francis fukuyama's end of history thesis

The End of History: Francis Fukuyama’s controversial idea explained

Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University

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In 1989, a policy wonk in the US State Department wrote a paper for the right-leaning international relations magazine The National Interest entitled “The End of History?”. His name was Francis Fukuyama, and the paper stirred such interest – and caused such controversy – that he was soon contracted to expand his 18-page article into a book. He did so in 1992: The End of History and the Last Man . The rest, they say, is (the end of) history.

Fukuyama became one of those academics whose work was cribbed to a shorthand: The End of History. It is, no doubt, a memorable and dramatic phrase – but it is as unclear as it is striking.

Put very simply, by “the end of history,” Fukuyama did not mean that we had reached a stage where nothing else would occur of historical significance – that all problems had been solved and politics would now be smooth-sailing.

His argument was that the unfolding of history had revealed – albeit in fits and starts – the ideal form of political organisation: liberal democratic states tied to market economies. (Or to put it in Churchillian language, the least-worst form.)

Fukuyama’s use of the word “history” here is best approximated by synonyms in sociology such as “modernisation” or “development”.

He wasn’t saying those states that claimed to be liberal democracies lived up to this ideal, nor that such a political organisation resolved all possible problems – merely that liberal democracy, with all its flaws, was the unsurpassable ideal .

For him, a liberal democratic state requires three things. First, it is democratic, not only in the sense of allowing elections, but in the outcomes of these elections resulting in the implementation of the will of the citizenry. Secondly, the state possesses sufficient strength and authority to enforce its laws and administer services. Thirdly, the state – and its highest representatives – is itself constrained by law. Its leaders are not above the law.

In a recent article in The Atlantic , Fukuyama, now a senior fellow and professor at Stanford University, appeared to stand firm on his central idea. He argued that those states which have eschewed liberal democracy and proclaimed it dead or dying – particularly Russia and China – remain vulnerable in two specific ways.

Firstly, he argues, their reliance on a single leader or small leadership group at the top virtually guarantees bad decision-making over the long-term. Secondly, the absence of public participation in any political processes means the support for such leaders is inherently volatile, liable to evaporate at any moment.

Read more: Why Putin’s retreat from Kherson could be his most humiliating defeat yet

A debt to Hegel and others

The phrase “the end of history” was not, in fact, coined by Fukuyama. It bears a history, and philosophical currency tracing back to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) (who coined the term) and his modern interpreters Karl Marx (1818-1883) and the Russian-born French philosopher and statesman Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968). Understanding it requires an understanding of these thinkers.

Hegel had argued that history has a telos or goal – an end point – equivalent to the emergence of a perfectly rational and just state. That state would guarantee the liberty necessary for the full development of all human capacities. At the same time, it would exist in a state of perpetual peace with other – similarly configured – states.

Hegel – according to Kojève – had witnessed this end of history (or at least the beginning of such an end) with the French Revolution and its universalisation of the ideas of equality and liberty.

Fukuyama judged Kojève correct: the French republic had not been bettered, despite many fascistic and communist attempts to make it so. It is not necessarily that the ideals of the revolution were all realised perfectly (as if the Reign of Terror served as vindication of liberalism) but that – as ideals – they had manifested themselves decisively, shown their force, and since proved unsurpassable.

For Fukuyama, Hegel’s misfortune was to be thought of by many 20th-century intellectuals as a mere precursor to Marx, for whom the fate of a society – and an “end of history” – was not determined by its ideas, but by its material organisation.

For Marx, the resolution of historical development would take the form of global communism. This would mean the end of the exploitation of man by man, the dissolution of private property, the resolution of all antitheses between mental and physical labour, the emergence of a system in which each individual would contribute “according to his ability,” and consume “according to his needs”.

Read more: Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

But by the end of the 1980s, Fukuyama – along with a host of others – began to suspect we weren’t going to see a Marxist “end of history” after all. The Russian Communist Party, under Mikhail Gorbachev, was moving towards a series of reforms: a “reconstruction” (Perestroika) pushing for greater openness and transparency (Glasnost) and even the expansion of profit-seeking and commercialisation within the confines of a planned economy.

These democratising and liberalising reforms – a response to the totalitarian impulses and long-term economic stagnation of the Eastern Bloc – both delayed and precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991.

Limitations

Many have accused Fukuyama of a Whiggish tendency towards reifying and valorising a particular model of government – the United States specifically – as somehow embodying the perfect form of the modern state.

But this critique, commonly held, is largely misplaced. Fukuyama has pointed out repeatedly the failures of the US, the misguided collapsing of liberalism with neoliberalism, and – more recently – the populist nationalism of the Republican Party, which he sees as catastrophic and of a piece with parallel developments in, for instance, Tayyip Erdōgan’s Turkey and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

His thesis, therefore, concerning “the end of history” is not so much that this form of political organisation has been realised, but that, as an idea, it is one upon which we cannot improve. And maybe he is right about this. But the devil, as always, is in the details – and Fukuyama seems to sometimes pass over those in silence.

He acknowledges, for instance, but has provided scant recommendation on how to resolve, the inherent tension between the strength of liberal democratic states and the freedoms of their citizens.

A strong state will be one which is able to enforce its mandate – but how is this enforcement to be squared with the liberties of the individuals that comprise its citizenry?

Here Fukuyama counsels “balance”. We may be given to wonder not only what to weigh, but what metric might be used. Furthermore, issues about “details” may run deeper than merely the question of policy resolutions to address such fundamental tensions; much of Fukuyama’s best-known work work favours the general over specifics.

This may be no coincidence, given the German idealist framework out of which his thesis was originally couched. Both Hegel and Marx have been accused of a “totalising” vision in which the dirty historical details – of stateless people, show trials and pogroms, the human casualties of both liberal and illiberal “state building” – are swept to the side in the name of universal tales of progress.

It is important to point out that the liberal democratic state Fukuyama praises is one which is very rarely established liberally or democratically. Recent attempts at forcefully “exporting” liberal democracy into countries have very often resulted in destabilisations and tyrannies far worse than those they hoped to replace.

And what of the recent phenomenon concerning the global resurgence of a number of authoritarian regimes, from Nicaragua and Sudan to Burma and Iran, whose successes (if not stability) don’t immediately give rise to the kind of optimism about democratisation that was at large in the 1980s?

A more sober stance

Even if his commitment to his position hasn’t wavered, Fukuyama has sobered somewhat in the years following his original article. Although as convinced as ever in liberal democratic states as the ultimate form of political organisation, he is certainly more sanguine about their imminent victory in the world we actually live in.

In an interview in 2021 , the Norwegian political historian Mathilde C. Fasting pressed Fukuyama on the global rise rise and damaging impact of populism, and on what Stanford University’s Larry Diamond calls “democratic recession” – a decline in the number of democracies around the world , as well as the degradation of democratic structures within established democracies, including the US and Britain:

Fasting : Is what we are witnessing “temporary counterwaves,” to quote Samuel Huntington , or are they fundamental reversals that belie the optimism before the millennium? Fukuyama : I don’t think you can answer that at this point.

Nobody can, of course. As a science, political futurology has proved itself even more dismal than economics.

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The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

David macintosh reaches the end of history ..

Francis Fukuyama is a conservative political philosopher and economist. He was politically active during the Reagan administration, when he worked for the State Department, and also during the Clinton years, mainly through Washington think tanks. During the earlier years, Fukuyama was interested in US foreign policy, later becoming increasingly interested in broader, long-term political goals in the hope of providing solutions to problems on a global scale. He wrote The End of History and the Last Man in 1992 as an attempt to solve some of these problems. His contention in this book is that liberal democracy is the final form of government for the world, and the end of human ideological struggle.

The History of The End of History

The core of the book came from a paper written by Fukuyama in 1989 entitled ‘The End of History’. In it Fukuyama noted that Western liberal democratic traditions have maintained their place in politics over the last hundred years despite the successive rise of alternative systems of government: liberal democratic government has outlasted monarchism, fascism and communism. In fact, it can be said that liberal democracy has survived to increasingly become the choice of political system for all nations. Fukuyama’s central thesis in The End of History and the Last Man is that human history is moving towards a state of idealised harmony through the mechanisms of liberal democracy. For Fukuyama, the realization of an ideal political and economic system which has the essential elements of liberal democracy is the purpose behind the march of history. ‘Liberal democracy’ does not necessarily mean the exact type of constitutional democracy found in the United States. It can manifest itself in a number of ways, but its consistent features are freedom of speech, free and fair elections, and the separation of powers. Fukuyama argues that there are no ‘contradictions in human life’ that cannot be resolved within the context of liberalism; or more generally, that there is no longer an alternative political and economic structure that can offer solutions to problems such as the need for freedom, protection, and human rights.

In making his claim about history having a process and a goal, Fukuyama is following in the footsteps of the early Nineteenth Century German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831). This famous philosopher saw a ‘dialectical’ process as the driving force behind human history that will eventually achieve a final goal for humanity. This Hegelian dialectic is a logical process manifest in the events of history and unfolding over time. Hegel maintained that the operation of this Idea or ‘Spirit’ ( Geist ) in history will continually produce opposite, and conflicting, ways of thinking, thesis and antithesis : once the thesis has been formulated there will eventually be an antithesis opposing it. The result is a conflict of beliefs that somehow must be resolved. The resolution takes the form of a compromise between the thesis and antithesis. Thus a synthesis provides a temporary solution, until it too becomes the new thesis, or in the historical sense, the new ideological state of society, which in its turn is also opposed; and this dialectical process continues until the development of the ultimate society.

For instance, as Fukuyama agrees with Hegel, human beings are alike in the sense that they have basic needs, such as food, shelter and self-preservation, and that the human spirit also demands a recognition of our worth. We instinctively want to say to others, “I am greater than you, I want you to look up to me and give me respect.” Peoples’ desires taking the form of wanting other people to recognise their superiority creates conflict with their fellow beings. This is, in essence, a struggle for dignity. Because all people desire dignity, no party is initially prepared to give ground, so a struggle for superiority ensures. Hegel refers to this struggle as the master-slave dialectic or relationship. There will always be a winner and loser; so someone will be master, and someone is always going to be delegated to the status of slave. According to Hegel, people will eventually attempt to overcome their subservient status and fight for the sake of their self-importance, their highest ideal being the desire to make the enemy respect their abilities, and so recognise their humanity. (It’s the regaining of self-consciousness too.)

These and other conflicts are played out through history as dialectical processes. But Hegel believed that at the last stage in history, every human and every country will achieve a final synthesis. Fukuyama similarly believes that all humanity will shortly arrive at the final goal of history – liberal democracy. Fukuyama cites evidence that over time, more and more countries are turning to a liberal democratic system to solve their problems.

Like Hegel, Fukuyama believes this process towards the end of history will not be smooth and linear. Some countries will continue to fall in and out of democracy; but in the end they will return to the democratic style of government because it is the only form of government than can satisfy the human need for dignity.

Historical Struggles

For Fukuyama, ideals such as the need for dignity represent important pillars upon which liberal democracy has been built; and this struggle for dignity and recognition is universal to humanity. Like Hegel, Fukuyama believes the striving for the full expression of our humanity is the driving force behind the progress of history. This striving manifests itself in the form of the nation state, since not only is there a need for individual recognition dictated by this psychological impulse, each cultural group must realize the same needs. But Fukuyama doesn’t ignore the importance of economics in the historical process, so he adds another pillar to his theory. Human progress through history can be explained in terms of ideas; but other advantages of liberal democracy are that it nurtures economic development, the rise of an educated middle class, and high levels of scientific and technological achievement. Fukuyama would perhaps say that countries such as Russia and China have not yet reformed their systems to incorporate both liberalism and capitalism because there is reluctance amongst the ruling elites to completely abandon communist ideals, although at the same time they do see the need to participate successfully in the global market. The problem for both Russia and China is the attractiveness of liberal ideals, which appear to go hand in hand with a free market economy.

One problem for Fukuyama is that his thesis leads to a paradox; one he is happy to acknowledge. The end of history will be an age where liberal democracies will meet the economic and psychological needs of everyone in every nation. There will no longer be a need to struggle for respect, dignity and recognition. However, what makes us human is our desire to be recognised as something more than just creatures with basic needs to be met. This leads to a paradox because when we will have finally arrived at the end of history, our basic needs are satisfied, and there will no struggle by which our superiority to animals can be recognised. As Fukuyama writes:

“The end of history would mean the end of wars and bloody revolutions. Agreeing on ends, men would have no large causes for which to fight. They would satisfy their needs through economic activity, but they would no longer have to risk their lives in battle. They would in other words become animals, as before the bloody battle that began history… Once our physical and mental states are satisfied we no longer have any use for one of the things that has been driving us toward an historical end. We no longer need to impose our dignity upon others.” (p.311)

We will then indeed be the last men.

David Macintosh is a professional educator in New South Wales, Australia, and a regular participant in philosophy forums. He wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Andrew Macintosh, who provided a historical perspective.

• The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama, Penguin UK, or Macmillan USA, 1992, 448pp., ISBN 978-0141927763

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History’s End? Francis Fukuyama’s Conception of the West

Cite this chapter.

Jacinta O'Hagan 2

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In 1989, the American political analyst, Francis Fukuyama, heralded the end of the Cold War by declaring the victory of the liberal West over the communist East. He characterized the Cold War as an epic battle between two ideologies to determine the direction of man’s evolution through the course of modernity. The West’s victory represented the conclusion of this ideological evolution and, in this sense, the ‘end of history’. While this particular thesis is highly distinctive, the concept of the West embedded in it illustrates broader trends in American liberal thought in the late twentieth century. These provide important insights into assumptions about the West and the cultural world order that can be found in this significant perspective. These assumptions stand in marked contrast to those of earlier authors such as Spengler and Toynbee in the faith they express in science and the optimistic belief in human progress. Fukuyama’s image of cultural world order comprises different cultures, but nevertheless presents humanity as a whole engaged in a single, civilizing process of development and modernization. His assumptions about culture and civilization are influenced by his belief in human progress and his concept of civilizational interaction linked to levels of development and modernization.

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O'Hagan, J. (2002). History’s End? Francis Fukuyama’s Conception of the West. In: Conceptualizing the West in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403907523_7

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Journal of Democracy

The End of History Revisited

Yascha Mounk
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 31, Number 1, January 2020
10.1353/jod.2020.0002
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Until a few years ago, many argued that liberal democracy was the most just and attractive political regime. The most prominent manifestation of this optimism was Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the "end of history." Ironically, many of the same social scientists who dismissed Fukuyama's work out of hand at the time were themselves committed to equally far-reaching assumptions. Now, as the tides of history are rapidly turning, the hypotheses of theory are being reversed. Indeed, some authors today predict that as the conditions that made liberal democracy possible fade away, it is likely to be supplanted by illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, or outright dictatorship. Such conclusions risk being just as rash as the more optimistic ones that preceded them.

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The End of History: Francis Fukuyama’s controversial idea explained

Sep 20, 2023

Reading time: 8 minutes

By Chris Fleming , Western Sydney University

Fukuyama became one of those academics whose work was cribbed to a shorthand: The End of History. It is, no doubt, a memorable and dramatic phrase – but it is as unclear as it is striking.

Fukuyama’s use of the word “history” here is best approximated by synonyms in sociology such as “modernisation” or “development”.

A debt to Hegel and others

Limitations

He acknowledges, for instance, but has provided scant recommendation on how to resolve, the inherent tension between the strength of liberal democratic states and the freedoms of their citizens.

A strong state will be one which is able to enforce its mandate – but how is this enforcement to be squared with the liberties of the individuals that comprise its citizenry?

A more sober stance

Fasting : Is what we are witnessing “temporary counterwaves,” to quote Samuel Huntington , or are they fundamental reversals that belie the optimism before the millennium? Fukuyama : I don’t think you can answer that at this point.

Nobody can, of course. As a science, political futurology has proved itself even more dismal than economics.

This article was originally published in The Conversation.

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Scenes of Distress: Reflections on Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”

Matthew taylor, kinjo gakuin university nagoya, japan [email protected].

