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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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Table of Contents
About The Book
Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
Product Details

• Publisher: Free Press (March 1, 2006)
• Length: 464 pages
• ISBN13: 9780743284554
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  Raves and Reviews
  "Awesome...a landmark...profoundly realistic and important...supremely timely and cogent...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world."
  -- George Gilder, The Washington Post Book World
  "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
  "Clearly written...Immensely ambitious...A tightly argued work of political philosophy...Fukuyama deserves to have his argument taken seriously."
  -- William H. McNeill, The New York Times Book Review
  "Provocative and elegant...Complex and interesting...Fukuyama is to be applauded for posing important questions in serious and stimulating ways."
  -- Ronald Steel, USA Today
  "Extraordinary...Controversial...A superb book. Whether or not one accepts his thesis, he has injected serious political philosophy into the discussion of political affairs and thereby significantly enriched it."
  -- Mackubin Thomas Owens, The Washington Times
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Conversations with Francis Fukuyama
Edited by Mathilde Fasting
With Francis Fukuyama
Forthcoming
Intimate access to the mind of Francis Fukuyama and his reflections on world politics, his life and career, and the evolution of his thought
In his 1992 best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the dominance of liberal democracy marked the end of humanity’s political and ideological development. Thirty years later, with populism on the rise and the number of liberal democracies decreasing worldwide, Fukuyama revisits his classic thesis.
A series of in-depth interviews between Fukuyama and editor Mathilde Fasting, After the End of History offers a wide-ranging analysis of liberal democracy today. Drawing on Fukuyama’s work on identity, biotechnology, and political order, the book provides essential insight into the rise of authoritarianism and the greatest threats faced by democracy in our present world.
Diving into topics like the surprise election of Donald Trump, the destruction of social and political norms, and the rise of China, Fukuyama deftly explains the plight of liberal democracy and explores how we might prevent its further decline. He also covers personal topics, reflects on his life and career, the evolution of his thinking, and some of his most important books.
Insightful and important, After the End of History grants unprecedented access to one of the greatest political minds of our time.
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. What Has Happened after the End of History?
2. How Have World Politics Changed?
3. How Do Illiberal Attacks Threaten Democracy?
4. Will the US Cease to Be the Beacon of the Liberal Order?
5. Will Orwell’s 1984 Dystopia Come True?
6. Is Fukuyama a Classical European Liberal?
7. What Led Fukuyama to International Politics?
8. What Is the End of History?
9. Why Do We Go to Denmark?
10. How Do We Build Liberal Democracies?
11. How Can We Understand How Societies Work?
12. Is Identity Politics a Question of Thymos?
13. How Do Society and Capitalism Interact?
14. How Does Human Nature Shape Society?
15. Is China a Serious Contender to Liberal Democracy?
16. Are We Experiencing a Clash of Civilizations?
17. How Can We Make Liberal Democracies Thrive?
18. The Future of History
    Epilogue
    Literature
    "Students of geopolitics and world history will find Fukuyama’s thoughts both provocative and inspiring."—Kirkus Reviews
    "Francis Fukuyama is without doubt one of the most influential political scientists of the post Cold War period. There is hardly anyone who has not heard of his The End of History and the Last Man. In this splendid book of conversations between Mathilde Fasting and Francis Fukuyama, we discover much more about Fukuyama: his background and studies, polymathic interests, relationship to neocons, and his relationship to contemporary economics. It is a book about the person and the scholar, and it will appeal both to biographers and to students of social sciences."—Branko Milanovic, author of Capitalism, Alone
    "Fukuyama here shows again that the telos of history is human dignity, not the State’s boot on your face, forever."—Deirdre Nansen McCloskey , author of Why Liberalism Works
    "A fascinating set of interviews offering unprecedented insight into the mind of one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time. Topics range from Fukuyama’s early childhood education, to the challenges facing liberal democracies today, including the US-China trade war, the rise of authoritarianism around the world, the power of AI and Facebook, and intensifying identity politics. A great read."—Helena Rosenblatt, professor of history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York
    "What a splendid piece of work and service rendered by Mathilde Fasting. After the End of History sets records straight, clarifies, challenges, and provokes. It is sufficient in detail, broad in scope, and focuses the mind on the problem at hand. Liberalism and liberal democracy are in trouble. To manage the problem we need a clear and precise understanding of how we got here. This book helps."—Jeffrey Gedmin, CEO and Editor in Chief, American Purpose, and former President, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
    "After the End of History offers unmatched insights into Francis Fukuyama’s biography and scholarship and combines them with wide-ranging reflections on liberal democracies and global politics."—Review of Democracy
    "Indeed, for anyone who lacks the time to absorbhis numerous books and essays, this volume offers a useful introduction to thecore ideas of one of America’s most consequential (and often misunderstood) contemporary thinkers."—National Review
    "...Fukuyama provides an interesting counterpoint to the current pessimism about the future of democracy."—MoneyWeek
    "The book is a horn of plenty. Every page presents a novel idea, a new fact, or an unexpected perspective."—Journal of Peace Research
    "This extended conversation between Fasting and the famed political scientist Francis Fukuyama takes readers on an engaging intellectual journey in which Fukuyama reflects on the global crises and transformations that have unfolded in the three decades since his famous essay on “the end of history.”"—Foreign Affairs
    Mathilde Fasting is a project manager and fellow at Civita, one of Norway’s most influential think tanks, where she regularly hosts its weekly podcast. Her published works include Freedom of Choice, The Citizen and the Community, and Torkel Aschehoug and Norwegian Historical Economic Thought: Reconsidering a Forgotten Norwegian Pioneer Economist. Fasting earned her MA in economics from the Norwegian School of Economics, her BA and MA in the history of ideas from the University of Oslo, and her PhD in the economic history of ideas from the University of Erfurt.
    Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), the director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues related to democratization and international political economy, including his seminal work The End of History and the Last Man. His most recent book is Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.
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    ISBN: 978-1-64712-086-3
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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.
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, i

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End of history
The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. A variety of authors have argued that a particular system is the "end of history" including Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexandre Kojève,[1] and Francis Fukuyama in the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.[2]
The concept of an end of history differs from the ideas of an end of the world as expressed in various religions. These ideas may forecast a complete destruction of the Earth or of life on Earth, as well as the end of the human race. In contrast, the concept of an end of history posits a scenario in which human existence persists indefinitely into the future, devoid of any significant alterations to the prevailing social, political, or economic structures.
History[edit]
The phrase the end of history was first used by French philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1861 "to refer to the end of the historical dynamic with the perfection of civil society".[3] Arnold Gehlen adopted it in 1952 and it has been taken up more recently by Heidegger and Vattimo.[3]
The formal development of an idea of an "end of history" is most closely associated with Hegel, although Hegel discussed the idea in ambiguous terms, making it unclear whether he thought such a thing was a certainty or a mere possibility.[4] The goal of Hegel's philosophy on history was to show that history is a process of realization of reason, for which he does not name a definite endpoint. Hegel believes that it is on the one hand the task of history to show that there is essentially reason in the development over time, while on the other hand history itself also has the task of developing reason over time. The realization of history is thus something that one can observe, but also something that is an active task.[5]
In postmodernism[edit]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (November 2022)
A postmodern understanding of the term differs in that:
The idea of an "end of history" does not imply that nothing more will ever happen. Rather, what the postmodern sense of an end of history tends to signify is, in the words of contemporary historian Keith Jenkins, the idea that "the peculiar ways in which the past was historicized (was conceptualized in modernist, linear and essentially metanarrative forms) has now come to an end of its productive life; the all-encompassing 'experiment of modernity' ... is passing away into our postmodern condition".[6]
Francis Fukuyama[edit]
A name that is commonly linked to the concept of the end of history in contemporary discourse is Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama brought the term back to the forefront with his essay The End of History? that was published months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this essay, which he later expanded upon in his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, Fukuyama builds on the knowledge of Hegel, Marx and Kojève. The essay centers around the idea that now that its two most important competitors, fascism and communism, have been defeated, there should no longer be any serious competition for liberal democracy and the market economy.[7]
In his theory, Fukuyama distinguishes between the material or real world and the world of ideas or consciousness. He believes that in the realm of ideas liberalism has proven to be triumphant, meaning that even though a successful liberal democracy and market economy have not yet been established everywhere, there are no longer any ideological competitors for these systems. This would mean that any fundamental contradiction in human life can be worked out within the context of modern liberalism and would not need an alternative political-economic structure to be resolved. Now that the end of history is reached, Fukuyama believes that international relations would be primarily concerned with economic matters and no longer with politics or strategy, thus reducing the chances of a large scale international violent conflict.
Fukuyama concludes that the end of history will be a sad time, because the potential of ideological struggles that people were prepared to risk their lives for has now been replaced with the prospect of "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."[8] This does not mean that Fukuyama believes that a modern liberal democracy is the perfect political system, but rather that he does not think another political structure can provide citizens with the levels of wealth and personal liberties that a liberal democracy can.[9]
Following the end of the Cold War, as liberal democracy and free market economy began to dominate even outside the traditional Western World, his was also referred to as the world being on vacation from history. As the War on Terror, following the 2001 September 11 attacks, and the Second Cold War escalated during the 21st century, the vacation was referred to as being over.[10][11]
Quantification[edit]
In a 2022 research article published by the Royal Society Open Science, the author models the transition between political regimes as a Markov process. Using a Bayesian inference approach, he then estimates the transition probabilities between political regimes from time-series data describing the evolution of political regimes from 1800 to 2018. The author then computes the steady state for this Markov process which represents a mathematical abstraction of the End of history and predicts that approximately 46% of countries will be full democracies. Moreover, the model indicates that the fraction of autocracies in the world is expected to increase over the next half-century before declining. Using random-walk theory, the author estimates the survival curves of different types of regimes and the characteristic lifetimes of democracies and autocracies at 244 years and 69 years, respectively. The argument is made that there is no statistical evidence that the End of history constitutes a fixed, complete omnipresence of democratic regimes.[12]
See also[edit]

• War to end all wars
• Capitalist Realism
• Chronocentrism
• Philosophy of history
• Sociocultural evolution
• Immanentize the eschaton
• Peace
  References[edit]
• ^ Boucher, Geoff. "History and Desire in Kojève".
