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The hegemonic Weltanschauung of many non-abrahmic peoples perceived time not as a straight line ― but as a circle, or a Möbius strip, or perhaps something entirely different. To St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, this vantage point was reserved for God only, preferring the parallel of Him observing time as a block. During the 18th and 19th Century, the idea of time as a fourth dimension was expanded upon, culminating in Albert Einstein’s concept of spacetime in his 1905 special theory of relativity. Three years later, J.M.E. McTaggart famously proclaimed time to be an illusion. Lately, David Deutsch has reinvigorated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which postulates that quantum uncertainty can be explained by the universe branching into several differing time lines.
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Drawing upon Hegelian notions of human history as a linear progression, Francis Fukuyama argued in his 1989 essay The End of History?, and his subsequent book The End of History and the Last Man (1991), that humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukuyama has since grown increasingly critical of his own thesis.
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“People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time