has reached its end,

and there are no more battles over big ideas.

That's the point.

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