• ^ Fukuyama himself began to revise his ideas and abandon some of the neoconservative components of his thesis since the Iraq War. Interview with Ex-Neocon Francis Fukuyama: "A Model Democracy Is not Emerging in Iraq" Spiegel Online, March 22, 2006
• ^ a b Mike Featherstone, "Global and Local Cultures", in John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (1993), p. 184, n. 3.
• ^ William Desmond, "Hegel, Art, and History", in Robert L. Perkins, ed., History and System: Hegel's Philosophy of History (1984), p. 173.
• ^ Fillion, R. (2008). Multicultural Dynamics and the Ends Of History: Exploring Kant, Hegel and Marx, p. 89
• ^ Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (2004), p. 89, quoting Keith Jenkins (2001), p. 57.
• ^ Fukuyama, F. (1989) "The End of History?". The National Interest, p 1.
• ^ Fukuyama, F. (1989) "The End of History?". The National Interest, p 17.
• ^ Fukuyama, F. (2013). "The 'End of History' 20 Years Later". New Perspectives Quarterly. 30 (4): 31. doi:10.1111/npqu.11399. Retrieved 10 October 2023.
• ^ Katrin Bennhold (24 December 2016). "Grappling With My Family's Identity in a Post-'Brexit' Europe". New York Times. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
• ^ Michael D. Mosettig (20 March 2024). "Ukraine crisis signals our 25-year break from history is over". PBS News. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
• ^ Klimm, Florian (2022). "Quantifying the 'end of history' through a Bayesian Markov-chain approach". Royal Society Open Science. 9 (11). arXiv:2211.01955. Bibcode:2022RSOS....921131K. doi:10.1098/rsos.221131. PMC 9709514. PMID 36465687. This article incorporates text from this source, which is available under the CC BY 4.0 license.

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464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
“But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between socalled "interest groups" that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving.”
[humanity has reached] not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

[No text found]

The Granddaddy of American Conspiracy Theorists
Even a broken clock is right twice a day; that’s what they say about people who are supposed to be crackpots. It’s the idea that there is a moment in time when even the most outlandish contention, the most eccentric point of view, the most unlikely person, somehow lines up with shifting reality to produce, however fleetingly, what many perceive to be the truth.
But to accept the notion of the “broken clock” is to embrace the established, rationalist parameters of time, 24 hours a day, day after day, years arranged in ascending numerical order, decade after decade, eon upon eon, a forever forward march to an undetermined future, world without end, amen.
For some people, people like the late Milton William (Bill) Cooper, collector of clocks, time did not work that way. American shortwave talk‐show host, author, and lecturer during the millennial period of the late 1980s onward to the advent of the current century, Bill Cooper chose not to adhere to the mandated linear passage of existence. For Cooper, the entire span of time — the beginning, the middle, and the end — was all equally important, but there could be no doubt where the clock had stopped. A minute to midnight, that was Bill Cooper’s time.
This wasn’t because Cooper, a voracious reader and self‐schooled savant, was anti‐science or anti‐intellectual. He believed in evolution and, like his philosophical hero Aristotle, Cooper treasured the supremacy of knowledge and its acquisition. He had a massive collection of jazz records. But somewhere along the way, dating at least back to his service as river-boat captain in a hot zone during the Vietnam War, Cooper came to believe that something wasn’t right. What he’d always accepted as truth, what he was willing to give his life to protect, wasn’t true at all. It was part of a vast web of lies that stretched back through the centuries, contrived to rob the common man of his unalienable right to know the reality of his place on the planet. It was a deep-seated conviction that became an obsession — and a potent bridge to the current environment, where no one seems to believe anything they’re told, where long-respected bastions of truth are thought to be so corrupt as to be what Donald Trump calls “the enemy of the people.” The idea of “fake news,” along with personages like Alex Jones and QAnon (notably influenced by Cooper) are not unprecedented in American life. But none of them would have manifested as they have without Bill Cooper as an immediate predecessor.
Editor’s picks
Cooper sought to dramatize the compounding urgency of the moment on The Hour of the Time, the radio program he broadcast from 1992 until November 2001, his resonant, sometimes folksy, sometimes fulminating voice filling the airwaves via satellite hookups and shortwave frequencies. Nearly every episode of The Hour of the Time began the same way, with the show’s singular opening, one of the most arresting sign‐ons in radio history. It starts with a blaring air‐raid siren, a blast in the night. This is followed by a loud, distorted electronic voice: “Lights out!” comes the command, as if issued from a penitentiary guard tower. “Lights out for The Hour of the Time!…Lights out for the curfew of your body, soul, and mind.” Dogs bark, people shriek, the bleat of the still half‐sleeping multitudes. There is the sound of tramping jackbooted feet, growing louder, closing in.
Now is the time, a minute to midnight, 60 seconds before enslavement, one last chance. Some citizens will rise, if only from not-quite‐yet‐atrophied muscle memory. They will shake themselves awake as their forebears once did at Lexington and Concord, heeding Paul Revere’s immortal call. They will defend their homes, families, and the last shreds of the tattered Constitution, the most close‐to‐perfect political document ever produced.