“For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed!’ 30 Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’” Luke 23:29-30

Introduction: Geopolitics, Fukuyama, and Japan

Current international news presents a challenge, to put it mildly, for Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that liberal democracy and free markets comprise the inevitable, triumphant system of human organization. With the resurgence of ideology, nationalism, and authoritarianism around the globe, with the re-assertion of regional and cultural identity, and with a growing ambivalence, if not outright hostility, toward globalization, “history” in Fukuyama’s sense of the term seems to be returning with a vengeance. A quarter century after Fukuyama’s essay (“The End of History,” 1989) and book ( The End of History and the Last Man , 1992), the world appears to be taking on a decidedly “Huntingtonian” cast. Samuel Huntington’s rival thesis, the “Clash of Civilizations,” predicted that cultural primacy among the world’s great civilizational blocs would drive events and override the forces of globalization, the basis for Fukuyama’s more hopeful projections. (1)

However, the dramatic, real time repudiation of Fukuyama’s thesis distracts from a question that is equally important, if not more so. Let us suppose that the “end of history” were to proceed as Fukuyama projected, and that all ideological alternatives were indeed discredited and abandoned. In such a case, could the “end of history” succeed, not against ideological opponents, but on its own terms ? This question, as to whether Fukuyama’s post-historical society could survive its own success, worried Fukuyama himself, who was convinced that the end of history would succeed. He wrote the “last man” section of his book to address precisely this concern.

Real world examples are not lacking, though. Japan presents a particularly interesting case for exploring this aspect of Fukuyama’s thesis, for investigating what the end of history would look like, and for asking what kind of society, what kind of person it would produce. Fukuyama himself made much of Japan as a kind of advance guard for post-historical developments.

Yet Japan is not the same country it was when Fukuyama first advanced his thesis a quarter century ago. Japan’s “bubble economy” was already collapsing when Fukuyama’s book came out. A continuous period of stagnation and economic insecurity has followed, along with persistently elevated rates of suicide and depression. The widespread psychological distress, excellently documented by Junko Kitanaka ( Depression in Japan ), has ushered in the trend of mass palliative medication, and to some extent, redefined the terms of social existence itself. There has also been a rise in social isolation with substantial numbers of people removing themselves from society, or any social interaction at all. Furthermore, the burgeoning population of the elderly has presented increasingly urgent, even intractable problems of care in a society no longer buffered by the bonds of extended families. Given these demographics, democratic mandates tend more and more to be socialist in nature.

Any one of these developments would present problems for an optimistic reading of Fukuyama’s thesis. Taken together, they might be considered a looming catastrophe at the end of history, indicating that Fukuyama’s world is not sustainable . Insofar as his “end of history” succeeds, it carries within it the seeds of its own unraveling. It establishes a society that cannot renew itself, and which must inevitably collapse under its own weight. While the twin forces of liberal democracy and free market capitalism do indeed have, as Fukuyama so well observes, a forward momentum that is unstoppable, they leave in their wake a spent and nonviable social and economic order; one whose weaknesses are already becoming apparent. I hope to make this case economically, psychologically, demographically, and politically, by examining these four factors in Japan: the very nation Fukuyama regarded to be a showpiece for his thesis.

In the background of this reflection is Eric Gans, the founder of generative anthropology (GA), who has consistently endorsed Fukuyama’s thesis (for instance, Chronicles 174, 227, 498, 503, and 527). Like Fukuyama, Gans sees liberal democracy and the market system as the best hopes for establishing a stable, peaceful, and flourishing human order. The main downside Gans identifies in this system is “victimary thinking” which can be broadly understood as identity politics. However, in Japan, where identity politics are as yet a novel distraction, the unraveling of the social order has little to do with victimary thinking. Thus, I would argue that the peculiarities of Western partisan politics may work to limit the conceptual focus of GA, and distract from what are more important civilizational dilemmas.

In this reflection I first offer a brief overview of Fukuyama’s “end of history” argument. I then outline what I regard to be its strengths, including its resonance with GA. In the main section of this essay I elaborate on the challenges to Fukuyama posed by contemporary Japan, indicating a failure at the “end of history.” Finally, I conclude with more general reflections about the global predicament and the direction of GA. Overall, this reflection is not intended as an attack on Fukuyama’s thesis, which in many ways is admirably clear-sighted, but as a critical engagement. Fukuyama’s problem was not that he was wrong per se but often, if anything, more right than he realized. Specifically, he was not wrong to put Japan, and by extension East Asia, at the cutting edge of history. Yet developments in Japan call into question the sustainability of his “post-historical” future, and Japan’s demographic trends in particular seem to augur a disconcertingly literal interpretation of “last man.”

Fukuyama’s End of History in Brief

The context of Fukuyama’s essay and book was the end of the Cold War, dramatically realized with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “Iron Curtain,” the rapid collapse of communist governments in the Eastern bloc nations, and soon after that the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. However, Fukuyama pointed out that long-standing authoritarian regimes around the world had also been collapsing, often bloodlessly, on the right, for instance in Spain (in the late 1970s), and Chile, South Korea and the Philippines (in the late 1980s). The trend was clear: the world was turning steadily, swiftly, and often unexpectedly, toward liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Together they were proving to be the ultimate, optimal, final, and triumphant system of government. It was no longer a question of if but of how long the rest of the world would take to enter the fold.

Fukuyama argued that this process would continue until the entire world had effectively adopted democracy and capitalism. He called this the “end of history,” a term and idea taken directly from Hegel. (2) Fukuyama’s thesis is from beginning to end a Hegelian one, though he also made much use of Hegel’s 20 th century interpreter Alexandre Kojève. The “end of history” did not mean that time or human events would cease but that “history,” if it is defined as the great contest of empires and ideologies, would simply cease to exist as such. The default winner was liberal democracy and capitalism. All viable alternatives had been or were in the process of being defeated, discredited, or dissolved. While there would certainly be holdouts and even regressions along the way, the overall direction was clear. It might be useful to think of the “end of history” as a milder, secular version of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point,” a singularity of integrated human development that would introduce a qualitatively different level of consciousness. Likewise, the “end of history” is the “end” of one state but also the beginning of another.

Fukuyama made much of Japan as a model for his thesis. Not so very long ago Japan had invested its all in the fascistic, expansionist State Shintoism of Imperial Japan. Following its devastating defeat in World War II, a democratic constitution was imposed on Japan by the U.S., as occupiers. This small, crowded, ruined, impoverished and humiliated nation, poor in natural resources (and hardly a natural heir to liberal democracy), rose through wits and pluck and human capital to develop into a solid civil society with stable democratic institutions, and became an industrial and economic powerhouse. Fukuyama focused on post-war Japan extensively in his book, paying particular attention to its “economic miracle” and Japan’s famous worker culture. Fukuyama was impressed with the corporate culture of the overworked “salaryman” who gave his all to the company, receiving in recompense a sense of belonging, or Hegelian “recognition,” (3) meaning roughly, sufficient respect or acknowledgement as an autonomous human agent.

Yet Fukuyama was impressed not just that Japan had adopted liberal democracy and capitalism with such astonishing (and unexpected) success, but that it had become one of the great evangelists for both, through the marketing of its high quality products around the world. Japan had become the promoter of a sophisticated global consumer culture and presented an example of national success that was already becoming the envy of peers, particularly in East Asia. Fukuyama noted in particular the Asian “Tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) that were set to reproduce Japan’s success.

Fukuyama developed the “last man” component of his thesis to consider what kind of human being would emerge when the end of history’s triumph was complete. The last man was taken from Nietzsche, (4) and Fukuyama also made use of a parallel idea from C. S. Lewis, “men without chests.” (5) These were the small-minded, rationalistic, materially preoccupied, self-interested humans who would emerge as the norm at the end stage of a materialistic or technocratic society. Fukuyama worried likewise that in a post-historical world where no more great battles or great causes could inspire humanity, we would lose some essential component of heroism, of idealism. Fukuyama was concerned that humanity would lose its soul, or in C. S. Lewis’s stark terms, “man” as such would cease to exist. Fukuyama took these concerns quite seriously but was guardedly optimistic, and argued that while it was true there would no longer be great causes or battles to rally behind, those of heroic bent could find—were indeed already finding—their “niche” in activities provided by the free market in a free society. They could, he observed, test their mettle in courageous physical challenges such as rock-climbing, hang-gliding, whitewater rafting, or equivalent pursuits.

Positively Assessing Fukuyama’s Thesis

Fukuyama’s geopolitical projection has been arguably the most widely cited and discussed since the end of the Cold War. Its closest rival is the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis explicitly developed (also in an essay and book) by Fukuyama’s teacher Samuel Huntington as a refutation of his former student’s position. Fukuyama’s thesis is thought provoking, well stated, well-informed, and deeply informative. It provides a powerful framework even for those who would contest it, including Huntington.

On some levels, it is very hard to quarrel with Fukuyama. For instance, whether or not one applauds the spread of liberal democracy, consumer capitalism, and globalization, it is hard to deny that they have spread, and have been extremely powerful forces, often virtually unstoppable. Like the Borg civilization in Star Trek ’s Next Generation series, they seem to conquer and co-opt the strengths of nearly every system in their path. In the words of the Borg, “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” To those ambivalent about or hostile to globalization, Fukuyama was, if anything, too correct.

Fukuyama was also right about Japan and Asia, more than he would have predicted. Japan is more politically mature than it was 25 years ago (Fukuyama found Japan’s then one party rule by the Liberal Democratic Party underdeveloped), and the “Asian Tigers” now include other emergent or emerging economies like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and before long Cambodia and Myanmar. China has quickly grown to dominate global markets while (contra Fukuyama’s thesis) retaining an official communist ideology and pursuing nationalistic goals and aggressive territorial ambitions, so it remains to be seen if China will ultimately follow a “Huntingtonian” course. Nevertheless, it could plausibly be argued that political and economic developments of this “Asian Century,” taken as a whole, vindicate Fukuyama’s vision.

What of GA? Eric Gans has consistently endorsed Fukuyama’s thesis, though never without caveats, including the term “end of history” itself. It is important to note the general consonance between Fukuyama and Gans. The consonance is a natural one because of the emphasis in generative anthropology upon the market and the exchange system, both real and symbolic. Though originating in mimetic theory, GA does not see the world in the same apocalyptic terms, especially those spelled out in Rene Girard’s last great work, Battling to the End . In the GA view, the exchange of signs and goods can and does defer violence. In this regard, Fukuyama and Gans use different terms but talk about very similar things.

For Fukuyama, the key to understanding participation in political and economic life in a liberal democratic order is that it allows people to get a sense of Hegelian recognition. Gans tends rather to interpret the same things in terms of resentment : voting and economic participation allow people to discharge and recycle resentment, and transform it into positive good for society. More recently, Gans has seen both the administration of Barack Obama and the election of Donald Trump as operating more or less successfully within Fukuyama’s paradigm, where ongoing negotiation of values between left and right (in this case specifically about “victimary thinking”) unfold within the framework of liberal democracy and the market system. Obama’s “arc of history”—that the direction of history was inherently toward social justice—essentially took an end of history perspective (Chronicle 503), while Gans argues that Trump’s election has renegotiated the terms of victimary thinking (Chronicle 527). In other words, identity politics present an ever expanding range of seemingly non-negotiable propositions, based on resentment, which threaten the give and take of a functioning democracy. The right re-negotiates this range, hopefully at a pace faster than or at least equal to the generation of new resentments. Yet both left and right actually work within the same framework and toward the same end: the triumph, in one form or another, of the market system and the liberal democratic order.

Failure at the “End of History”: The Case of Japan

As noted, geopolitics is moving away from rather than toward Fukuyama’s ideal, but the challenge I issue to Fukuyama is from within his system rather than without, societal rather than geopolitical. I argue that Fukuyama’s world is not sustainable, and make the case economically, psychologically, demographically, and politically, by examining these respective factors in Japan.

Scenes of Economic Distress

Fukuyama made his analysis of Japan with its “economic miracle” in mind. A quarter century later, we are better able to assess this aspect of Fukuyama’s thesis, but even at the time his essay and book came out (the early 90s), Japan was experiencing what came to be known as the collapse of its economic “bubble.” The bubble in specific terms related to extraordinarily inflated land prices that were tied into banks and the lending mechanisms that underwrote “Japan Inc.” (corporate Japan in the bubble years). Now it has come to signify more generally the surreal extravagance and frivolity of the era, roughly equivalent to “the Gilded Age” in the U.S. In popular culture, the “ bubble jidai ” (bubble era), particularly of the 1980s, is looked upon both sardonically and nostalgically as a great, wild, naïve, fun-filled illusion. (6)

Post-bubble Japan presents a much different economic picture, one characterized by stagnation, uncertainty, and decline. The long recession, first called the “lost decade” of the 90s, extended itself into the 2000s, and up to the global financial crisis of 2008 (Tsutsui and Mazzotta, 67-73). That crisis further undermined many of the great manufacturers Fukuyama so much admired, including Toshiba (which he praised for introducing the joys of consumerism to Iran), now in a state of imminent disintegration after hiding its losses for years (Fuse). Olympus lied about its finances for decades and is now a shadow of its former self (Hawkes and Goodley). The electronics giant Sharp was recently sold off to a Taiwanese manufacturer after suffering continuous losses, and Sony, Hitachi and Panasonic have only survived by scaling back and refocusing production, while their more limber Asian competitors now lead the fields they once dominated (Yoshida). Thus, to the extent that Fukuyama was right economically, namely, the replication of Japan’s success in other East Asian nations, it has also meant that Japan’s economic and industrial power have steadily eroded as its competitors become the newer centers of vitality.

It is important to recall in this context Fukuyama’s focus on the then famous work culture of Japan, as exemplified by the overworked but dedicated salaryman, the lifelong employee who got a sense of Hegelian recognition from his company identity, however poorly he might be rewarded or enriched personally relative to his output. Fukuyama generalized this, somewhat naïvely though understandably, to the entire worker culture of Japan. However, the post-bubble period, which in a sense introduced real capitalistic forces into Japan, as opposed to a somewhat benign corporate paternalism, also introduced risutora : restructuring, or downsizing. Many workers have lost or can lose their jobs as companies struggle to cut costs and compete with more vibrant economies, or relocate or outsource industrial production to other Asian countries.

Lifelong job security is by no means the norm at present; for instance, the percentage of workers who are working either part-time or hired on short-term contracts has risen dramatically, standing now at about 40% (“Plight of Irregular Workers”). Thus, an increasing number of workers find they are only as valuable as their skill set until the termination of their contracts, or the bankruptcy of their company, or its cannibalization through mergers and acquisitions. This has introduced, increasingly, a two-tiered society in Japan, and a growing split between the stably and unstably employed, who very often work side by side. The Japan that Fukuyama so much admired was in many ways a universally middle class society, and his characterization of Hegelian recognition applied rather well when this social compact was in force and everyone’s contribution to society was valued, if not equally, at least sufficiently. Clearly this is no longer the case.

Another recent development is that both the stably and unstably employed may find themselves in shamelessly exploitative work environments typified by notoriously ruthless “black companies,” which focus aggressively on the bottom line (Suzuki). This is indicative yet again of the advance of “real” capitalism in Japan, as opposed to paternalistic corporatism. Again, even if one can see merit in this relatively unbridled mode of capitalism, in the form, for example, of more economic vigor, one certainly cannot see Fukuyama’s “recognition,” however well such a characterization may have applied during the bubble years. The contemporary work culture of Japan bears little resemblance to the one Fukuyama described. He was describing a temporary—and depending how one looks at it, illusory—period of economic success, not a permanent aspect of society.

This is a crucial point because Fukuyama’s projection is long term by definition: the “end of history.” If he held up as exemplar what amounts to a temporary stage of economic development lasting a decade or two, then clearly Japan as it was in the bubble years can no longer be considered valid support for his thesis. Conceivably, one could look to reinforce Fukuyama’s thesis elsewhere, for instance, by looking at Japan’s successful Asian competitors. Yet it would be just as easy, and more plausible, to see that success, too, as a temporary stage of economic development, and one that will end in more or less the same way: stagnation, uncertainty, and decline.

One could in fact project a wave of prosperity for global consumerist capitalism, advancing as Fukuyama describes but leaving everywhere in its wake not stably prosperous societies but a hollowed out economy and labor force. The “end of history” is, in other words, a kind of global economic bubble. The “cutting edge” of the bubble surges ahead like a tide, disruptive, destructive, with no regard to consequences, and with no reference for success other than itself. Unfortunately, the bubble brings along more than just economic debilitation.

Scenes of Psychological Distress

Unsurprisingly, the period following the collapse of the economic bubble in Japan saw a dramatic increase in clinical depression, along with elevated levels of suicide that were already quite high in comparison to other industrialized nations. Depression became as much an issue among the stably employed as among those who were experiencing the brunt of the economic decline, and to the surprise of few in Japan, the overworked salaryman, so lionized by Fukuyama, easily became someone whose depression caused him or her to be hospitalized. In fact, many high profile cases of suicide—high profile because they resulted in litigation, leading in turn to new laws and workplace guidelines—concerned victims who worked for prestigious corporations, whose depression and suicide were directly linked to the workplace environment. (7)

The widespread depression necessitated a new public consciousness; while there was traditionally a strong stigma associated with emotional illness and a reluctance to talk about it, openness was needed now because depression had become too large a problem to ignore. This process, superbly documented by Junko Kitanaka in the book Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress , was a complex and multifaceted one, but it could roughly be characterized as twofold. On the one hand, depression was medicalized , and approached as a biological illness that could be treated with medicine. For instance, Kitanaka notes prominent ad campaigns for pharmaceuticals that called depression a “cold of the heart” (14). This sort of campaign lifted the stigma of depression by characterizing it as nothing to be ashamed of, comparing it to catching a common cold, and facilitating the acceptance of psychotropic medication. In this way, mass medication for depression was introduced to Japan. On the other hand, and at the same time, a somewhat contradictory public narrative about depression emerged that identified its nexus in intractable situations, social expectations, and human relations, particularly in the work environment. To no small extent, this led to a subtle redefinition of social existence itself; it was a potential scene of distress that might overcome anyone, anytime, anywhere, for any number of reasons.

