Post by metamitya

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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  "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.