The vast majority, however, won’t even get out of bed. Some will cower under the covers, but most will simply roll over and go back to sleep. They slept through life, so why not sleep through death?
This is how it will be at a minute to midnight, according to Bill Cooper. At the End of Time, a broken clock is always right.
Reputed instances of Cooper’s prescience are legion. An early roundup of these forecasts can be found in the August 15th, 1990, edition of the newsletter of the Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence (CAJI), an organization Cooper created, billing it as “the largest private intelligence‐gathering agency in the world.” Published on a dot-matrix printer, carrying the tagline “Information, not money, will be the power of the nineties,” Cooper ran an article entitled “Every Prediction Has Come True.” He listed 16 of his most recent prognostications that had come to pass “or will soon be fulfilled.”
See Also
These included the disclosure that “the CIA and the military are bringing drugs into the United States to finance their black projects.” Cooper also predicted that “the rape of the Savings and Loans by the CIA is only the tip of the iceberg. At least 600 banks will go under in the next two years.” The current monetary structure, Cooper said, “will be replaced by a cashless system that will allow the government to monitor our every action by computer. If you attempt to stay out of the system you will not be allowed to buy, sell, work, get medical care, or anything else we all take for granted.”
Cooper continued to make predictions in his watershed book, Behold a Pale Horse. Published in 1991 by Light Technology, a small New Age–oriented house then located in Sedona, Arizona, Behold a Pale Horse is something of a publishing miracle. With an initial press run of 3,500 (500 hardcover, 3,000 paperback), by the end of 2017, the book was closing in on 300,000 copies sold.
“Behold a Pale Horse is the biggest‐selling underground book of all time,” Cooper often told his audience. Yet sales figures represent only a fraction of the book’s true reach. For one thing, as its author often bragged, Behold a Pale Horse routinely topped lists of the most‐shoplifted books in the country. To this day, Barnes & Noble stores keep BAPH, as it is sometimes called, behind the cashier’s counter to reduce pilferage. This was because, as one clerk at the Barnes & Noble near my house in Brooklyn told me, “that book has a habit of walking out all by itself.”
There is also the captive audience. Since its release, Behold a Pale Horse has been among the most popular “prison books” (in that prisoners read them), a distinction it shares with Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. During the crack epidemic of the 1990s, it was not unusual for a single copy of Behold a Pale Horse to go through enough hands in the cellblocks of places such as Attica to break the book’s spine.
Some of Cooper’s best‐known predictions appear in Behold a Pale Horse, which runs a densely typed 500 pages. Eight years before the Trench Coat Mafia murders at Columbine High School, Cooper wrote: “The sharp increase of prescriptions of psychoactive drugs like Prozac and Ritalin to younger and younger children will inevitably lead to a rash of horrific school shootings.” These incidents, he said, “will be used by elements of the federal government as an excuse to infringe upon the citizenry’s Second Amendment rights.”
For many, including those who would later claim that the seemingly endless series of school shootings were part of a plot by gun‐control advocates to take away America’s weapons, Cooper’s words took on the air of prophesy.
But Bill Cooper never claimed to be a prophet. He never imagined himself in the line of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, the ancient Hebrew seers carried off by King Nebuchadnezzar II to a 70‐year captivity in Babylon. Neither did Cooper compare himself to John, an exile on the island of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation, which is where the title Behold a Pale Horse comes from. The phrase appears in chapter 6, verse 8, in which John is witness to the opening of the Seven Seals, the preview of God’s secret plan to once again destroy the world prior to its rebirth as the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
When the Fourth Seal was revealed, John wrote, “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
“I am no Prophet, I am no Nostradamus, I have no crystal ball,” Cooper proclaimed. He was “just an ordinary guy.” There was nothing supernatural about his predictions. Anyone could do it. It was all in the methodology, summed up in what he called his “standard admonition,” the one rule every prospective Hour of the Time listener had to obey, “no matter what.”
“You must not believe anything you hear on this show,” Cooper declared. Nor was the listener to believe anything they heard from any other shortwave host, “or Larry King Live, Dan Rather, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or anyone else in this entire world, whether you hear it on radio, on television, or from the lips of someone standing right in front of you.
“Listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing until you, yourself, can prove it with your own research,” Cooper told the audience. “Only free‐thinking, intelligent people who are prepared to root through all the crap and get at the truth should be listening to this show. Everyone else should just turn off their radio. We don’t even want you to listen.
“Listen to everyone. Read everything, believe nothing . . . until you can prove to yourself whether it is true or false or lies between the many shades of gray. If you don’t do this, if you cannot do this, or are just plain too lazy to do this, then I can assure you that you will march into the New World Order as a docile slave.”
Then Cooper made the sound of a sheep. “Baaa! Baaa! Baaaing all the way.”
Cooper’s most famous prediction was made during the June 28th, 2001, broadcast of The Hour of the Time. A little past his 58th birthday and drinking heavily, Cooper was doing his program from a studio he’d built in the den of his house at 96 North Clearview Circle, atop a hill in the small White Mountains town of Eagar, Arizona, 15 miles from the New Mexico line.