The psychosocial scene in Japan indicates that the “last man” is (contra Fukuyama, Nietszche, and Lewis) not a small-minded person but a deeply distressed one. The twin forces of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism, even when most successful—perhaps especially when most successful—appear to be poorly calibrated toward fulfillment or human happiness, at least not for the multitude that need to stay medicated.

Another sign that the social order has become increasingly dysfunctional in Japan is that many are withdrawing from it. (8) In childhood, this has often taken the form of futouko (“school refusal”): prolonged absence from school. In adolescence and young adulthood it has manifested as various forms of co-dependence, most strikingly hikikomori (“pull-inside”), who for extended periods, sometimes indefinitely, do not leave their home, and sometimes even their bedroom. Other kinds of social isolation have been emerging among the middle aged or elderly. (9) The term muen shakai (“no relationship society”) was for a short time an umbrella term (no longer current) for people who live alone and have virtually no meaningful social relationships. The most striking manifestation of this phenomenon has been kotokushi (“lonely death”): isolated individuals who die alone in their homes, often undiscovered for days due to their lack of social contact.

There is certainly a tendency, inside and outside of Japan, to sensationalize such developments. Nevertheless, taking these psychosocial trends as a whole, it is fair to observe that debilitating neuroses and social isolation have become a common and even normal condition in Japanese society. This appears to be the legacy of Japan’s economic miracle, the last man at the end of history.

Scenes of Demographic Distress

A grim irony is that the last man may literally become the last man . Japan’s population implosion is now widely known, with fertility and birth rates far below replacement level, a rapidly aging society, a depleted labor force, and a strained safety net emerging as the nation struggles to allocate resources while fewer and fewer tax-paying workers support more and more aging retirees (Eberstadt, Pilling). Less well known outside Japan (though a constant topic in media within it) are the concrete difficulties involved as the nation comes to term with its aging population. Directly or indirectly, virtually everyone in Japan has been affected by the problems of the aging society.

Much of this is not immediately apparent in the middle of the bustling urban centers, but rural areas have been hollowing out for decades, and it is now in the areas ringing cities that the texture of life in an aging society can be most strikingly observed (“Desperately Seeking Young People”). In some areas, it is rare to see any children or young adults. Care facilities for the aged, both live-in accommodations and day care facilities, continue to proliferate in suburban neighborhoods. Care is now a growth industry and a major source of employment, often a default one with the decline of formerly vibrant sectors in the lingering post-bubble recession. Since 2000, government-supported care increased in response to families overwhelmed with the care of aging parents (Holder). Now the government typically supports 90% of care through insurance (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research) which has been incentivizing its growth and spurred the current explosion of facilities. However, these facilities may become less financially viable when government support is inevitably reduced (Brasor and Tsubuku). At any rate, they are not sufficient to accommodate the projected aging population, and there is also expected to be a shortage of care workers (Japan Nursing Association). Work in the care industry is often difficult and poorly compensated, and there are frequently cases of depression and fatigue connected with it (Eberstadt, Japan Support Center).

To the extent that publicly assisted care is reduced, the burden of care for the aged will increasingly fall back on families (Oi, Japan Support Center). A key difficulty is that families themselves are much smaller now, often down to two or three people, and the caretakers themselves may be quite old, a phenomenon now called roro kaigo (“care of the aged by the aged”). Many people middle-aged or older may experience a sudden downward mobility into poverty when they quit their jobs to care for aging parents (“Japan’s Middle-aged Workers”). It should be noted that caregivers like these are often facing the situation alone; no family is available to care for them when their time comes.

Senile dementia is a particularly acute problem for caregivers. It is projected that by 2025 one in four people in Japan over 65 will have senile dementia, which is one in twenty people in the general population (Eberstadt). This is already an urgent public safety concern and incidents connected with it such as fatal traffic accidents, fires, and missing persons, are now quite common (McCurry, Japan Support Center, “Car Accidents Rampant,”). Care for dementia can be extremely difficult, and there have been cases of abuse when caregivers at facilities snap (Japan Support Center), or even murder-suicide among distressed family members who are caregivers, famously including the tragic case of a former pop singer (Brasor).

Turning back to Fukuyama, it is striking that demographic issues were not touched upon in his essay or book, even once. This most famous of expert prognosticators failed to see what in a very short time would become the most pressing concern in Japan, the centerpiece for his post-historical future. In retrospect, it ought to have been easy to predict the population collapse and its associated ills; there was enough data available to extrapolate with small nuclear families using a little math. That Fukuyama, along with more or less the entire educated world through the 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s, could not imagine such a demographic crisis coming, either in Japan or beyond, cries out for explanation. How did such conceptual blindness become so pervasive that educated people could not grasp the fact that modern society might need babies?

A provisional answer is that a “population crisis” was conceptualized only in terms of swollen populations, scarce resources, and privation. Fukuyama seems to have adopted this view, albeit tacitly, as axiomatic. Thus, the good life in the paradigm of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism was equated with small families (if children were even considered at all) and the bad life with overpopulation and poverty, what the end of history was destined to overcome. But Fukuyama, along with most of the rest of us, missed the fact that children are the wealth of a given society, not its detriment. This “lost wisdom” is now blindingly obvious, but it seems to have been rediscovered too late to reverse the downward demographic spiral.

Scenes of Politics: The End of Capitalism?

It is easy look at Japan from the perspectives of partisan politics in the West, but post-war Japan, whether in boom or bust, has nearly always been governed within a statist consensus, wobbling slightly between center-right and center-left, and generally with very low voter turnout and widespread emotional detachment from the “political process.” It seems clear now that Japan as a political order is morphing de facto into socialism, whatever name is ultimately applied to it. Japan must of necessity veer more and more to the “left,” but not for ideological reasons. It is simply that there’s nothing remaining for it to do; society has to make arrangements for the aging and the incapacitated, and to step in to provide basic benefits (e.g. insurance, pension supplements, welfare) for the workers who can no longer get the kind of positions that used to provide such benefits when the economy was booming.

These dependent groups also constitute voting blocs that—assuming the constituents vote at all—will likely vote in the end not for robust capitalism but for their particular self-interest, meaning the public safety net standing between them and total destitution. Thus, if Japan is any indication, Fukuyama’s system relies on a reciprocal synthesis of liberal democracy and free market capitalism that must, as a democratic order, progressively vote capitalism out of existence. However, to look at this in terms of right or left seems to be like adopting opposite and reinforcing errors, at least in the Japanese context. In these views, either capitalism has failed and we need to adopt socialism, or socialism fails to produce growth and therefore we need to go back to capitalism. In fact, capitalism has succeeded spectacularly well and, because of its success, has undermined the basis for growth. As a result, it must now morph into socialism. Socialism ultimately cannot sustain itself because it does not generate sufficient wealth, and capitalism cannot sustain itself because it generates a preponderance of wealth best enjoyed by singles, childless couples, or if one insists on children, at most small nuclear families. This demographic decline leads to a society that cannot sustain growth, whether it is governed on the basis of a progressive or conservative approach: in the end it will be progressive by default as the statist, interventionist dispensing of public welfare benefits becomes the paradigm.

From a post-historical perspective Japan, the near perfect exemplar for the end of history, simply cannot sustain its success. The end of history is in fact the “end of capitalism” insofar as the state must intervene increasingly to fill in the gaps in social support that cannot be addressed by the market economy. This is certainly the case now as the focus of intervention shifts increasingly from futile initiatives to boost the birthrate, or attempts to revive Japan’s national success via monetary policy like “Abenomics,” toward an attempt to manage the social decline in practical and reasonably humane ways—essentially a throwing up of hands. This consumes more and more of the energy of government and, so to speak, sucks all of the other air out of the room.

Japan, limited militarily by its own constitution, is not among the world’s top military players, nor is it torn by such polarizing ideological struggles as those that roil so much of the West. The very fact that Japan has existed in this kind of blessed, if now more precarious, isolation makes it particularly illuminating for assessing Fukuyama’s thesis, apart from the “noise” of history. Japan shows that the ideal society Fukuyama describes cannot viably propagate itself long-term. Even in the absence of imminent external threats, as is evidenced by Japan’s national security and access to trade under the protection of the US military umbrella for decades, and even as a “post-ideological” country, the end of history can’t work in Japan. If it cannot work here, of all places, how could it ever work anywhere? It is little surprise in this regard that Japan’s problems, particularly its demographic problems, are being replicated in Europe and in other East Asian countries (Pilling), and before long will be spreading to the developing world (Roser).

A group of analysts led by Susan Yoshihara and Douglas Zerlov have recently begun connecting demographic decline with the Huntingtonian projections presented at the beginning of this reflection. (10) Counterintuitively, the “geriatric” nations may not be the calm and rationally calculating ones but will likely be prone to use military force in impulsive and unpredictable ways from a sense of their own depleted position of strength. Likewise, neighbors may sense the weaknesses of demographically challenged nations and may be duly emboldened. Thus, demographic decline could very well introduce a new and destabilizing calculus into the so-called “clash of civilizations.” Whether or not this view, or for that matter Huntington’s, turns out to be vindicated, what is less in dispute is that demographics will be directing and shaping the world in upcoming decades, much more than the post-historical forces that were the focus of Fukuyama’s analysis.

That Gans continues to endorse Fukuyama’s thesis raises the obvious question, in the context of this reflection, of whether he is correct to do so. There is no intellectual diktat that Fukuyama’s thesis and GA must converge, but there are prominent commonalities, as mentioned earlier, particularly with regard to participation in the market and democracy as a way of negotiating resentment, usually subsumed by Fukuyama under the treatment of recognition. One way to reconcile the resonance between Fukuyama and GA with the manifest shortcomings of the former may be this; just as Fukuyama astutely observed the forward momentum of liberal democracy and the market economy while failing to predict their aftermath, so has Gans insightfully analyzed the same process from the GA perspective, though neglecting the downsides, unless they have to do with victimary thinking. As I have argued earlier, though, and as I hope this reflection has shown at a minimum, Japan demonstrates that there are profound economic, psychological, social, and demographic problems at the “end of history” that have nothing to do with identity politics.

How might GA, with its unique perspective on “the human,” address these quintessentially human problems connected with labor, social relations, psychosocial pathology, or demographics? I am not competent to analyze Hegel but can at least offer the intuition either that GA premises do not align particularly well with the “master-slave” dialectic, or that GA needs to develop a much different approach to it than Fukuyama. (11) Fukuyama seems to have gone astray with his application of the dialectic in his treatment of recognition, since, equipped with this “anthropology,” he could not grasp the most basic components of a human scene, and certainly not enough to anticipate current conditions, not even at a birds-and-bees level (population and reproduction). In contrast, GA by its very nature apprehends “the human” as existing within a communally signifying scene that, as a matter of course, encompasses the problems of co-existence, reciprocity, distribution, and long-term survival and flourishing—as opposed to one-to-one contests of will. It seems that for GA to rise to its potential here, it needs to play to its own strengths. Or, to consider it another way, to apprehend communal or societal dysfunction, GA may need to move beyond resentment. As a social model, GA certainly has an advantage over mimetic theory, which cannot comprehend social cohesion as anything other than an effluence of sacrificial violence.

One surprisingly hopeful contribution—surprising because it is a literary study concerning non-humans in dystopian science fiction—is Andrew Bartlett’s Mad Scientist, Impossible Human . In addressing the objectification of the human vis-à-vis science and technology, Bartlett takes pains to articulate an alternate vision of the human as communally situated, both humanized and humanizing through participation in labor, consumption, and exchange, as well as social, romantic, family, and community life: the agony and horror of Mary Shelley’s monster is that he cannot share in any of this. Bartlett’s vision, thoroughly informed by GA, is a deeply humanistic one and quite useful in thinking through the human within a different dystopian context—namely the currently unfolding one, as described in this essay. Another relevant contribution is Benjamin Matthews’ analysis of alternative work environments in the present issue of Anthropoetics . Matthews shows how such emerging communities structure the chain of command in such a way as to acknowledge and “humanize” the contributors, without ignoring market realities.

In my view, both Bartlett’s and Matthews’ studies connect with the original “social justice” that developed in the context of 19 th and 20 th century Catholic social teaching to articulate the principle of subsidiarity , or the scaling down of social responsibility to the lowest practical levels, and the economic philosophy of “distributism,” where ownership and production are established as far as possible at the smallest human scale. (12) These twin concepts were proposed to address the inherent weaknesses of socialist collectivism and capitalist corporatism, both of which stripped human beings of property and alienated them from their own labor, their fellows, and their sense of worth. In fact, Japan’s “post-historical” crisis is unfolding uncannily closely to what was predicted by distributist thinkers: the inexorable morphing of capitalism into socialism, a nonviable social and economic order, and a disfigurement of the psyche. (13) It may be worthwhile, therefore, to follow up this reflection by considering subsidiarity and distributist thought from a GA framework, and to examine alternative business and community models along the same lines that Matthews has explored digital collectives.

As a final note of concession to Fukuyama, the implausibility of Japan serving as a model for the “end of history” is not an occasion for smug naysaying, but something to be truly regretted. The qualities that make Japan such a pleasant and interesting place are very “Fukuyaman” ones: including the advanced infrastructure, the civic culture, and the in many ways fair and egalitarian social system, all coexisting alongside Japan’s strong retention of cultural distinctiveness. A global civilization structured along such lines might have been a very fine one indeed. One can hardly fault Fukuyama for having recognized a good thing when he saw it, and it is arguable that no nation has made a better “go” of realizing Fukuyama’s ideal. The inherent fragility of advanced, industrialized democracies is tragic for it indicates the end, not of history, but of a very grand dream.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my wife Emi for guiding me through current trends in Japan and much relevant data, to Benjamin Matthews for extensive and invaluable editorial support, and to my interlocutors at GASC 2016 in Nagoya, Japan for helpful comments. The views in this paper, and any defects, are my own.

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“Japan’s Middle Aged Workers Risk Careers to Care for Elderly Parents.” Today . 22 Dec. 2015: n. pag. Web. 6 Feb. 2017. http://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/japans-middle-aged-workers-risk-careers-care-elderly-parents?singlepage=true.

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McCurry, Justin. “Japan’s Dementia Crisis Hits Record Levels as Thousands Go Missing.” The Guardian . 16 Jun. 2016: n. pag. Web. 6 Feb. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/16/record-12208-people-with-dementia-reported-missing-in-japan.

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Yoshihara, Susan and Douglas A. Sylva, eds. Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics . Washington D.C.: Potomac Books. Print.

1. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order . (back)

2. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History . (back)

3. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind . (back)

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (back)

5. The Abolition of Man. (back)

6. For a representative recent example see the au “1980 Shock!” television commercial for Y!mobile phone service. The humorous time travel premise, featuring actress Mirei Kiritani and a cameo from the 1980s diva Minako Tanaka, pokes fun at the dazzling but ridiculous spirit of the bubble years. (back)

7. The most emblematic recent case is the suicide of 24 year old Matsuri Takahashi, which led to the resignation of the president of Dentsu Corporation. Her mother now leads a campaign for the reform of labor conditions. See Rothwell. (back)

8. I described these phenomena in a previous article for Anthropoetics , “Strategies of Dissociation.” (back)

9. I surveyed this phenomenon in the Anthropoetics article, “Not with a Bang but a Whimper.” (back)

10. The title of their edited volume, Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics , is a nod to Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . (back)

11. The Phenomenology of Mind . (back)

12. See for instance G.K. Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity , Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State , and E. F. Schumacher’s well-known update of distributist ideas in the 1970s, Small Is Beautiful . (back)

13. See for instance Chesterton, 40-43, and Cooney. (back)

The End of History Revisited

Yascha Mounk

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Until a few years ago, many argued that liberal democracy was the most just and attractive political regime. The most prominent manifestation of this optimism was Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the “end of history.” Ironically, many of the same social scientists who dismissed Fukuyama’s work out of hand at the time were themselves committed to equally far-reaching assumptions. Now, as the tides of history are rapidly turning, the hypotheses of theory are being reversed. Indeed, some authors today predict that as the conditions that made liberal democracy possible fade away, it is likely to be supplanted by illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, or outright dictatorship. Such conclusions risk being just as rash as the more optimistic ones that preceded them.

