The end of the exploration era has thus deeply thwarted two basic human emotions that are strongly intertwined: wanderlust and Eros. There is another deep aspiration that our finished world could eventually frustrate: our appetite for politics. As Aristotle stated, man is a political animal, and this can also be considered as one of our most ancient characteristics. Aristotle meant not only that man needed to live in a social environment (the polis) but also that he could develop his full potential and reach happiness only when participating in the collective making of his destiny throughout history. Yet our political nature could be soon deprived of any possibility of expressing itself, for we have reached not only the end of geography but also the end of history. This concept has been so worn out through philosophical debate, often in an aim to disqualify it, that one no longer pays any attention. The true reason, I believe, is that we are actually disturbed by the thought, so we prefer to dismiss the idea, waving it away with a disdainful hand as if it were a stupid remark from a child. But as the saying goes, the truth comes from the mouth of children.

Unlike with traditional messianism, which situates all major achievements in a future that is either unspecified or constantly postponed, Hegel was the first philosopher to imagine the end of history as a tangible event within our reach, as opposed to a far-off concept. For him, the end of history will arise when the Spirit is revealed within a rational governance in which men live freely and equally, an ideal that he saw beginning to seed in the Germany and France of his era. As such, Hegel's thesis was the very first intuition that the possible combinations of governmental types were limited not only in theory (as has been put forward since Aristotle) but also in practice, as there will be a point in history at which everything will have been tested.

The trials and tribulations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showed, provisionally, that Hegel was wrong.