“Can you believe what you have been seeing on CNN today, ladies and gentlemen?” Cooper asked the Hour of the Time audience that evening.
“Supposedly, a CNN reporter found Osama bin Laden, took a television camera crew with him, and interviewed him and his top leadership, lieutenants, and his colonels, and generals…in their hideout!
“Now don’t you think that’s kind of strange, folks?” Cooper asked with his signature chuckle. “Because the largest intelligence apparatus in the world, with the biggest budget in the history of world, has been looking for Osama bin Laden for years, and years, and years, and can’t find him!
“But some doofus jerk‐off reporter with his little camera crew waltzes right into his secret hideout and interviews him!”
This meant one of two things, Cooper told the audience. Either “everyone in the intelligence community and all the intelligence agencies of the United States government are blithering idiots and incompetent fools, or they’re lying to us.”
The fact was, Cooper told the audience, no one in the U.S. intelligence services was really looking for Osama bin Laden. They knew where he was. They had since the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Bin Laden, along with his entire family, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“They created him. They’re the ones funding him. They supported him to make their new utopian worlds…and he has served them well.” There were rumors floating around the mass media that bin Laden was planning attacks on the United States and Israel, but this was just subterfuge, Cooper said. “If Osama bin Laden is an enemy of Israel, don’t you think the Mossad would have taken care of that a long time ago?” Cooper asked.
Something else was in the wind. There was no other reason for the government to allow the CNN report but to further stamp bin Laden’s bearded, pointy face upon the collective American mind‐set. Bogeyman of the moment, the Saudi prince was being readied for his close‐up.
“I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack!” Cooper declared. The target would be a large American city.
“Something terrible is going to happen in this country. And whatever is going to happen they’re going to blame on Osama bin Laden. Don’t you even believe it.”
Two and a half months later, on September 11th, 2001, after two commercial airliners flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in a cataclysm that killed 2,996 people, including 343 New York City Fire Department personnel, Cooper’s prediction came to pass.
By the time Cooper got on the air that morning, the towers had already fallen. Several hours passed before the name Osama bin Laden surfaced on the BBC feed Cooper was monitoring. The British station, which Cooper regarded as marginally more reliable than the American networks, was doing an interview with the former Israeli Prime Minister General Ehud Barak and Richard Perle, chairman of George W. Bush’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.
Widely known as the Prince of Darkness, in part for his Reagan‐era support of Edward Teller’s $100 billion Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars, Perle said the attacks on New York and Washington were “clearly an act of war.”
“All our Western civilization is under attack,” Barak put in. The interviewer asked Perle if he thought the United States would be justified in firing cruise missiles at Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Perle, who along with fellow neocons Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld would soon push hard for the reinvasion of Iraq, answered in the affirmative.
The Afghani authorities had “allowed Osama bin Laden to operate in their territory,” Perle said. That alone was reason enough for a military strike. Bin Laden was involved, no doubt about it. Yes, Barak agreed, there was “every reason to believe” bin Laden was behind the attack.
It was then Cooper interrupted the transmission, shouting, “How do they know who did it?
“If the United States government had no warning like they say, if they didn’t know who was going to mount these attacks, and there are no survivors from the people in these planes, how do they know Osama bin Laden is behind it?”
So, yet again, Cooper was right. Events were transpiring exactly as his research had indicated. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi mama’s‐boy prince, was about to be officially blamed for the most spectacular foreign attack on America since Pearl Harbor.
Not that Cooper was gloating about his latest successful prediction. What had happened in New York City — thousands dead, their bodies crushed beneath tons of twisted rubble, a toxic cloud rising over the metropolis — was just the beginning of a new torrent of death. On the radio feed, Perle and Barak were discussing logistics; Afghanistan would be a target, possibly, Iraq as well.
“How can they determine that they should bomb Afghanistan?” Cooper shouted with alarm. “Who are we going to be bombing? The terrorists, or the innocent people of Kabul?”
Cooper made another prediction. “Folks, I can assure you that 72 hours from now we will be at war. We will be bombing two or maybe three countries….Because that’s how it works. When governments are attacked, they lash out. Thousands of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are going to die.
“Nothing will be the same after today,” Cooper said grimly.
“Get ready for it, folks, because that’s what you’re going to be hearing in the next weeks and months on radio and television: Nothing will be the same after today….Because I’ll tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what the people who really did this want you to think, that nothing, nothing, will be the same after today.
“And you know what? They’re right. They’re telling the truth about that. Within weeks the Congress will pass draconian legislation aimed at restricting the rights of American citizens. You’re going to have surveillance cameras on every street corner. You think your phones are being tapped now, just wait.