U ntil a few years ago, the optimists reigned supreme. Liberal democracy, many argued, was the most just and attractive political regime. It had already triumphed in many of the most militarily dominant, economically advanced, and culturally influential countries in the world. In due course, others would surely follow suit.

The most prominent manifestation of this optimism was Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the “end of history.” Writing a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, Fukuyama argued that humankind’s ideological evolution had come to an end. Although various twentieth-century political movements had promised to supersede Western liberalism, by the end of the century their impetus had been exhausted. Communism might still have “some isolated true believers” in such far-flung places as “Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts,” 1 but it was no longer a viable contender for ideological hegemony. Devoid of credible alternatives, the world was safe for liberal democracy: “The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.” 2

About the Author

Yascha Mounk is associate professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (2022).

View all work by Yascha Mounk

Many social scientists dismissed Fukuyama’s work out of hand. But the truth of the matter is that scholars who would never have deigned to make the bold pronouncements that turned Fukuyama into a worldwide celebrity were committed to equally far-reaching assumptions. Indeed, perhaps the most influential empirical article on the fate of democracy published since 1989 made a claim that, properly understood, was even more triumphalist. According to Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, countries that had changed governments through free and fair elections at least twice, and that had reached a level of annual per capita [End Page 22] income higher than that of Argentina in 1975 (a figure that they gave as $6,055 “expressed in constant U.S. dollars computed at purchasing-power parities and expressed in 1985 prices,” or close to $14,500 in 2019 terms), were consolidated democracies. They could expect to enjoy life eternal. 3 As Przeworski, Limongi, and two other colleagues had put it in an earlier article in the Journal of Democracy , at or above this level of per capita income, “democracy is certain to survive, come hell or high water.” 4

Now, as the tides of history are rapidly turning, the hypotheses of theory are being reversed. Over the span of less than a decade, Great Britain voted for Brexit, the United States elected Donald Trump, authoritarian populists took the reins of power from Brazil to India and from Italy to the Philippines, and elected strongmen started an all-out assault on liberal democracy in Ankara, Budapest, Caracas, Moscow, and Warsaw (as well as many other places that get far less attention in newspapers and academic journals alike).

As the certainties of yesteryear have melted into air, it has become fashionable to gloss recent political developments as “the end of the end of history.” 5 In many books and essays on this topic—including my own—the significance of recent developments is explicitly framed in terms of evidence for the failure of Fukuyama’s thesis. 6 History, a swelling chorus sings from the new hymnbook, has not ended. The values of liberal democracy are no longer hegemonic, if ever they truly were. Some authors go even farther: As the conditions that made liberal democracy possible fade away, they predict, it is likely to be supplanted by illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, or outright dictatorship. Whatever may come next, the democratic era is sure to end. But these conclusions, born from trauma, risk being just as rash as the more optimistic ones that preceded them.

The Triumphalist Philosophy of History

The triumphalist view of history that held such great intellectual sway until recently is so easy to dismiss in part because it has, all along, been so poorly understood. In the case of Francis Fukuyama, that misunderstanding begins with the very title of his most famous work. Influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama intended his essay not as a prediction that historical events would no longer occur, but rather as a rumination on the purpose of history: “This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs ‘ yearly summaries of international relations,” he slyly wrote in the pages of the august journal’s upstart rival, the National Interest , “for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” 7 [End Page 23]

For most of the ancients, there were a small number of basic political regimes, each of which was liable to prove unstable. Until the eighteenth century, virtually all philosophers shared this assumption: The realm of politics was, in their minds, marked by cyclical revolution rather than purposive evolution. Fukuyama argues that this account is unsatisfactory because it does not pay sufficient attention to the human ability to accumulate knowledge.

Knowledge, according to Fukuyama, shapes human societies in two crucial ways. First, the existence of ferocious military competition favors the development and survival of societies that embrace the scientific method. Second, the scientific method will also produce “directional historical change” by means of the “progressive conquest of nature for the purpose of satisfying human desires.” Economic development, in this view, requires an ever more sophisticated division of labor, which disrupts traditional societies and erodes their modes of governance.

But while the existence of science helps to dispel purely cyclical notions of history, it does not give human societies a clear destination. Indeed, while Fukuyama thought that the greater ability of markets to coordinate complex economic activities would ultimately give capitalist societies an evolutionary advantage over those governed by central planners, he disputed the classic assumptions of “modernization theorists” such as Seymour Martin Lipset. As the experience of societies such as Singapore or (later) China showed, it was possible to experience rapid economic growth and an exponential increase in educational standards without transitioning to liberal democracy. 8 To understand Fukuyama’s belief that history is moving in the direction of liberal democracy, it is therefore necessary to locate a second motor of history: thymos .

It is the human desire for recognition, Fukuyama argues, that pushes societies in the direction of greater equality. In a monarchy, in which only one person’s desire for recognition is satisfied, a great number of the king’s subjects will aspire to a greater status. In an aristocracy, in which only a few men and women of noble birth enjoy honor, the lowly will be tempted to plot revolution. It is only in a society that is capable of recognizing the equal status of all that such internal contradictions will be minimized. Most human beings, Fukuyama writes, “have a thymotic pride in their own self-worth, and this leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognizing their autonomy as free individuals.” 9 [End Page 24]

This helps to explain why liberal democracy, according to Fukuyama, holds greater appeal than any other political system. Communism and theocracy both fail at commanding broad consent and allowing citizens a significant scope of freedom. Only liberal democracy affords individual citizens a great amount of leeway to live life in accordance with their predilections and an ability to determine their collective fate. This is the source of its lasting appeal, and the reason why history ultimately tends toward its triumph.

This also helps to explain why Fukuyama could have believed that liberalism had triumphed “in the realm of ideas or consciousness” even though it remained “as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” As a result of the failure of totalitarian alternatives such as fascism or communism, liberal democracy has revealed itself to be the only credible way of satisfying humankind’s desire for recognition. While democracy has hardly conquered the whole world—and some democracies may even collapse—no other political system has a credible claim to rivaling its appeal.

This caveat both flows from Fukuyama’s deepest theoretical commitments and effectively demolishes the most simplistic objections to his theory. As he puts it, it would be a mistake “to cite the failure of liberal democracy in any given country, or even in an entire region of the world, as evidence of democracy’s overall weakness.” And yet, his insistence that “cycles and discontinuities in themselves are not incompatible with a history that is directional and universal, just as the existence of business cycles does not negate the possibility of long-term economic growth,” 10 invites an obvious concern: Is Fukuyama’s thesis unfalsifiable?

Although Fukuyama is not nearly as clear about what facts or developments might disprove his thesis as one might wish, I do not believe that he is putting forward a proposition that is unfalsifiable (and thus, as acolytes of Karl Popper would readily remind us, outside the realm of scientific knowledge). 11 In particular, two kinds of findings would, if true, suggest that Fukuyama’s theory is in need of serious revision.

First, since the desire for recognition is universal among human beings who live in societies that have reached a certain stage of historical development, we can assume that citizens of liberal democracies should cherish their political arrangements. This implies that the residents of countries such as Germany, Italy, or the United States should, despite all the discontent they might feel with particular policies or governments, ascribe great importance to living in a democracy and reject authoritarian alternatives to the status quo. If they fail to do so, this suggests that the internal contradictions of liberal democracy are more substantial than Fukuyama concedes. Call this the “democratic-consent condition.”

Second, citizens of countries that are not liberal democracies should, over the short or long term, bristle at their political arrangements to some [End Page 25] significant extent. This implies that residents of countries such as Russia or China should, despite all the legitimacy that these governments might derive from political stability or economic performance, seek to gain greater individual liberty and collective self-determination—ideally, in the form of liberal democracy. If some new form of regime should manage to fulfill its citizens’ longings for recognition, reconciling its internal contradictions to the same extent as liberal democracy does, then no one will be able to claim that history has ended. Call this the “autocratic-contradictions condition.”

Empirical Political Science Says History Has Ended

Many political scientists have ignored Fukuyama’s ideas, scoffed at them, or somehow managed to do both at the same time. This is in part owing to a general academic tendency to shy away from headline-grabbing hypotheses. But it is also connected to a larger disciplinary shift that gathered speed throughout the 1990s and early 2000s: the decisive victory of quantitative political science (with its focus on high-N statistical studies or rational-choice models) over qualitative political science, whether in the guise of political theory or of empirical work rooted in deep knowledge about particular countries and cultures. The irony of this hauteur is that quantitative political scientists arrived at conclusions that are astoundingly similar to Fukuyama’s.

For most of the postwar period, so-called modernization theory dominated large parts of the social sciences. According to Lipset, all good things went together: As societies developed economically and citizens’ level of education rose, their social attitudes became more liberal, and they demanded a greater say in their political affairs. Observing that rich societies were far more likely to be democratic, Lipset suggested that the process of economic growth caused widespread democratization. The implication was highly upbeat: As economic growth spread to more parts of the world, so would democracy. 12

But just as Fukuyama complicated this account by observing that some societies with high economic development never seemed to make the transition to democracy, so too did some of the leading political scientists of the 1990s begin to challenge this “endogenous” theory of democratization. In their influential essay, Przeworski and Limongi argued that the usual story, according to which economic progress caused the emergence of democracy, is mistaken. In fact, while middle-income countries experienced transitions to democracy more frequently than did the poorest countries, the richest dictatorships proved to be the most stable. On the whole, there seemed to be little evidence for the idea that economic development caused autocratic countries to transition toward democracy.

Instead, the strong association between democracy and economic development is best explained by “exogenous” factors: While democratic [End Page 26] experiments emerge at random, in both poor and affluent societies, a country’s level of economic development strongly influences the likelihood of success. As they put it:

Suppose that dictatorships are equally likely to die and democracies to emerge at any level of development. . . . Even if the emergence of democracy is independent of the level of development, the chance that such a regime will survive is greater if it has been established in an affluent country. We would thus expect to observe democracies to appear randomly with regard to levels of development, but to die in the poorer countries and survive in the wealthier ones. Thus, history gradually accumulates wealthy democracies, since every time a dictatorship happens to die in an affluent country, democracy is there to stay. 13

The empirical data seemed to prove this hypothesis in spectacular fashion. As Przeworski and Limongi wrote in 1997: “The simple fact is that during the period under our scrutiny or ever before, no democracy ever fell, regardless of everything else, in a country with a per capita income higher than that of Argentina in 1975: $6,055.” 14

This seminal article never mentioned Fukuyama. Nor did the authors utter the already famous phrase about “the end of history.” Yet it is hard to interpret their claims in any other way. Democracies, a growing consensus in the literature held, are very difficult to establish. But once they fulfill some basic criteria—once they have changed governments through free and fair elections a few times, and reached a certain level of economic development—they are “consolidated.” 15 They then become “the only game in town,” 16 and can “expect to last forever.” 17

The staggering implications of these claims cannot have escaped readers at the time. After all, a large number of countries already fulfilled the conditions stipulated by Przeworski and Limongi. North America and Western Europe, large swaths of Latin America, and some parts of Asia all qualified as regions filled with “consolidated democracies.” These areas would, henceforth, constitute the indestructible heartland of democracy. Moreover, it was natural to assume that those parts of the world that were not yet democratic would continue to experience some economic growth; if they continued to experiment with democracy at random intervals, it was very likely that they, too, would eventually enter the democratic column. Liberal democracy, in short, would dominate the world.

Three Challenges to the Triumphalist View

Recent years have posed a fundamental challenge to this extraordinary self-confidence. An onslaught of bad news, from the election of Donald Trump to the death throes of democracies in Hungary and Venezuela, has inspired a lively literature of democratic crisis. 18 After the hubris of the preceding decades, these works provide an important [End Page 27] wake-up call. But because they focus on a wide range of phenomena and draw on a disparate set of methodological and disciplinary approaches, the nature of the challenge raised by these works to the triumphalist philosophy of history remains poorly understood.

Three unexpected empirical developments have undermined belief in the assured stability of liberal democracy in its traditional heartland of North America and Western Europe, not to speak of democratic hegemony around the world. First, as Larry Diamond has chronicled, there has been a long “democratic recession”: For each of the past thirteen years, more countries have moved away from democracy than have moved toward it. Second, as Roberto Stefan Foa and I have shown, large numbers of people seem to have fallen out of love with liberal democracy: In countries from the United Kingdom to Australia, citizens have grown both more critical of liberal democracy and more open to authoritarian alternatives. Third, and perhaps most important, populist forces intent on challenging the most basic rules and norms of liberal democracy have risen across a great swath of democratic countries. While these developments are closely interrelated, each presents a distinct challenge to the triumphalist assumptions of what is rapidly coming to seem like an earlier age.

The Democratic Recession

The most straightforward, and at first glance most potent, challenge consists in the aggregate retreat of democracy that the world has seen over the past thirteen years. Looking back through iterations of Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World survey, Larry Diamond pointed out in 2015 that more countries had moved away from democracy than had moved toward it in each of the preceding seven years. “Around 2006,” he wrote, “the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt.” 19 In the years since Diamond first noticed this worrying trend, democracy’s losing record has continued year after year. By the time Freedom House published the 2019 edition of Freedom in the World , the organization was lamenting what it called “the 13th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” 20

In countries as diverse as Kenya, the Philippines, and Russia, the retreat of democracy has caused human suffering on a massive scale. In all these countries, worsening Freedom House scores correspond to jailed journalists and murdered critics, to growing corruption and a spreading sense of dread. Yet the aggregate retreat of democracy is not, in and of itself, an especially potent challenge to the triumphalist philosophy of history, in either its idealist or its empiricist vein.

That is because the current democratic recession may not be all that damaging to the future prospects of democracy. After all, most of the worsening scores recorded by Freedom House come from countries that political scientists had never expected to become “consolidated” democracies. [End Page 28] Kenya, the Philippines, and Russia, for example, all remain below the economic threshold identified by Przeworski and Limongi (as of 2018, those countries’ GDPs per capita in current U.S. dollars were estimated respectively to be $1,711; $3,103; and $11,289). A similar defensive maneuver is also available to Fukuyama. If it turns out that the idea of liberal democracy is not strong enough to weather inhospitable circumstances—such as those in which the scientific motor of history has not yet brought about sufficient material progress—this may delay the idea’s full manifestation in the empirical world, but it does not suggest that this manifestation will never arrive.

Indeed, many long-held theories in political science can easily accommodate—and perhaps even predict—Diamond’s observation. As Samuel P. Huntington argued in a seminal article for the Journal of Democracy , the spread of democracy has historically come as a series of waves. 21 Each of these waves was eventually followed by a powerful reverse wave, which helped to explain such phenomena as the rise of fascism in the 1920s and the fall of democracy in newly established African democracies in the 1960s. From this perspective, the bulk of Diamond’s democratic recession should simply be understood as the ebb that we should, all along, have expected to follow in the wake of the dramatic democratic expansion of the late twentieth century.

A Change in Attitude

Were democracy in crisis only in parts of the world where its historical roots are shallow and the economy is not yet mature, the challenge to the triumphalist philosophy of history could likely be contained. But the most remarkable development of the past two decades is not the democratic backsliding experienced by Kenya, the Philippines, or Russia; rather, it is the extent of popular discontent with the system that has become evident in longstanding democracies such as Britain, France, and the United States.

Even before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, Foa and I warned in these pages that citizens of some of the world’s supposedly most firmly consolidated democracies were starting to take a bleaker view of their political systems. 22 Younger citizens today, for example, are far less likely than their elders to say that living in a democracy is of the utmost importance to them. Worryingly, it is not only that citizens value democracy less than they once did—across age groups, they are also more likely to favor straightforwardly authoritarian alternatives to democracy.

Because they come from consolidated democracies with developed economies and long democratic traditions, these findings about political attitudes cast graver doubt on the triumphalist philosophy of history than does the democratic recession. The political scientists who promised that democracies such as that of the United States could expect to [End Page 29] live forever assumed that democracy would be the “only game in town” once the system had taken hold. The extent of popular disaffection with democratic institutions, as well as a surprising openness toward nondemocratic alternatives, suggests that this is no longer the case.

For parallel reasons, these findings also sit uneasily with Fukuyama’s thesis regarding the end of history. Liberal democracies, he claimed, are especially adept at satisfying the basic aspirations of humanity. It is only natural to expect that these regimes would, in that case, enjoy deep support from the citizens whose aspirations had been satisfied. Far from feeling contented, however, citizens are in fact deeply dissatisfied with their societies. It would appear, then, that liberal democracies may suffer from more fundamental contradictions than Fukuyama was willing to recognize. The democratic-consent condition has apparently been breached.

