Each one of the primary masterworks evinces a radically revolutionary conception of itself and proclaims its place at the apocalyptic culmination of the whole history of philosophy. A General Theory of Spirit as Pure Act, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, History and Class Consciousness and Being and Time: each one sees itself, in its own peculiar terms, as an "end of philosophy'. Obviously these terms differ enormously and how each relates itself to the previous philosophical past also varies fundamentally. Yet in each one there is a firm insistence that this whole past, extending back to the origins of philosophy, is now at an end and something new and unprecedented — beyond philosophy or beyond metaphysics or beyond the Tradition or beyond whatever it is that is being surpassed — is about to be inaugurated. The future of thought is to be something utterly different from its past. In their sense of revolutionary overturning and apocalyptic fulfilment, of the end of the past and beginning of the future, the primary masterworks are clearly in tune with the nascent totalitarian movements which also called for an end to history in a Revolution that would be the start of a new time. After the Armageddon of History, the disasters of the First World War, the expectations of a new Revelation, whether in thought or in deed, were high. The malign masters were the ones who best met such expectations in philosophy with their primary masterworks.