“No one is going to gain from this except a very small group of people. Everyone else will lose. No one will lose more than the American people.” This would be the most grievous casual

Milton William Cooper
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Milton William Cooper
Milton William Cooper
|Born||May 6, 1943|
Long Beach, California, U.S.
|Died||November 5, 2001 (aged 58)|
Eagar, Arizona, U.S.
|Cause of death||Gunshot|
|Resting place||Springerville Cemetery|
Springerville, Arizona
|Other names||Bill Cooper|
|Occupation(s)||Conspiracy theorist, radio broadcaster, author|
Milton William "Bill" Cooper (May 6, 1943 – November 5, 2001) was an American conspiracy theorist, radio broadcaster, and author known for his 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse, in which he warned of multiple global conspiracies, some involving extraterrestrial life.[1][2][3] Cooper also described HIV/AIDS as a man-made disease used to target blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals, and that a cure was made before it was implemented.[4] He has been described as a "militia theoretician".[5] Cooper was killed in 2001 by sheriff's deputies after he shot at them during an attempted arrest.[1]
Early life and education
Little is known about Cooper's background and education, beyond the information supplied in his own accounts. He claimed to have served in the United States Navy, the United States Air Force, and Naval Intelligence until his discharge in 1975;[6] however, public records only indicate a period of service in the Navy with a ratings code of E-5/Sergeant (Petty officer second class in the Navy), including a tour of duty in Vietnam with two service medals.[7] At the end of the war, while working in naval intelligence, Cooper served on a briefing team for Admiral Bernard A. Clarey.[8] He then attended a junior college in California, and worked for several technical and vocational schools before making his conspiracy theories known, beginning in 1988. Cooper expanded the speculations of earlier conspiracists by incorporating government involvement with extraterrestrials as a central theme.[9]
Behold a Pale Horse
In 1991, Cooper wrote and published Behold a Pale Horse.[5] The book has been influential among "UFO and militia circles".[10] Just prior to the trial of Terry Nichols in 1997, The Guardian described it as "the manifesto of the militia movement".[11]
According to sociologist Paul Gilroy, Cooper claimed "an elaborate conspiracy theory that encompasses the Kennedy assassination, the doings of the secret world government, the coming ice age, and a variety of other covert activities associated with the Illuminati's declaration of war upon the people of America".[5] Political scientist Michael Barkun characterized it as "among the most complex superconspiracy theories", and also among the most influential due to its popularity in militia circles as well as mainstream bookstores.[6] Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke described the book as a "chaotic farrago of conspiracy myths interspersed with reprints of executive laws, official papers, reports and other extraneous materials designed to show the looming prospect of a world government imposed on the American people against their wishes and in flagrant contempt of the Constitution."[12]
UFOs, aliens and the Illuminati
|External documents|
|Text of Cooper's first post to a UFO message board[13]|
Cooper gained attention in Ufology circles in 1988 when he claimed to have seen secret documents while in the Navy describing governmental dealings with extraterrestrials, a topic on which he expounded in Behold a Pale Horse.[6] By one account he served as a "low level clerk" in the Navy, and as such would not have had the security clearance needed to access classified documents.[14] In the Summer of 1988, Cooper made his first public comments on the ParaNet Bulletin Board System, an early UFO message board, claiming that in 1966 he was serving aboard the USS Tiru when he and fellow Navy personnel witnessed a metal craft "larger than a football field" repeatedly enter and exit the water.[15] Cooper claimed he was instructed by superiors to never speak about the incident.[15] Biographer Mark Jacobson argues "the Tiru incident itself would not have done much to make Cooper's name in ufology. That opportunity came only a few days later" when he was contacted by fellow ParaNet poster John Lear. Lear, the son of Learjet founder Bill Lear, identified as a pilot who had flown missions for the CIA.[15] Lear was the author of a post titled "The UFO Coverup" which incorporated elements of mythos from Paul Bennewitz, a ufologist who was later revealed to have been fed disinformation by American counter-intelligence agent Richard Doty.[15][16] Cooper soon visited Lear, and the two spent much time together from 1988 to 1990.[15]
Cooper's views were heavily influenced by Lear and his story of alien collusion with secret governmental forces.[8] In 1989, the two released an "indictment" against the US Government for "aiding and abetting and concealing this Alien Nation which exists in our borders".[8] In 2018, columnist Colin Dickey noted the pair's influence, writing "in the early years [UFO writers] did not, by and large, embrace strong political positions. They were the tip of a spear asserting that the number one thing we had to fear was not little green men, but the government that colluded with them, appropriating their technology against us."[8] Cooper and Lear's collaboration lasted for a few years, after which Cooper accused Lear of being a CIA plant.[8]
Ufologists later asserted that some of the material Cooper claimed to have seen in Naval Intelligence documents was actually plagiarized by Cooper from their own research, including several items that the ufologists had fabricated as pranks.[17] Don Ecker of UFO Magazine ran a series of exposés on Cooper in 1990.[18]
Cooper linked the Illuminati with his beliefs that extraterrestrials were secretly involved with the United States government, but later retracted these claims. He accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of negotiating a treaty with extraterrestrials in 1954, which supposedly allowed the aliens to abduct humans in exchange for technological assistance.[19] Cooper then claimed that Eisenhower had established an inner circle of Illuminati to manage relations with the aliens and keep their presence a secret from the general public. Cooper believed that aliens "manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religions, magic, witchcraft, and the occult", and that even the Illuminati were unknowingly being manipulated by them.[6]