Although suggestive, these findings are not enough to destroy belief in the triumphalist philosophy of history altogether. For one, these findings are still preliminary. While there is strong evidence of a significant loss of regime legitimacy in important liberal democracies, it is not yet clear just how far this will go. In order to answer the crucial question of whether liberal democracy generates as much loyalty to itself as both Fukuyama and empirical political scientists have long assumed, we will have to await both new data and the passage of time. For another, talk is cheap. A rising willingness to lambaste liberal democracy suggests that the contradictions within liberal democracy are stronger than most believed. But are these contradictions enough to bring about the rise of viable antidemocratic forces? We have yet to find out.

The Rise of the Populists

In the year 2000, populists were represented in seven European governments and on average commanded about 8 percent of the vote across the continent. By the end of 2018, they were represented in fifteen governments, and commanded 26 percent of the vote. 23 The situation is arguably even more dramatic outside Europe: Donald Trump is now the president of the United States, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. As of late 2019, three of the largest democracies in the world—Brazil, India, and the United States—are all ruled by populists. 24 This is, without a doubt, the most important reason why the triumphalist mood of the 1990s has, of late, been deflated.

In virtually all countries in which populist movements come to power, they begin to undermine the liberal elements of the political system. As a first step, populist leaders attack the rights of critical individuals or unpopular minorities. In most cases, they quickly go further: As they weaponize their claim to exclusively represent the people against any attempt to limit their power, populist leaders become implacable enemies of the rule of law and the separation of powers. It is this tendency that is neatly captured by the term “illiberal democracy.” [End Page 30]

But while it is indeed accurate to say that populists usually attempt—and frequently manage 25 —to transform countries into illiberal democracies, it is important to point out that this form of regime appears to be highly unstable. For when a popularly elected president or prime minister manages to dismantle the rule of law, there are no longer independent institutions which can ensure that the opposition enjoys the most basic rights, that the vote is counted fairly, or indeed that the ruler leaves office if the will of the people swings against him. This is why illiberal democracies often find themselves in an existential struggle: As the opposition attempts to reverse the slide toward illiberalism, populist leaders seek to gain ever greater control. Where they succeed, illiberal democracy turns out to be but a way station on the path to an elected dictatorship.

There is now sufficient evidence of this process playing out in supposedly consolidated democracies to challenge political science’s version of the triumphalist philosophy of history. Take the case of Hungary. Since becoming a fledgling democracy in the early 1990s, the country has had several changes of government through free and fair elections. Thanks to astonishing economic growth, it now enjoys an annual GDP per capita that the International Monetary Fund estimates at 17,296 in nominal dollars and 33,707 in Purchasing Power Parity dollars. 26

Yet the country has rapidly ceased to be a liberal democracy: In recent years, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party have neutered the courts, taken over much of the media, and mounted a sustained attack on free speech. In light of the extreme power that they now hold, it is no longer tenable to call Hungary an illiberal democracy. 27 In short, Hungary is one of the first countries to complete its transition from a liberal democracy that could, according to Przeworski and Limongi, “expect to live forever” to what is, for all intents and purposes, an elected dictatorship. As such, the country poses a fundamental challenge to the optimism that reigned supreme among political scientists until very recently.

But has Hungary’s transition from a liberal democracy to an elected dictatorship—or, for that matter, the rise of populism more broadly—also disproven Fukuyama’s version of the triumphalist philosophy of history? What is obvious is that the country’s citizens do not value individual liberty and collective self-determination enough to defend liberal democracy against its populist enemies. Much more conclusively than the changes in attitudes observed in countries such as the United States, this demonstrates a breach of the democratic-consent condition, demolishing a key building block of the argument that liberal democracy is history’s terminal station.

Curiously, however, what philosophers in a different time and place might have called the “world-historical significance” of the events in Hungary does not extend to the second key building block of Fukuyama’s optimism. Indeed, while there is now very strong reason to believe [End Page 31] that the contradictions of liberal democracy go much deeper than he had assumed, it is far too early to tell whether populists will be able to build political regimes in which these tensions are less severe. If populists prove capable of obtaining the consent of their populations over the long run, the autocratic-contradictions condition would also be violated; little would then remain of Fukuyama’s optimism. But there is, for now, strong reason to suspect that the project of justifying autocratic rule with the promise to speak for the people will, over time, prove at least equally difficult to sustain.

The Contradictions of Populist Dictatorships

While there has of late been extensive speculation about the future of liberal democracies, there has been far less reflection on how dictatorships that issue from populism may fare in the long run. Yet this question is just as crucial for assessing the long-term prospects of liberal democracy: Will countries such as Hungary that have of late transformed from liberal democracies into elected dictatorships remain autocratic—or might these new autocratic regimes, in turn, prove to be short intervals on a zigzagging course toward the consolidation of liberal democracy? 28

In their beginning stages, dictatorships often enjoy a strong bonus drawn from charismatic or revolutionary authority. Indeed, the widespread popularity that strongmen frequently enjoy during their first years in office allows the regime to limit the extent of repression it undertakes. 29 As a result, the great majority of citizens are able to escape the most negative aspects of autocracy by staying clear of politics; as long as they refrain from opposition activity, their lives—within the family, and even in civil society organizations such as churches or chess clubs—are much as they were before.

But charismatic or revolutionary authority usually fades. The failings of the founding dictator become more evident as the years go on; memories of the revolution grow fainter; an autocrat’s successors do not enjoy the same political skill or source of legitimacy. This loss of legitimacy becomes especially dangerous for autocratic regimes when it is compounded by exogenous shocks—a worldwide economic crisis or a fall in the prices of the country’s leading exports—or when the long-term effects of regime mismanagement, such as hyperinflation, begin to close in. Under such circumstances, an autocratic regime that once looked stable can quickly enter into a vicious cycle as the loss of legitimacy necessitates greater repression, which in turn leads to a further fall in legitimacy.

This dynamic, of course, applies to many dictatorships—plenty of which manage to survive for decades, or even centuries, by ratcheting up repression to the necessary degree. Yet there are reasons to think [End Page 32] that it may prove particularly challenging to dictatorships whose roots lie in a populist revolt. There are two reasons for this: First, these countries have recently been free, so citizens will likely prove restive when repression starts to affect their daily lives. As Machiavelli pointed out, it is particularly difficult to impose autocracy on people who are accustomed to liberty. 30 Second, unlike in autocratic regimes that claim forms of religious or traditional authority or ground themselves in an explicit rejection of democracy, the legitimacy of many of these governments strongly depends on their claim to be more democratic than their predecessors. It is one thing for an imam to claim the need for repression in the name of Allah, or for a fascist to justify his persecution of dissenters by citing his desire to build an organic, hierarchical society; it is quite another for a populist who was elected on the promise of sweeping aside antidemocratic elites to turn his tanks on his own people.

The past years have, in short, shown that many citizens of countries such as Hungary are willing to go along with a regime that claims to preserve individual freedom and collective self-determination while actually destroying these fundamental values. This shows that the democratic-consent condition no longer holds. Yet since autocracies rooted in populism are so young, we have very little information about whether they will be more adept at managing their own internal contradictions. And if it should turn out that the autocratic-contradictions condition still applies, then the elected dictatorships erected by rulers such as Orbán may ultimately prove to be but a detour on the tortuous route to democratic stability.

It follows that the tempting phrase “the end of the end of history” is, for now, premature. The past decade has taught us that the democratic-consent condition has been breached: The internal contradictions of liberal democracy go deeper than many have long assumed. The autocratic-contradictions condition, however, may yet hold: At this juncture at least, it does not seem at all obvious that any systematic alternative to liberal democracy will do better at avoiding internal contradictions.

Perhaps a growing share of citizens say that they do not care about individual liberty and collective self-determination—and are willing to vote for populist parties and candidates—because liberal democracy is far less able to fulfill the most pressing human desires than its partisans have long believed. Even after they lose their freedoms, the former citizens of liberal democracies might not bemoan their loss. But it seems just as plausible that the rise of authoritarian populists will eventually bring about a counterreaction. In that hopeful scenario, the citizens who have fallen out of love with democracy will recognize what they have lost when they wake up to the lived reality of an autocratic regime—and will once again embark on the momentous struggle to bring the real and material world into accord with their ideas and their consciousness. [End Page 33]

1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 18.

2. Fukuyama, “End of History?” 5.

4. The earlier article is Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, “What Makes Democracies Endure?” Journal of Democracy 7 (January 1996): 39–55. The quote is from page 48.

5. One of the earlier uses of this phrase is found in Robert Kagan, “The End of the End of History,” New Republic , 23 April 2008. More recent uses include Shadi Hamid, “The End of the End of History,” Foreign Policy , 15 November 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/15/the-end-of-the-end-of-history ; and Eli Friedman and Andi Kao, “The End of the ‘End of History,'” Jacobin , 1 April 2018, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/china-capitalism-communist-party-democracy-xi-jinping .

6. Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 3. See also Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017).

7. Fukuyama, “End of History,” 4.

8. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 125.

9. Fukuyama, End of History and the Last Man , xix.

10. Fukuyama, End of History and the Last Man , 48–50.

11. “It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.” Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 19.

12. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53 (March 1959): 69–105.

13. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” 158–9.

14. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” 165.

15. See Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O’Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992) and Andreas Schedler, “What Is Democratic Consolidation?” Journal of Democracy 9 (April 1998): 91–107.

16. Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies,” Journal of Democracy 7 (April 1996): 14–33.

17. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” 165.

18. See, for example, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); William A. Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); and Mounk, People vs Democracy .

19. Larry Diamond, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy 26 (January 2015): 141-55.

20. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2019: Democracy in Retreat , https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2019/democracy-in-retreat .

21. Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy 2 (Spring 1991): 12-34; www.ned.org/docs/Samuel-P-Huntington-Democracy-Third-Wave.pdf

22. See Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27 (July 2016): 5-17; Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy 28 (January 2017): 5-15; Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “Online Exchange on ‘Democratic Deconsolidation,'” www.journalofdemocracy.org/online-exchange-democratic-deconsolidation (2017), and Mounk, People vs. Democracy , ch. 3.

23. Martin Eiermann, Yascha Mounk, and Limor Gultchin, “European Populism: Trends, Threats and Future Prospects,” Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 29 December 2017, https://institute.global/insight/renewing-centre/european-populism-trends-threats-and-future-prospects .

24. Indonesia, a large (population about 260 million) electoral democracy rated Partly Free by Freedom House, might be said to be under populist rule, but is the least clear-cut of these cases.

25. Yascha Mounk and Jordan Kyle, “What Populists Do to Democracy,” Atlantic , 26 December 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/hard-data-populism-bolsonaro-trump/578878 ; as well as Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk, “The Populist Harm to Democracy: An Empirical Assessment,” Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 26 December 2018, https://institute.global/insight/renewing-centre/populist-harm-democracy .

26. In 1975, Hungary had a GDP per capita of barely $1,200 per year. In the late 1990s, around the time Przeworski and Limongi were writing, it was less than $5,000 per year. See www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/hungary/gdp-per-capita .

27. János Kornai, “Hungary’s U-Turn: Retreating from Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 26 (July 2015): 34–48.

28. In a masterful study of European political development, Sheri Berman argues that this kind of zigzagging course has in fact been the default mode of democratic consolidation in the past. See Sheri Berman, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

29. For classic reflections on the role of charismatic authority in democracy and dictatorship, see the first volume of Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds., Max Weber—Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology , 3 vols. (New York: Bedminster, 1968). See also Carl J. Friedrich, “Political Leadership and the Problem of the Charismatic Power,” Journal of Politics 23 (February 1961): 3-24; and Ian Kershaw, “‘Working Towards the Führer.’ Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 2 (July 1993): 103-18.

30. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy , bk. 1, ch. 4.

Image Credit: David Harding/Shutterstock

The Weight of Geopolitics

Robert Kagan

Can democracy prosper when democratic countries are in geopolitical retreat? History cautions against the notion that democracy will inevitably prevail.

Volume 33, Issue 1

Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled

Larry Diamond

Whether democracy regains its footing will depend on how democratic leaders and citizens respond to emboldened authoritarians and the fissures within their own societies.

Volume 33, Issue 4

Debate: A Quiet Consensus

Jason Brownlee

We welcome the common ground. The challenge ahead is to protect democracies genuinely in peril, while not losing valuable time and resources chasing authoritarian ghosts.

The End of History and the Last Man

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The End of History and the Last Man by political scientist Francis Fukuyama is a widely read and controversial book on political philosophy published in 1992. In it, Fukuyama argues that the end of the Cold War in 1991 established Western liberal democracy as the final and most successful form of government, thus marking the conclusion of “mankind’s ideological evolution.” Since its original release, the book has been updated in 2006 and 2019 with reassertions and some modifications of the original thesis. At the time of its original release, The End of History inspired lively debate in academic circles and among media commentators. This guide references the 2006 Free Press Kindle edition.

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The book asserts that the end of the Cold War signals the end of history. The term “history” does not refer to a series of events, which, of course, continue to occur. Instead, the text focuses on an endpoint in the evolution of history. This approach is akin to a linear, secular eschatology , the branch of theology concerned with God’s final judgment and the afterlife. According to Fukuyama, this endpoint constitutes the eventual political transition into liberal democracies and their economic system, capitalism , all around the world. He believes that the world would still comprise different states as individual political entities with certain national characteristics. However, their internal dynamics would be similar in terms of their relative material abundance, equal and free elections, and egalitarianism in the legal system. The author also suggests that the transition of all countries to this political model may signal the end of military conflicts because during the Cold War liberal democracies maintained amicable international relations.

The book is divided into five parts. Each part addresses an important theme or group of themes. The first part focuses on general ideological trends in in the Modern period and the possibility of a universal history of humankind. The second part discusses in more detail the ideological battle that took part during the Cold War between Communism and Liberalism , as well as the question of prerequisites for establishing a liberal democracy such as education and technological growth. The third part of the book examines the question of identity and its recognition, and how this question transformed throughout the history of Western thought. Part 4 describes attitudes toward work and obstacles to liberal democracy such as political nationalism and religion. Finally, the end of the book examines the negative aspects of liberal democracies, including socioeconomic inequality.

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The author situates his argument about the end of history in the work of 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . Specifically, Fukuyama borrows Hegelian historicism and its evolutionary approach driven by the Spirit of History but adapted to the realities of the 20th century. To establish Liberalism as the optimal ideology, Fukuyama examines the Modern period in broad strokes, including: the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, European colonial conquest, world wars and the Holocaust, the Cold War, and nuclear weapons. He asserts that the Modern period produced three key ideologies: Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism . The author examines each ideology. They feature a distinct focal point and a historical driving force like Hegel’s Spirit of History. For Fascism, this focal point was the state or race. Communism focused on class. Liberalism, the oldest and the only remaining ideology of Modernity, on the other hand, uses the individual as its historic subject. Fukuyama then underscores the collapse of Fascism in 1945 and Communism in the late 1980s by characterizing them as ideologies with global ambitions. He concludes that it is not coincidental that Liberalism remained the only Modern ideology capable of conquering the world.

Hegel is not the only philosopher of note in The End of History and the Last Man . Fukuyama examines other Western thinkers including Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , Karl Marx , and Friedrich Nietzsche . By examining the transformation of key concepts in political philosophy, such as the question of individual human identity and the social contract between the state and those it governs, the author ambitiously seeks to establish a universal history of humankind. He outlines this universal history strictly from a Western perspective and then applies it to non-Western parts of the world. The author assesses non-Western regions using several categories such as technological innovation. In doing so, he automatically places the West in the Modern period ahead of the curve and ranks many countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa as underdeveloped. The author’s assumption that there is a single, unified human history written from a Western perspective, rather than culturally specific local and regional histories, is in line with Modern thinking. This runs counter to the Postmodern destruction of such a “grand narrative .” Yet technological advancement is not a guarantee of moral behavior, as the examples of the Holocaust and the U.S. atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrate.

Whereas equal rights, education, and economic development are key rational elements in a liberal democracy, the need for recognition of one’s identity by others is another, less rational, feature. The author typically uses the ancient Greek term thymos to denote this concept. He traces the Modern development of thymos from Hegel’s concept of a bloody battle, in which recognition was worth dying for, to the present-day, peaceful way of recognizing the Other as an equal.

Fukuyama believes that the two essential obstacles to establishing a liberal democracy are nationalism and religion, especially in their political expression. He asserts that these traditional forms of communal relationships should be made compliant with liberal democracies. For example, for culture this would mean removing its political aspects and reducing it to benign forms like ethnic cuisines. At the same time, Fukuyama admits that traditional ties are what made communities strong, and there is a danger of atomization and loneliness in the most advanced liberal democracies.

The author dedicates the final chapters to examining some of the drawbacks of his preferred political system. These drawbacks include economic inequalities, crime, and substance abuse. On a deeper level, Fukuyama wonders whether the material abundance and the safety and security of liberal democracies would produce the so-called last men whom Friedrich Nietzsche disparaged. These are passive individuals solely focused on material comforts rather than risk-taking and great creative passions which made humans great in the past.

The End of History and the Last Man is an important contribution to 20th century political philosophy. The author is well versed in the history of Western thought which he presents in an accessible way. The book comprises dozens of historical examples to back up his claims showing the author’s erudition. At the same time, The End of History sparked discussion and criticism. In the three decades since its initial publication, the world transformed significantly and not necessarily in favor of liberal democracy. For example, the rise of China with its alternative social and political system in the 21st century presents a serious challenge to the end-of-history thesis.

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Filmed on Thursday June 28, 02007

Francis Fukuyama

'the end of history' revisited.

About Francis Fukuyama
Introduction
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Currently a professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins, Frank Fukuyama is the author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Trust (1995), The Great Disruption (1999), Our Posthuman Future (2002), State-Building (2004), America at the Crossroads (2006), and After the Neo Cons (2006).

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Frank Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man had profound and lasting impact with its declaration that science and technology, the growing global economy, and liberal democracy are leading history in a quite different direction than Marx and Hegel imagined. In this revisit to those themes, Fukuyama examines conflict with and within Islam, the need for a diffuse form of global governance to deal with problems like climate change, and the deeper implications of biotechnology.

Democracy versus Culture

Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man . In the book he proposed that humanity’s economic progress over the past 10,000 years was driven by the accumulation of science and technology over time. That connection is direct and reliable.

Less direct and reliable, but very important, is the sequence from economic progress to the adoption of liberal democracy. Political modernization accompanies economic modernization. This is a deep force of history, the book claims.

Fukuyama describes the rise of the idea of human rights in the West as a secularization of Christian doctrine. That led to accountability mechanisms— “You can’t have good governance without feedback loops.” Once there is a propertied middle class, they demand political participation. The threshold for that demand appears to about $6,000 per capita per year. It’s hard to get to, but hundreds of millions of people in the world are making that climb right now.

China and Russia will be a test of his thesis, Fukuyama said. They are getting wealthier. If they democratize in the next twenty years, he’s right. If they remain authoritarian, he’s wrong.

Fukuyama is most intrigued by a challenge that comes from his old teacher and continuing friend, Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations . Culture can trump modernization, says Huntington— current radical Islam is an example. Fukuyama agrees that people at the fringe of modernization feel a sense of onslaught, and they can respond as Bolsheviks and Fascists did in the 20th century. “A Hitler or a Bin Laden proclaims, ‘I can tell you who you are.’”

A second challenge to the universalism of liberal democracy is that it does not yet work internationally. Fukuyama agrees, noting that the major current obstacle is America’s overwhelming hegemony. He expects no solution from the UN, but an overlapping set of international institutions could eventually do the job.

A third challenge is the continuing poverty trap for so many in the world. Fukuyama says it takes a national state with the rule of law and time to learn from mistakes before you get economic takeoff. He sees later colonialism, done on the cheap (instead of with the patient institution building that England did in India), as a major source of the world’s current failed and crippled states.

The final challenge that impresses Fukuyama is the possibility that technology may now be accelerating too fast to cure its own problems the way it has done in the past. Climate change could be an example of that. And Fukuyama particularly worries that biotechnology might so transform human nature that it will fragment humanity irreparably.

While he sees meaning in history, Fukuyama said it’s not a matter of iron law. Human agency counts. History swerves on who wins a battle or an election. We are responsible.

Two further angles on Fukuyama’s thesis emerged at dinner. One concerned how society’s morality should express itself in dealing with the threat/promise of biotechnology. Conservative Fukuyama promoted strict government regulation while the liberals (and libertarians) in the room said the market and Internet should sort it out. Kevin Kelly asked Fukuyama, “Do you think human nature is as good as it can be?” I proposed to Washington-based Fukuyama that he was in the midst of a classic argument between the coasts. East Coast says, “Ready, aim, don’t fire.” West Coast says, “Fire, aim, ready.”

Then there’s the European Union. In his talk Fukuyama praised it as the fullest realization of his theory. At dinner he acknowledged his concern that Europe may be headed toward permanent conflict with its growing immigrant populations, whose first allegiance continues to be to their own cultures.

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The End of History and the Last Man Paperback – March 1, 2006

Print length 464 pages
Language English
Publication date March 1, 2006
Dimensions 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10 0743284550
ISBN-13 978-0743284554
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; Reissue edition (March 1, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743284550
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743284554
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.44 inches
#61 in Political Philosophy (Books)
#117 in History & Theory of Politics
#152 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism

About the author

Francis fukuyama.

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, and Mosbacher DIrector of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Dr. Fukuyama has writtenon questions concerning governance, democratization, and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. His book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment will be published in Septmer 2018.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, and was a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Francis Fukuyama is married to Laura Holmgren and lives in Palo Alto, California.

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A Brief Analysis of Fukuyama's Thesis ''The End Of History

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TImothy Burns

The end of history is a concept developed by G. W. F. Hegel, according to whom the unplanned struggles of history have produced a progress of human consciousness that culminates in the final, rational state of humanity. The notion of such a historical progression of consciousness was adopted by Karl Marx, who however attributed progress to the economic history of humans. With the fall of the (Marxist) Soviet Union, the Hegelian notion was revived by Francis Fukuyama.

Nevio Cristante

Susanna Lindberg

This article clarifies Hegel's notion of the "end of history" in terms of "the end of the world", precisely showing by Hegel's philosophy does not lead to an apocalyptic vision of the end. The article is included in the book "The End of the World", edited by Marcia Sá Cavalcante and myself at Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.

Asian Political Science Review

Sabri Kicmari

Abdulvahap Alıcı

This paper aims at demonstrating the Hegelian concept of the philosophy of the History. The terms, Spirit, Universal History and Truth, are widely used in the Hegelian notion of the History. The unity of these terms sheds light on the route of the History which is viewed as to be pre-destined to reach a particular goal, the freedom. The freedom is only attainable if imperative stages are reached. The progress, in History, plays an indispensable role to accomplish the goal of the History. The paper ascertains the role of each notion in depth to display the overall structure of the Hegelian philosophy of the History. INTRODUCTION Hegel's philosophy of the History is criticized due to its lack of tangible data and speculative content, even though it does not address the concrete existences. 1 Firstly, Hegel has not written on the philosophy of the historiography. The major works of Hegel concerned with the questions related to metaphysical aspects of the History such as history of philosophy. Hegel represented the history of philosophy or thought in a historical way by examining the characteristics of each well-known culture such as Chinese, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and German respectively. Hegel's philosophy of the History is somewhat similar to the philosophy of historicality which investigates the main driving forces behind the major events in history. 2 Hegel, by following the traits of the History demonstrated that the aim of the History is the emancipation of the Spirit. 3 Nature, in its incipient form, is the obstacle ahead of human beings to reach designed subjectivity. Nature, put the humans in the confinement of irrational environ. The Reason and Nature are in conflict on the way to the freedom. Nature must be defeated to achieve greater spiritual freedom. History is the medium of this conflict. Hegel defines the history as a rationally motivated phenomenon destined to set free itself for itself. History is the development of Spirit in time and nations can be ordered according to their present levels of the Freedom. However, Hegelian development concept takes the thought as an indicator of progress, not the time. 4 Hegel's history of philosophy was the first treatment of the history of philosophy in a philosophical sense. 5 Hegel was ahead of his peers in terms of speculative penetration and sharpness of universal criticism.6 Furthermore, Hegel can be classified as the most influential philosopher after Plato and Aristotle in a context of prevalence in the philosophical world.

Published in Portuguese in Quirino, C.G., Vouga, C. and Brandão, G.M. (eds). Clássicos do Pensamento Político. São Paulo: EDUSP, 1998, pp. 211-270

Kurt Mettenheim

This paper suggests that Hegel's Philosophy of History provides a comparative analysis of the critical junctures that redefined state-society relations in Western Europe. The paper seeks to clarify Hegel's causal claims about periods of sudden and dramatic change in European history, and then to test the validity of these claims with evidence accumulated since he wrote. By doing so, we attempt to provide a broader historical perspective on democratization that may help develop sorely needed concepts, theories, and methods for analysis of the sudden and dramatic changes of our fin-de-siecle. The cold war is over. The sheer number and non-violence of recent transitions from authoritarian rule have been remarkable. The working assumption of this paper is that new perspectives on democracy and change are needed and that there is no better place to look for new ideas than classic work. This paper uses the concept of critical junctures to capture the unique causal status of the sudden and dramatic political changes that periodically recast state-society relations. Social structures, economic trends, cultural attributes, and institutional inertia do not determine the resolution of conflicts during critical junctures. Instead, the causal process remains open and contingent on a series of eminently political factors such as pacts, negotiations, and written and/or symbolic acts that legitimize subsequent political order and routine. In this respect, history turns on a series of political moments. Critical junctures suddenly recast state-society relations and determine the subsequent path of cultural, economic, and social developments. We claim that Hegel's Philosophy of History is an analysis of how Western European state-society relations were recast in a sequence of such critical junctures or political moments. From his perspective, the most important critical junctures were the organization of democracy in ancient Greece, the emergence of Christianity under the Roman Empire, the statecraft of Charlemagne (and religious reforms of Pope Gregory VII) that produced medieval orders, Protestant reformation that solidified the early modern European state system, and the French revolution that defined popular representative government in nineteenth century Europe. This list of critical junctures is neither definitive for Europe nor a substitute for analysis of the historical trajectories of other regions.

Amara E S T H E R Ani

Hegel sees history as the dialectical movement of Spirit. This dialectical movement involves the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis. At the thesis, Spirit is an abstract entity which embodies its antithesis. Spirit becomes real through its antithesis of human consciousness. Man, the opposition of Spirit, helps the Spirit to actualize its self purpose of freedom. When the Spirit finally attains its purpose it becomes the synthesis. This process continues but in higher form than the first. For inherent in every synthesis (which in turn becomes the thesis) is its antithesis, then to synthesis. This paper critically analyzes the underlying assumptions of Hegel’s conception of history with the philosophical tool of criticism. With the tool of criticism, we aim to show that history as a dialectical movement of Spirit is necessary but not sufficient to deal with the details of human history. It is necessary because it acknowledged the history of human society; but is not sufficient because it fails to conceive history in light of man creating his own history rather it conceived history as Spirit actualizing Self-knowledge. This paper draws much insight from Karl Marx in establishing that history is made by man and for man and not by any absolute spirit.

Bujar Aruqaj

Rolando M Gripaldo

The author tries to show in this paper the sense in which history can be considered ideological, using the framework of Georg Hegel. The ideological sense of history is neither factual in the descriptive sense nor panoramic as in tracing the chronological flow of events from the past to the present, but goes beyond these into a rational, metaphysical interpretation of history. For Hegel, the Absolute Spirit is the substance of the universe which manifests Itself through historical men who serve as agents for the accomplishment of Its ultimate aim.

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Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History

By Louis Menand

In February, 1989, Francis Fukuyama gave a talk on international relations at the University of Chicago. Fukuyama was thirty-six years old, and on his way from a job at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where he had worked as an expert on Soviet foreign policy, to a post as the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, in Washington.

It was a good moment for talking about international relations, and a good moment for Soviet experts especially, because, two months earlier, on December 7, 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev had announced, in a speech at the United Nations , that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene in the affairs of its Eastern European satellite states. Those nations could now become democratic. It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War .

At RAND , Fukuyama had produced focussed analyses of Soviet policy. In Chicago, he permitted himself to think big. His talk came to the attention of Owen Harries, an editor at a Washington journal called The National Interest, and Harries offered to publish it. The article was titled “ The End of History? ” It came out in the summer of 1989, and it turned the foreign-policy world on its ear.

Fukuyama’s argument was that, with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the last ideological alternative to liberalism had been eliminated. Fascism had been killed off in the Second World War, and now Communism was imploding. In states, like China, that called themselves Communist, political and economic reforms were heading in the direction of a liberal order.

So, if you imagined history as the process by which liberal institutions—representative government, free markets, and consumerist culture—become universal, it might be possible to say that history had reached its goal. Stuff would still happen, obviously, and smaller states could be expected to experience ethnic and religious tensions and become home to illiberal ideas. But “it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso,” Fukuyama explained, “for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind.”

Hegel, Fukuyama said, had written of a moment when a perfectly rational form of society and the state would become victorious. Now, with Communism vanquished and the major powers converging on a single political and economic model, Hegel’s prediction had finally been fulfilled. There would be a “Common Marketization” of international relations and the world would achieve homeostasis.

Even among little magazines, The National Interest was little. Launched in 1985 by Irving Kristol, the leading figure in neoconservatism, it had by 1989 a circulation of six thousand. Fukuyama himself was virtually unknown outside the world of professional Sovietologists, people not given to eschatological reflection. But the “end of history” claim was picked up in the mainstream press, Fukuyama was profiled by James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine , and his article was debated in Britain and in France and translated into many languages, from Japanese to Icelandic. Some of the responses to “The End of History?” were dismissive; almost all of them were skeptical. But somehow the phrase found its way into post-Cold War thought, and it stuck.

One of the reasons for the stickiness was that Fukuyama was lucky. He got out about six months ahead of the curve—his article appearing before the Velvet Revolution, in Czechoslovakia, and before the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, in November, 1989. Fukuyama was betting on present trends continuing, always a high-risk gamble in the international-relations business.

Any number of things might have happened for Gorbachev’s promise not to cash out: political resistance within the Soviet Union, the refusal of the Eastern European puppet regimes to cede power, the United States misplaying its hand. But events in Europe unfolded more or less according to Fukuyama’s prediction, and, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. The Cold War really was over.

Events in Asia were not so obliging. Fukuyama missed completely the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in China. There is no mention of the massacre in Tiananmen Square in “The End of History?,” presumably because the piece was in production when it happened, in June, 1989. This does not seem to have made a difference to the article’s reception, however. Almost none of the initial responses to the piece mentioned Tiananmen, either—even though many people already believed that China, not Russia, was the power that liberal democracies would have to reckon with in the future. “The End of History?” was a little Eurocentric.

There was also a seductive twist to Fukuyama’s argument. At the end of the article, he suggested that life after history might be sad. When all political efforts were committed to “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” (sounds good to me), we might feel nostalgia for the “courage, imagination, and idealism” that animated the old struggles for liberalism and democracy. This speculative flourish recalled the famous question that John Stuart Mill said he asked himself as a young man: If all the political and social reforms you believe in came to pass, would it make you a happier human being? That is always an interesting question.

Another reason that Fukuyama’s article got noticed may have had to do with his new job title. The office of policy planning at State had been created in 1947 by George Kennan, who was its first chief. In July of that year, Kennan published the so-called X article, “ The Sources of Soviet Conduct ,” in Foreign Affairs. It appeared anonymously—signed with an “X”—but once the press learned his identity the article was received as an official statement of American Cold War policy.

“The Sources of Soviet Conduct” defined the containment doctrine, according to which the aim of American policy was to keep the Soviet Union inside its box. The United States did not need to intervene in Soviet affairs, Kennan believed, because Communism was bound to collapse from its own inefficiency. Four decades later, when “The End of History?” appeared, that is exactly what seemed to be happening. That April, Kennan, then eighty-five, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to declare that the Cold War was over. He received a standing ovation. Fukuyama’s article could thus be seen as a bookend to Kennan’s.

It was not the bookend Kennan would have written. Containment is a realist doctrine. Realists think that a nation’s foreign policy should be guided by dispassionate consideration of its own interests, not by moral principles, or by a belief that nations share a “harmony of interests.” To Kennan, it was of no concern to the United States what the Soviets did inside their own box. The only thing that mattered was that Communism not be allowed to expand.

The National Interest, as the name proclaims, is a realist foreign-policy journal. But Fukuyama’s premise was that nations do share a harmony of interests, and that their convergence on liberal political and economic models was mutually beneficial. Realism imagines nations to be in perpetual competition with one another; Fukuyama was saying that this was no longer going to be the case. He offered Cold War realists a kind of valediction: their mission, though philosophically misconceived, had been accomplished. Now they were out of a job. “Frank thought that what was happening spelled the end of the Realpolitik world,” Harries later said. It must have tickled him to have published Fukuyama’s article.

Twenty-nine years later, it seems that the realists haven’t gone anywhere, and that history has a few more tricks up its sleeve. It turns out that liberal democracy and free trade may actually be rather fragile achievements. (Consumerism appears safe for now.) There is something out there that doesn’t like liberalism, and is making trouble for the survival of its institutions.