Cooper described the Illuminati as a secret international organization, controlled by the Bilderberg Group, that conspired with the Knights of Columbus, Masons, Skull and Bones, and other organizations. Its ultimate goal, he said, was the establishment of a New World Order. According to Cooper, the Illuminati conspirators not only invented alien threats for their own gain, but actively conspired with extraterrestrials to take over the world.[6] Cooper believed that James Forrestal's fatal fall from a window on the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Hospital was connected to the alleged secret committee Majestic 12, and that JASON advisory group scientists reported to an elite group of Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations executive committee members who were high-ranking members of the Illuminati.[2][3]
Cooper also claimed that the antisemitic conspiracy theory forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was actually an Illuminati work, and instructed readers to substitute "Sion" for "Zion", "Illuminati" for "Jews", and "cattle" for "Goyim".[3][20][21] The publisher removed the chapter that was a reproduction of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion document from later printings of Behold a Pale Horse.[22]
Kennedy assassination
In Behold a Pale Horse, Cooper asserts that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were in the process of taking over the Earth. According to a "top secret" video of the assassination that Cooper claimed to have discovered, the driver of the presidential limousine, William Greer, used "a gas pressure device developed by aliens from the Trilateral Commission" to shoot the president from the driver's seat.[14] The Zapruder film shows Greer twice turning to look into the back seat of the car; Cooper theorized that Greer first turned to assess Kennedy's status after the external attack, and then to fire the fatal shot. Conspiracy theories implicating Greer reportedly "snowballed" after publication of Behold a Pale Horse.[23] Cooper's video purporting to prove his theory was analyzed by several television stations, according to one source, and was found to be "... a poor-quality fake using chunks of the... Zapruder film."[14]
HIV/AIDS
In Behold a Pale Horse Cooper proposed that AIDS was the result of a conspiracy to decrease the populations of blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals.[9] In 2000 South Africa's Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang received criticism for distributing the chapter discussing this theory to senior South African government officials.[24]
Radio show
From 1992 until his death in November 2001, Cooper originated his radio show, The Hour of the Time from a studio in his house at the top of a hill in the small White Mountains town of Eagar, Arizona, 15 miles from the New Mexico border.[25][26] Cooper sent his show via audio cassette, satellite patch, or direct telephone link to WWCR in Nashville where it was broadcast by the station's 100,000-watt shortwave transmitter.[25][27] Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Cooper was well known within the militia movement for his anti-government shortwave radio program. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was reportedly a fan.[28][1][29] McVeigh was reported by The Daily Beast to have ordered from Cooper a cassette, Waco, The Big Lie, which the radio host marketed. Cooper broadcast conspiracy theories on the Waco siege in early 1993, which he believed had been the opening battle in a new Civil War. He later participated in the early radio shows of Alex Jones, who was an admirer of his broadcasts.[30]
On June 28, 2001, commenting on a televised interview of Osama bin Laden at his hideout in Afghanistan, Cooper claimed that bin Laden would soon be "blamed" for a 'major attack' on a large U.S. city, "but don't you believe it". Immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, he predicted the U.S. would soon be at war in 'two or maybe three countries'.[31][8] He began broadcasting the "controlled demolition" conspiracy theory on the day of the attacks, which eventually became a center of 9/11 conspiracy theories.[22]
Death
As Cooper moved away from the Ufology community and toward the militia and anti-government subculture in the late 1990s, he became convinced that he was being personally targeted by President Bill Clinton and the Internal Revenue Service. In July 1998, he was charged with tax evasion; an arrest warrant was issued, but Cooper eluded repeated attempts to serve it. In 2000, he was named a "major fugitive" by the United States Marshals Service.[6]
On November 5, 2001, Apache County sheriff's deputies attempted to arrest Cooper at his Eagar, Arizona home on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and endangerment stemming from disputes with local residents. After an exchange of gunfire during which Cooper shot one of the deputies in the head, Cooper was fatally shot. Federal authorities reported that Cooper had spent years evading execution of the 1998 arrest warrant, and according to a spokesman for the Marshals Service, he vowed that "he would not be taken alive".[1]
In popular culture

• Cooper's writing holds enduring popularity in hip hop, being referenced by artists including Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, and Jay-Z.[32]
• The rapper William Cooper took his stage name from Milton William Cooper.[32]
• The X-Files incorporated numerous elements of Cooper's mythos of a secret government in collusion with alien beings. In one of the most famous episodes, "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", John F. Kennedy is assassinated to prevent him from revealing the existence of aliens.[15] The 1998 X-Files film uses phrasing from Cooper (e.g. "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars") and features the name Cooper in apparent homage.[15]
• In 1997, hip hop group Killarmy released their debut album, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, a title drawn from Cooper's work.
  Books
• Cooper, Milton William (1991). Behold a Pale Horse. Light Technology Publications. ISBN 0-929385-22-5.