Fukuyama thinks he knows what that something is, and his answer is summed up in the title of his new book, “ Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The demand for recognition, Fukuyama says, is the “master concept” that explains all the contemporary dissatisfactions with the global liberal order: Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, ISIS , Brexit, resurgent European nationalisms, anti-immigration political movements, campus identity politics, and the election of Donald Trump. It also explains the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Chinese Communism, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, multiculturalism, and the thought of Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir. Oh, and the whole business begins with Plato’s Republic. Fukuyama covers all of this in less than two hundred pages. How does he do it?

Not well. Some of the problem comes from misunderstanding figures like Beauvoir and Freud; some comes from reducing the work of complex writers like Rousseau and Nietzsche to a single philosophical bullet point. A lot comes from the astonishingly blasé assumption—which was also the astonishingly blasé assumption of “The End of History?”—that Western thought is universal thought. But the whole project, trying to fit Vladimir Putin into the same analytic paradigm as Black Lives Matter and tracing them both back to Martin Luther, is far-fetched. It’s a case of Great Booksism: history as a chain of paper dolls cut out of books that only a tiny fraction of human beings have even heard of. Fukuyama is a smart man, but no one could have made this argument work.

Why is the desire for recognition—or identity politics, as Fukuyama also calls it—a threat to liberalism? Because it cannot be satisfied by economic or procedural reforms. Having the same amount of wealth as everyone else or the same opportunity to acquire it is not a substitute for respect. Fukuyama thinks that political movements that appear to be about legal and economic equality—gay marriage, for example, or #MeToo—are really about recognition and respect. Women who are sexually harassed in the workplace feel that their dignity has been violated, that they are being treated as less than fully human.

Fukuyama gives this desire for recognition a Greek name, taken from Plato’s Republic: thymos . He says that thymos is “a universal aspect of human nature that has always existed.” In the Republic, thymos is distinct from the two other parts of the soul that Socrates names: reason and appetite. Appetites we share with animals; reason is what makes us human. Thymos is in between.

The term has been defined in various ways. “Passion” is one translation; “spirit,” as in “spiritedness,” is another. Fukuyama defines thymos as “the seat of judgments of worth.” This seems a semantic overreach. In the Republic, Socrates associates thymos with children and dogs, beings whose reactions need to be controlled by reason. The term is generally taken to refer to our instinctive response when we feel we’re being disrespected. We bristle. We swell with amour propre. We honk the horn. We overreact.

Plato had Socrates divide the psyche into three parts in order to assign roles to the citizens of his imaginary republic. Appetite is the principal attribute of the plebes, passion of the warriors, and reason of the philosopher kings. The Republic is philosophy; it is not cognitive science. Yet Fukuyama adopts Plato’s heuristic and biologizes it. “Today we know that feelings of pride and self-esteem are related to levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain,” he says, and points to studies done with chimps (which Socrates would have counted as animals, but never mind).

But so what? Lots of feelings are related to changes in serotonin levels. In fact, every feeling we experience—lust, anger, depression, exasperation—has a corollary in brain chemistry. That’s how consciousness works. To say, as Fukuyama does, that “the desire for status—megalothymia—is rooted in human biology” is the academic equivalent of palmistry. You’re just making it up.

Fukuyama resorts to this tactic because he wants to do with the desire for recognition what he did with liberalism in “The End of History?” He wants to universalize it. This allows him to argue, for example, that the feelings that led to the rise of Vladimir Putin are exactly the same (albeit “on a larger scale”) as the feelings of a woman who complains that her potential is limited by gender discrimination. The woman can’t help it. She needs the serotonin, just like the Russians.

Hegel thought that the end of history would arrive when humans achieved perfect self-knowledge and self-mastery, when life was rational and transparent. Rationality and transparency are the values of classical liberalism. Rationality and transparency are supposed to be what make free markets and democratic elections work. People understand how the system functions, and that allows them to make rational choices.

The trouble with thymos is that it is not rational. People not only sacrifice worldly goods for recognition; they die for recognition. The choice to die is not rational. “Human psychology is much more complex than the rather simpleminded economic model suggests,” Fukuyama concludes.

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But how was that model of the rational economic actor ever plausible? It’s not just that human beings are neurotic; it’s that, on the list of things human beings are neurotic about, money is close to the top. People hoard money; they squander it; they marry for it; they kill for it. Don’t economists ever read novels? Practically every realist novel, from Austen and Balzac to James and Wharton, is about people behaving badly around money. Free markets didn’t change that. They arguably made people even crazier.

And as with money so with most of life. The notion that we have some mental faculty called “reason” that functions independently of our needs, desires, anxieties, and superstitions is, well, Platonic. Right now, you are trying to decide whether to finish this piece or turn to the cartoon-caption contest. Which mental faculty are you using to make this decision? Which is responsible for your opinion of Donald Trump? How can you tell?

“Identity” can be read as a corrective to the position that Fukuyama staked out in “The End of History?” Universal liberalism isn’t impeded by ideology, like fascism or communism, but by passion. Liberalism remains the ideal political and economic system, but it needs to find ways to accommodate and neutralize this pesky desire for recognition. What is odd about Fukuyama’s dilemma is that, in the philosophical source for his original theory about the end of history, recognition was not a problem. Recognition was, in fact, the means to get there.

That source was not Hegel. As Fukuyama stated explicitly in “The End of History?,” he was adopting an interpretation of Hegel made in the nineteen-thirties by a semi-obscure intellectual adventurer named Alexandre Kojève. How, fifty years later, Kojève’s ideas got into the pages of a Washington policy journal is an unusual story of intellectual musical chairs.

Kojève was born in 1902 into a well-off Moscow family, and he was raised in a cultivated atmosphere. The painter Wassily Kandinsky was an uncle. Kojève was a prodigious intellect; by the time he was eighteen, he was fluent in Russian, German, French, and English, and read Latin. Later, he learned Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan in order to study Buddhism. In 1918, he went to prison for some sort of black-market transaction. After he got out, he and a friend managed to cross the closed Soviet border into Poland, where they were briefly jailed on suspicion of espionage. With the pointed encouragement of Polish authorities, Kojève left for Germany. He studied philosophy with Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg and lived as a bon vivant in Weimar Berlin. In 1926, he moved to Paris, where he continued to live the high life while writing a dissertation that dealt with quantum physics.

Kojève had invested his inheritance in the French company that made La Vache Qui Rit cheese, but he lost everything in the stock-market crash. In 1933, in need of income, he accepted a friend’s offer to take over a seminar on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He ended up running the course for six years.

People who were around Kojève seem to have regarded him as a kind of magician. In the Hegel seminar, he taught just one text, “ The Phenomenology of Spirit ,” first published in 1807. He would read a passage aloud in German (the book had not been translated into French) and then, extemporaneously and in perfect French (with an enchanting Slavic accent), provide his own commentary. People found him eloquent, brilliant, mesmerizing. Enrollment was small, around twenty, but a number of future intellectual luminaries, like Hannah Arendt and Jacques Lacan, either took the class or sat in on it.

For Kojève, the key concept in Hegel’s “Phenomenology” was recognition. Human beings want the recognition of other human beings in order to become self-conscious—to know themselves as autonomous individuals. As Kojève put it, humans desire, and what they desire is either something that other humans desire or the desire of other humans. “Human history,” he said, “is the history of desired desires.” What makes this complicated is that in the struggle for recognition there are winners and losers. The terms Hegel used for these can be translated as lords and servants, but also as masters and slaves, which are the terms Kojève used. The master wins the recognition of the slave, but his satisfaction is empty, since he does not recognize the slave as human in turn. The slave, lacking recognition from the master, must seek it in some other way.

Kojève thought that the other way was through labor. The slave achieves his sense of self by work that transforms the natural world into a human world. But the slave is driven to labor in the first place because of the master’s refusal to recognize him. This “master-slave dialectic” is the motor of human history, and human history comes to an end when there are no more masters or slaves, and all are recognized equally.

This is the idea that Marx had adopted to describe history as the history of class struggle. That struggle also has winners and losers, and its penultimate phase was the struggle between property owners (the bourgeoisie) and workers (the proletariat). The struggle would come to an end with the overthrow of capitalism and the arrival of a classless society—communism. Kojève called himself, mischievously or not, a Communist, and people listening to him in the nineteen-thirties would have understood this to be the subtext of his commentary. Equality of recognition was history’s goal, whether that meant Communist equality or liberal equality. People would stop killing one another in the name of dignity and self-respect, and life would probably be boring.

After the war, Kojève’s lectures were published as “ Introduction to the Reading of Hegel ,” a book that went through many printings in France. By then, he had stopped teaching and had become an official in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, where he played an influential behind-the-scenes role in establishing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ( GATT ) and the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union—in other words, Common Marketization. He liked to say that he was presiding over the end of history.

In 1953, Allan Bloom, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, met Kojève in Paris, at his office in the ministry. (The connection was presumably made through the émigré political theorist Leo Strauss, who was teaching at Chicago and who carried on a long correspondence with Kojève.) “I was seduced,” Bloom later said. He began studying with Kojève, and their meetings continued until Kojève’s death, in 1968. In 1969, Bloom arranged for the publication of the first English translation of the Hegel lectures and contributed an introduction. He was then a professor at Cornell.

Fukuyama entered Cornell as a freshman in 1970. He lived in Telluride House, a selective academic society for students and faculty, where Bloom was a resident. Fukuyama enrolled in Bloom’s freshman course on Greek philosophy, and, according to Atlas, he and Bloom “shared meals and talked philosophy until all hours.”

As it happened, that was Bloom’s last year at Cornell. He resigned in disgust at the way the administration had handled the occupation of a university building by armed students from the Afro-American Society. Fukuyama graduated in 1974 with a degree in classics. Following an excursus into the world of poststructuralist theory at Yale and in Paris, he switched his field to political science and received his Ph.D. from Harvard’s government department. He graduated in 1979, and went to RAND .

By then, Bloom was back at the University of Chicago, as a professor in the Committee on Social Thought. In 1982, he published an article on the condition of higher education in William F. Buckley’s National Review . He did not think the condition was good. Encouraged by his friend Saul Bellow, he decided to turn the article into a book. “ The Closing of the American Mind ,” which Simon & Schuster brought out in February, 1987, launched a campaign of criticism of American higher education that has taken little time off since.

“The Closing of the American Mind” is a Great Booksist attempt to account for the rise of cultural relativism, which Bloom thought was the bane of American higher education. Almost no one at Simon & Schuster had great hopes for sales. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that when the editor who signed the book, Erwin Glikes, left the firm to run the Free Press he was invited to take Bloom’s book, not yet published, with him, and he declined.

If so, he missed out on one of the publishing phenomena of the decade. After a slow start, “The Closing of the American Mind” went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list and stayed there for two and a half months. By March, 1988, it had sold a million hardcover copies in the United States alone. It made Bloom a rich man.

It was Bloom, along with another professor at Chicago, Nathan Tarcov, who invited Fukuyama to give his February, 1989, talk on international relations. If Fukuyama had not already been thinking about it, it is easy to imagine him deciding that, under the circumstances, it might be interesting to say something Kojèvean.

When “The End of History?” ran in The National Interest that summer, Bloom had become a star in the neoconservative firmament, and his was the first of six responses that the magazine printed to accompany the article. Bloom called it “bold and brilliant.” Possibly seeing the way the wind was blowing, Glikes offered Fukuyama six hundred thousand dollars to turn his article into a book. “ The End of History and the Last Man ” was published by the Free Press in 1992.

The book was a best-seller, but not a huge one, maybe because the excitement about the end of the Cold War had cooled. Fukuyama had taken his time writing it. “The End of History and the Last Man” is not a journal article on steroids. It is a thoughtful examination of the questions raised by the piece in The National Interest , and one of those questions is the problem of thymos , which occupies much of the book. A lot of “Identity” is a recap of what Fukuyama had already said there.

The importance of recognition has been emphasized by writers other than Kojève. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, for example, whose book “ The Sources of the Self ,” published in 1989, the same year as “The End of History?,” argued that the modern idea of the self involved a cultural shift from the concept of honor, which is something for the few, to dignity, which is aspired to by all. In 1992, in the essay “The Politics of Recognition,” Taylor analyzed the advent of multiculturalism in terms similar to the ones Fukuyama uses in “Identity.” (Taylor, too, is a Hegel expert.)

Fukuyama acknowledges that identity politics has done some good, and he says that people on the right exaggerate the prevalence of political correctness and the effects of affirmative action. He also thinks that people on the left have become obsessed with cultural and identitarian politics, and have abandoned social policy. But he has surprisingly few policy suggestions himself.

He has no interest in the solution that liberals typically adopt to accommodate diversity: pluralism and multiculturalism. Taylor, for example, has championed the right of the Québécois to pass laws preserving a French-language culture in their province. Fukuyama concedes that people need a sense of national identity, whether ethnic or creedal, but otherwise he remains an assimilationist and a universalist. He wants to iron out differences, not protect them. He suggests measures like a mandatory national-service requirement and a more meaningful path to citizenship for immigrants.

It’s unfortunate that Fukuyama has hung his authorial hat on meta-historical claims. In other books—notably “ The Great Disruption ” (1999) and a two-volume world history, “ The Origins of Political Order ” (2011) and “ Political Order and Political Decay ” (2014)—he distinguishes civilizational differences and uses empirical data to explain social trends. But thymos is too clumsy an instrument to be much help in understanding contemporary politics.

Wouldn’t it be important to distinguish people who ultimately don’t want differences to matter, like the people involved in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, from people who ultimately do want them to matter, like ISIS militants, Brexit voters, or separatist nationalists? And what about people who are neither Mexican nor immigrants and who feel indignation at the treatment of Mexican immigrants? Black Americans risked their lives for civil rights, but so did white Americans. How would Socrates classify that behavior? Borrowed thymos ?

It might also be good to replace the linear “if present trends continue” conception of history as a steady progression toward some stable state with the dialectical conception of history that Hegel and Kojève in fact used. Present trends don’t continue. They produce backlashes and reshufflings of the social deck. The identities that people embrace today are the identities their children will want to escape from tomorrow. History is somersaults all the way to the end. That’s why it’s so hard to write, and so hard to predict. Unless you’re lucky. ♦

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Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?

By Adam Gopnik

By Ian Buruma

By Daniel Immerwahr

More Proof That This Really Is the End of History

Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states.

Overlayed side profiles of Xi and Putin in red and blue

Over the past decade, global politics has been heavily shaped by apparently strong states whose leaders are not constrained by law or constitutional checks and balances. Russia and China both have argued that liberal democracy is in long-term decline, and that their brand of muscular authoritarian government is able to act decisively and get things done while their democratic rivals debate, dither, and fail to deliver on their promises. These two countries were the vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave that turned back democratic gains across the globe, from Myanmar to Tunisia to Hungary to El Salvador. Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.

The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences. Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.

Supporters of liberal democracy must not give in to a fatalism that tacitly accepts the Russian-Chinese line that such democracies are in inevitable decline. The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or end point of historical progress. The millions of people voting with their feet—leaving poor, corrupt, or violent countries for life not in Russia, China, or Iran but in the liberal, democratic West—amply demonstrate this.

The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.

The weaknesses of strong states have been on glaring display in Russia. President Vladimir Putin is the sole decision maker; even the former Soviet Union had a politburo where the party secretary had to vet policy ideas. We saw images of Putin sitting at the end of a long table with his defense and foreign ministers because of his fear of COVID; he was so isolated that he had no idea how strong Ukrainian national identity had become in recent years or how fierce a resistance his invasion would provoke. He similarly got no word of how deeply corruption and incompetence had taken root within his own military, how abysmally the modern weapons he had developed were working, or how poorly trained his own officer corps was.

The shallowness of his regime’s support was made evident by the rush to the borders of young Russian men when he announced his “partial” mobilization on September 21. Some 700,000 Russians have left for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, and any other country that would take them, a far greater number than has actually been mobilized. Those who have been caught up by the conscription are being thrown directly into battle without adequate training or equipment, and are already showing up on the front as POWs or casualties. Putin’s legitimacy was based on a social contract that promised citizens stability and a modicum of prosperity in return for political passivity, but the regime has broken that deal and is feeling the consequences.

Putin’s bad decision making and shallow support have produced one of the biggest strategic blunders in living memory. Far from demonstrating its greatness and recovering its empire, Russia has become a global object of ridicule, and will endure further humiliations at the hands of Ukraine in the coming weeks. The entire Russian military position in the south of Ukraine is likely to collapse, and the Ukrainians have a real chance of liberating the Crimean Peninsula for the first time since 2014. These reversals have triggered a huge amount of finger-pointing in Moscow; the Kremlin is cracking down even harder on dissent. Whether Putin himself will be able to survive a Russian military defeat is an open question.