  Lectures
• Truth vs Deception (Undated, audio only), 1h 14m
• Sedona Speech (September 24, 1989), 3h 26m
• The Secret Government: Origin, Identity and Purpose of the Real MJ-12 (1989), 1h 28m
• UFOs, Aliens and the Black Government (1990), 2h 2m
• Behold a Pale Horse (1991), 4h 40m
• UFO Alien Agenda Conference (September 9, 1991), 3h 37m
• The Little Ale'Inn (July 9, 1993), 1h
• Wembley Speech (January 9, 1993), 2h 45m
• Lansing, Michigan (1996), 1h
• The Porterville Presentation (1997), 11h
  Self-produced videos
  Produced as "Shining Star Productions":
• Project Redlight (1991), 2h 2m
• Project Redlight II (1992), 1h 38m
• JFK: Assassin Unmasked (1993), 45m
• Kennedy, The Sacrificed King (1993), 1h 14m
• Luxor (1994), 54m
  Media appearances
• Interview with Ellie Crystal (Undated)
• UFO Investigations-The Cover Up (1989)
• On the Kennedy Assassination, KUTV (May 15, 1991)
• Dimensions in Parapsychology (1991)
• Shane Eden's The UFO Connection (1991)
• NYC Public Access Interview (April 24, 1992)
• The CNN Interview (May 3, 1992)
• Reichstag '95 (1995)
• The Land of the Lost Story (1999), dir. Anna Zetchus Smith
• The Hour of Our Time: The Legacy of William Cooper (2006), dir. Jim Jankiewicz
  References
• ^ a b c d "Arizona Militia Figure Is Shot to Death". Los Angeles Times. November 7, 2001. p. A24. Retrieved January 1, 2022.
• ^ a b Richard Allen Landes (2011). Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. Oxford University Press. p. 418. ISBN 978-0-19-975359-8. Retrieved January 4, 2012.
• ^ a b c Arthur Goldwag (2009). Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, the New World Order, and Many, Many More. Random House Digital, Inc. ISBN 978-0-307-39067-7. Retrieved January 4, 2012.
• ^ "Bill Cooper interview CNN Uncut original". Event occurs at 39:00. Retrieved June 13, 2015.
• ^ a b c Gilroy, Paul (2000). "Planetary Humanism". Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 352–353. ISBN 978-0674000964. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
• ^ a b c d e f Michael Barkun (2006). A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-520-24812-0. Retrieved January 5, 2012.
• ^ Milton William Cooper. aad.archives.gov. Retrieved November 24, 2014.
• ^ a b c d e f Dickey, Colin (August 28, 2018). "A Pioneer of Paranoia". The New Republic.
• ^ a b Carroll, Robert Todd (2003). "Illuminati". The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p. 175. ISBN 978-1118045633. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
• ^ Nattrass, Nicoli (2012). The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 4, 23–27. ISBN 978-0231149129. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
• ^ Vulliamy, Ed; Dirks, Bruce (November 3, 1997). "New trial may solve riddle of Oklahoma bombing". The Guardian. London. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
• ^ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2002). "Conspiracy Beliefs and the New World Order". Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University Press. pp. 284–285. ISBN 978-0814731550. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
• ^ Jacobson, Mark (September 4, 2018). Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-698-15798-9.
• ^ a b c Kirk, Paul (September 8, 2000). "Govt Aids nut linked to Ku Klux Klan". Mail & Guardian. Johannesburg. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
• ^ a b c d e f g Jacobson, Mark (2018). Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America. Blue Rider Press. ISBN 978-0399169953.
• ^ Pilkington, Mark (2010). Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. Little, Brown Book. ISBN 978-1849012409.
• ^ Doh

Behold a Pale Horse
Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publishing, 1991.
First edition, copy #219 in the hand-numbered limited issue. Signed by William Cooper on the paste down with a short inscription, also signed on p. 4 with a red stamp as was typical for this edition. Rear paste down hand numbered as well. [x], 500, [2] pp with fold-out chart at rear. Bound in publisher's dark navy cloth with gilt spine lettering. Very Good with a few very light stains to edges, textblock slightly fallen due to weight, slightly musty smell, in a Near Fine dust jacket with wear along head, a little rubbing. Uncommon. A controversial, self-published conspiracy/UFOlogy book that gained an enormous cult following over the years not only in the UFO, QAnon and militia subcultures but also in hip hop. Prodigy of Mobb Deep and both Killah Priest and Ol' Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan were fans. In what should be an official blurb for the book, when talking to Cooper's biographer Mark Jacobson ODB said in 2004, “Everybody gets f---ed, William Cooper tells you who’s f---ing you… when you’re someone like me, that’s valuable information." This first edition contains a chapter, "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," that would be cut from later editions. After tax evasion charges, vowing to never be taken alive by authorities, Cooper was killed in a 2001 shootout with sheriff's deputies in Eagar, Arizona.
A controversial, self-published conspiracy/UFOlogy book that gained an enormous cult following over the years not only in the UFO, QAnon and militia subcultures but also in hip hop. Prodigy of Mobb Deep and both Killah Priest and Ol' Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan were fans. In what should be an official blurb for the book, when talking to Cooper's biographer Mark Jacobson ODB said in 2004, “Everybody gets f---ed, William Cooper tells you who’s f---ing you… when you’re someone like me, that’s valuable information."
This first edition contains a chapter, "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," that would be cut from later editions. After tax evasion charges, vowing to never be taken alive by authorities, Cooper was killed in a 2001 shootout with sheriff's deputies in Eagar, Arizona.Item #140945193
Price: $5,000