Something similar, if a bit less dramatic, has been going on in China. One of the hallmarks of Chinese authoritarianism in the period between Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978 and Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2013 was the degree to which it was institutionalized. Institutions mean that rulers have to follow rules and cannot do whatever they please. The Chinese Communist Party imposed many rules on itself: mandatory retirement ages for party cadres, strict meritocratic standards for recruitment and promotion, and above all a 10-year term limit for the party’s most-senior leadership. Deng Xiaoping established a system of collective leadership precisely to avoid the dominance of a single obsessive leader like Mao Zedong.

Much of this has been dismantled under Xi Jinping, who will receive the blessing of his party to remain on as paramount leader for a third five-year term at the 20th Party Congress. In place of collective leadership, China has moved to a personalistic system in which no other senior official can come close to challenging Xi.

This concentration of authority in one man has in turn led to poor decision making. The party has intervened in the economy, hobbling the tech sector by going after stars such as Alibaba and Tencent; forced Chinese farmers to plant money-losing staples in pursuit of agricultural self-sufficiency; and insisted on a zero-COVID strategy that keeps important parts of China under continuing lockdowns that have shaved points off the country’s economic growth. China cannot easily reverse zero-COVID, because it has failed to buy effective vaccines and finds a large part of its elderly population vulnerable to the disease. What looked two years ago like a triumphant success in controlling COVID has turned into a prolonged debacle.

All of this comes on top of the failure of China’s underlying growth model, which relied on heavy state investment in real estate to keep the economy humming. Basic economics suggests that this would lead to massive misallocation of resources, as has in fact happened. Go online and search for Chinese buildings being blown up , and you will see many videos of massive housing complexes being dynamited because there is no one to buy apartments in them.

These authoritarian failures are not limited to China. Iran has been rocked by weeks of protests following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police. Iran is in terrible shape: It faces a banking crisis, is running out of water, has seen big declines in agriculture, and is grappling with crippling international sanctions and isolation. Despite its pariah status, it has a well-educated population, in which women constitute a majority of university graduates. And yet the regime is led by a small group of old men with social attitudes several generations out of date. It is no wonder that the regime is now facing its greatest test of legitimacy. The only country that qualifies as even more poorly managed is one with another dictatorship, Venezuela, which has produced the world’s largest outflux of refugees over the past decade.

Celebrations of the rise of strong states and the decline of liberal democracy are thus very premature. Liberal democracy, precisely because it distributes power and relies on consent of the governed, is in much better shape globally than many people think. Despite recent gains by populist parties in Sweden and Italy, most countries in Europe still enjoy a strong degree of social consensus.

The big question mark remains, unfortunately, the United States. Some 30 to 35 percent of its voters continue to believe the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and the Republican Party has been taken over by Donald Trump’s MAGA followers, who are doing their best to put election deniers in positions of power around the country. This group does not represent a majority of the country but is likely to regain control of at least the House of Representatives this November, and possibly the presidency in 2024. The party’s putative leader, Trump, has fallen deeper and deeper into a conspiracy-fueled madness in which he believes that he could be immediately reinstated as president and that the country should criminally indict his presidential predecessors, including one who is already dead.

There is an intimate connection between the success of strong states abroad and populist politics at home. Politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and of course Trump in the U.S. have all expressed sympathy for Putin. They see in him a model for the kind of strongman rule they would like to exercise in their own country. He, in turn, is hoping that their rise will weaken Western support for Ukraine and save his flailing “special military operation.”

Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted. Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights, whether that is the European Union or the administration in Washington. But reality has intervened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine constitutes a real dictatorship trying to crush a genuinely free society with rockets and tanks, and may serve to remind the current generation of what is at stake. By resisting Russian imperialism, the Ukrainians are demonstrating the grievous weaknesses that exist at the core of an apparently strong state. They understand the true value of freedom, and are fighting a larger battle on our behalf, a battle that all of us need to join.

Donald Trump didn’t spark our current political chaos. The ’90s did.

In ‘When the Clock Broke,’ John Ganz revisits the era of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot to find the roots of our populist moment

In 1992, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously declared “the end of history.” The Soviet Union had imploded, and liberal democracy appeared triumphant and invulnerable. The placid new world that emerged might prove underwhelming — Fukuyama prophesied that it would be bereft of the “ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” — but at least it would be restful.

Alas, the ’90s were not quite as uneventful as Fukuyama predicted they would be. In a new history of the end of history, “ When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s ,” the journalist John Ganz shows how a country robbed of its external enemies turned inward and devoured its own. Pundits are fond of characterizing Donald Trump’s political career as “unprecedented,” but in fact he is amply precedented, as Ganz demonstrates in this wry and engaging account of the former president’s crooked and crankish forebears.

Summer reading

“History, as the cliché goes, is written by the winners,” Ganz begins, “but this is a history of the losers.” The losers include such simultaneously risible and menacing figures as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, thinly veiled white supremacist and all-around reactionary Pat Buchanan, and kooky populist maverick Ross Perot, all of whom ran for president in 1992. The resultant election cycle was a circus, but it was also a warning that the establishment ignored at its peril, with disastrous — if delayed — results.

The era’s would-be demagogues were able to gain traction because history was far from over for most of the country. While elites congratulated themselves on winning the Cold War and went on conducting bureaucratic business as usual, the working classes suffered. Eight years of Reaganomics had yielded catastrophic inequalities. “The average income for 80 percent of American families declined between 1980 and 1989, while the top fifth of Americans saw an increase of nearly 50 percent,” Ganz writes. Meanwhile, jobs that had been mainstays for much of the population were rapidly vanishing: Manufacturing work was disappearing in the wake of deindustrialization, and white-collar administrative positions were hardly more viable. Throughout middle America, family farmers struggled to compete with big agriculture.

The rejects of what President George H.W. Bush rather menacingly termed the New World Order felt betrayed by their leaders. “Across the country” in 1992, Ganz writes, “polls showed discontent with all options on the table in the primaries.” There was Bush, a disappointingly milquetoast incumbent, and Bill Clinton, a liberal Rhodes scholar and the darling of Washington society. Unsurprisingly, Clinton’s victory did not quell the rising tides of resentment and disaffection. Alienated from the centers of power and hungry for scapegoats, working-class White Americans concocted conspiracy theories and railed against “multiculturalism” and “political correctness.” The inflammatory jingoism that followed — first in the lead-up to Clinton’s presidency, then during the ensuing decades — was no surprise to anyone who was paying attention. Unfortunately, few liberals were.

Devotees of Ganz’s pugilistic writing on Substack may be surprised by the restraint he displays in his first book. “When the Clock Broke” is a work of narrative history that is comparatively light on confrontation and polemic. Instead of insulting his adversaries (which Ganz does well, and often deservedly), he turns his hand to character studies that double as deft exercises in political critique. In one characteristically astute passage, he paints a telling portrait of the first President Bush as “bred to govern, not to lead. … He had been happiest as leader of the nation’s Super Secret Club for Privileged Boys, the Central Intelligence Agency, and he took with him the clichés and behaviors of a bureaucrat.”

Ganz is also strangely silent on the question of Trump. Even when the parallels between past and present are most glaring, Ganz leaves his readers to make them out. Still, even though its claims about present-day America are largely implicit, “When the Clock Broke” is leagues more insightful on the subject of Trump’s ascent than most writing that purports to address the issue directly. The 45th president’s aggrieved nativism is less confounding, if no less alarming, when it is treated as part and parcel of a long-standing American tradition.

Of course, some of the fixations that gripped the country in the early ’90s — for instance, fear of Japanese hegemony — seem almost quaint in retrospect. But other talking points remain uncomfortably familiar. Both Duke and Perot cast themselves as victims of the mainstream media’s bias against conservatives and free thinkers. “It’s like the establishment is closing ranks to prevent an independent from coming through,” Duke told a newspaper when asked why he was so unpopular with the press. One pro-Duke flier characterized him as “a modern David versus the Goliaths of money, power, media, and political corruption.”

Buchanan, by far the most influential and ominous of Ganz’s subjects, anticipated the worst of the MAGA cult when he spoke of a “new nationalism” and proposed to build a wall at the border. It was he who first popularized the term “culture war” (“cultural war” were his exact words) and who most loudly shouted the isolationists’ old rallying cry: “America first!”

Perhaps most recognizable, enduring and damning was a new political style, a brazen commitment to courting scandal and spectacle. If the elder Bush was a staid technocrat, more comfortable working behind the scenes, Ganz’s flashy new populists thrived in the spotlight: They were performers first and politicians second.

“Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it,” Saul Bellow wrote near the start of his 2000 novel, “Ravelstein.” This is a principle that Duke, Buchanan and Perot grasped with a vengeance. Like today’s MAGA Republicans, they were tolerated, even indulged, by liberal journalists precisely because they were so irresistibly outrageous. Those who think Trump is uniquely absurd have forgotten Duke’s sex jokes and nervous outbursts of giggling, or the die-hard Perot supporters who “sculpted an eight-foot plaster of paris bust” of their hero.

These unlikely candidates may have been ridiculous and buffoonish, but they were sinister nonetheless. Bush and other respectable fixtures of the GOP had long flirted with “racial resentment and animus,” Ganz writes, but at last they were beginning to realize that they “could not control it.” Mainstream Republicans had miscalculated, unleashing dark forces they were no longer able to contain. They feebly extolled decency and civility as the fringes, and then the center, of their party crept toward extremism.

Opponents of the far right have an unfortunate tendency to caricature it as a coalition of hapless fools, incapable of mustering ideas and therefore beneath serious consideration. Ganz knows better than to take this condescending and intellectually dishonest approach. Instead, he tackles reactionary belligerence with appropriate rigor (and appropriate moral scorn): He understands that Trumpian zealots and their political ancestors are part of a movement like any other. Some of them are feckless opportunists, but some are thinkers with a coherent, if repugnant, ideology — an ideology they have been openly preaching for decades.

In 1992, the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard did not bother to conceal his agenda when he ranted to a crowd at a conservative club: “With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. … We shall repeal the 20th century.” The writings of the white-supremacist columnist Samuel Francis, longtime contributor to the far-right publications Chronicles and the Washington Times, are another case in point, and Ganz is wise to read them carefully. The right, Francis suggested as early as 1992, was in need of “a political formula and a public myth that synthesize the attention to material-economic interests offered by the left with the defense of concrete cultural and national identity offered by the right.” Trump’s success with just such a formula was a long time coming. To predict the end of the end of history, all we had to do was listen to its prophets.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”

When the Clock Broke

Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

By John Ganz

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 420 pp. $30

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The End of History and the Last Man
418. ISBN. 978--02-910975-5. Followed by. Trust. The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy —which occurred after the Cold War (1945-1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991 ...
The End of History: Francis Fukuyama's controversial idea explained
A debt to Hegel and others. The phrase "the end of history" was not, in fact, coined by Fukuyama. It bears a history, and philosophical currency tracing back to the German philosopher Georg ...
The End of History?
The mastery and trans end of history as such: that is, the end point formation of man's natural environment. of mankind's ideological evolution and the through the application of science and tech universalization of Western liberal democracy nology was originally not a Marxist concept, as the final form of human government.
PDF The End of History?*
The End of History?* Francis Fukuyama** IN WATCHING the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history. The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact that "peace" seems to be breaking out in many regions of ...
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Praise for Francis Fukuyama's The End Of History and the Last Man "Bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant. Until now the triumph of the West was merely a fact. Fukuyama has given it a deep and highly original meaning'.' — Charles Krauthammer "With one now-famous essay, Frank Fukuyama did what had hitherto seemed almost
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
Fukuyama's central thesis in The End of History and the Last Man is that human history is moving towards a state of idealised harmony through the mechanisms of liberal democracy. For Fukuyama, the realization of an ideal political and economic system which has the essential elements of liberal democracy is the purpose behind the march of history.
Francis Fukuyama and the End of History on JSTOR
xml. Fukuyama's concept of the End of History has been one of the most widely debated theories of international politics since the end of the Cold War. This book discusses Fukuyama's claim that liberal democracy alone is able to satisfy the human aspiration for freedom and dignity, and explores the way in which his thinking is part of a ...
PDF History's End? Francis Fukuyama's Conception of the West
Fukuyama's era and inﬂuences Fukuyama's thesis blends the inﬂuences of European philosophy with an analysis of the tumultuous post-Cold War world to produce a distinctive contribution to the debate on the role of the West in world politics. While Fukuyama is an American of Japanese descent, his work is infused with the
Project MUSE
The End of History Revisited. Until a few years ago, many argued that liberal democracy was the most just and attractive political regime. The most prominent manifestation of this optimism was Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the "end of history." Ironically, many of the same social scientists who dismissed Fukuyama's work out of hand at the time ...
PDF Fukuyama'S End of History : Triumph of The Liberal State
Francis Fukuyama, a Professor of Harvard University wrote an article "The End of History?" in 1 989, in ... Kojevian reading of Hegel is the philosophical basis on which Fukuyama's thesis of the end of history is based. Kojeve discovered the dialectic of master-slave relationships as the key to understand Hegelian philosophy. For Hegel, man is ...
The End of History: Francis Fukuyama's controversial idea explained
The phrase "the end of history" was not, in fact, coined by Fukuyama. It bears a history, and philosophical currency tracing back to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) (who coined the term) and his modern interpreters Karl Marx (1818-1883) and the Russian-born French philosopher and statesman Alexandre Kojève ...
Revisiting Fukuyama's 'End of History Thesis"
Francis Fukuyama is one of them. He is a famous political commentator for his ' End of History ' thesis that proclaimed the victory of the United States Led-liberal world order after the disintegration of Soviet Union. Perhaps, this was an open proclamation about the end of cold war and certainly the end of decade long ideological ...
Scenes of Distress: Reflections on Francis Fukuyama's "End of History
A quarter century after Fukuyama's essay ("The End of History," 1989) and book (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992), the world appears to be taking on a decidedly "Huntingtonian" cast. Samuel Huntington's rival thesis, the "Clash of Civilizations," predicted that cultural primacy among the world's great civilizational ...
The End of History Revisited
Until a few years ago, many argued that liberal democracy was the most just and attractive political regime. The most prominent manifestation of this optimism was Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the "end of history.". Ironically, many of the same social scientists who dismissed Fukuyama's work out of hand at the time were themselves ...
The End of History and the Last Man Summary
Francis Fukuyama raised a storm of controversy. THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN is the author's response. His thesis is simple. The failure of communism and the disappearance of the Soviet ...
The End of History and the Last Man
Overview. The End of History and the Last Man by political scientist Francis Fukuyama is a widely read and controversial book on political philosophy published in 1992. In it, Fukuyama argues that the end of the Cold War in 1991 established Western liberal democracy as the final and most successful form of government, thus marking the ...
I. Reading fukuyama: Politics at the end of history
I.January 1993, 64-78 Political geography debates No. 4: Reading Fukuyama I. Reading Fukuyama: politics at the end of history RICHARD PEET Graduate School of Geography, dark University, 950 Main St, Worcester, MA 01610, USA ABSTRACT. This article provides a critical reading of Francis Fukuyama's "The end of history' thesis, focusing on its ...
Francis Fukuyama: 'The End of History' Revisited
Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. In the book he proposed that humanity's economic progress over the past 10,000 years was driven by the accumulation of science and technology over time. That connection is direct and reliable.
The Ends of History: Introduction
The Ends of History: Introduction Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Andrew Sartori I t has been more than twenty years since Francis Fukuyama announced, in The End of History and the Last Man, that the fall of soviet communism meant that "History" had effectively come to a close. Fukuyama did not mean that history would cease to pass—
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The End of History and the Last Man. Paperback - March 1, 2006. by Francis Fukuyama (Author) 4.5 796 ratings. See all formats and editions. Ever since its first publication in 1992, the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate.
A Brief Analysis of Fukuyama's Thesis ''The End Of History
For Hegel this was the liberal state while for Marx it was a communist so- 1 2 Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History And The Last Man. The Free Press, NewYork, 1992,ix(Introduction) 13 "Booknotes Transcript- Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man" Retrieved January 12;20Q0~6n1rreW^13"'W^ SELCEN ÖNER 99 ciety.
Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History
August 27, 2018. The desire for recognition, Fukuyama argues, is an essential threat to liberalism. Illustration by Aude Van Ryn. In February, 1989, Francis Fukuyama gave a talk on international ...
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Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states. By Francis Fukuyama. The Atlantic. October 17, 2022. Over the past ...
'When the Clock Broke,' by John Ganz, revisits '90s politics
In 1992, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously declared "the end of history." The Soviet Union had imploded, and liberal democracy appeared triumphant and invulnerable.

The End of History: Francis Fukuyama’s controversial idea explained

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The Triumphalist Philosophy of History

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