Like Einstein’s theory of general relativity—which inspired such ubiquitous middlebrow wisdom as “everything’s relative”—and Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”, the audacious notion Francis Fukuyama first put forward in his 1989 article 'The End of History?' is one of the few theses that can truly be said to have become a meme. Like those other ideas in their time, Fukuyama’s proclamation has been as widely referenced as it has been inadequately understood.
In the public mind, Fukuyama is the thinker who declared that the victory of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War amounted to, in some literal sense, the end of history. He’s typically seen as a triumphalist, perhaps the ultimate cheerleader for liberalism and the free market. While this image is not wholly wrong, it completely fails to do justice to the subtlety and richness of the thesis that made Fukuyama famous.
A lack of appreciation for these qualities of Fukuyama's early thought has led even intelligent commentators in the 21st century to write it off entirely. 9/11 was taken by many to herald "the end of Fukuyama". The democratic recession of the last twenty years, which has seen the number of democracies in the world continuously fall, has tended to reinforce this view. By the early 2020s it had become commonplace to speak of "the end of the end of history", a phrase conveying the belief that, however useful Fukuyama's early thought had been for understanding the 1990s and, at most, the early 2000s, it has now become entirely irrelevant, of historical interest only. In the two parts of the present essay, I will try to show why this dismissive verdict is unwarranted.
Fukuyama is typically seen as the ultimate cheerleader for liberalism and the free market. While this image is not wholly wrong, it completely fails to do justice to the subtlety and richness of the thesis that made Fukuyama famous.
As Fukuyama himself noted in After the End of History, a book-length interview published in 2021, the ideas he advanced in 'The End of History?' were misunderstood from the outset. It must be said that the essay’s provocative headline claims and esoteric Hegelian framework made that all but inevitable. This is how, in the Summer 1989 issue of international relations quarterly The National Interest, the then-unknown Fukuyama introduced the idea—implausible, even ludicrous on first hearing—that he has been associated with ever since:
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar 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".
That central assertion attracted an enormous amount of comment, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November revealed the article’s impressive prescience. In the voluble and passionate response which Fukuyama received from scholars and other commentators, incredulity, fascination and misunderstanding were all mixed together. While Allan Bloom praised the essay as "bold and brilliant", Time magazine blasted it as "giddiness bordering on nuttiness". Even The National Interest itself later published a collection of rebuttals entitled 'No Exit: The Errors of Endism'. Such was the level of controversy, that 'The End of History', shorn of its question mark, became a talking point and a slogan well beyond scholarly circles. In latching onto this strange and exciting "new" idea, masses of corporate executives, business journalists, bankers and financiers suddenly became unknowing Hegelians.
In latching onto this strange and exciting "new" idea, masses of corporate executives, business journalists, bankers and financiers suddenly became unknowing Hegelians.
Predictably the finer points of Fukuyama's argument eluded most. For instance, whatever his use of "universalization" may suggest, Fukuyama did not make the utopian claim often imputed to him, that, with communism all but defeated, liberal democracy and the free market would soon spread throughout the entire world. Still less did he bizarrely assert that events would simply cease, as some have misunderstood him to have done:
"This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’ yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world".
What Fukuyama says here about liberalism winning as an idea is key to understanding him: liberal democracy has established itself as the best system, or, to paraphrase Churchill, the “least worst” system. As the end point of ideological development, it is an idea that cannot be improved upon.
A bold claim, to be sure. On real-world politics, Fukuyama was more cautious. For him it remained to be seen which of the world’s many authoritarian regimes liberal democracy would unseat, and when. While, in the “The End of History?” essay, he placed his chips on liberalism being “the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run”, he also offered a forecast that the next few years would ironically show to have been overly conservative:
"The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now, nor do I think that it is terribly likely that perestroika will succeed such that the label will be thinkable any time in the near future".
The point Fukuyama then makes is another missed by more casual commentators:
"But at the end of history, it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society".
Moreover only a few early commentators picked up on the deep ambivalence Fukuyama expressed towards the end of history. Later writers seem largely to have ignored this aspect of his stance, perhaps because it is difficult to parse within the conventional frame of Anglo-American political science:
"The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed".
Thus, in the thought of the early Fukuyama, there is a striking tension between a sense of ultimate triumph and a quite sombre melancholy. For me, it is this tension which is the most thought-provoking element of his thesis. Few contemporary thinkers have expressed the fundamental ambiguity of progress with such resonance and poignancy. And today, in the age of rapidly advancing AI, this ambiguity is thrown into especially sharp relief.
But how did Fukuyama come to hold this unusually ambivalent view? The answer is that he inherited it from radical left-bank philosopher Alexandre Kojève, who, under the influence of Marx (himself a Hegelian and surely the most famous propagator of the idea of a terminus to history), had put a subversively ambiguous spin on the idea of the end of history that had originated with Hegel.
Fukuyama inherited his unusually ambivalent view from radical left-bank philosopher Alexandre Kojève, who, under the influence of Marx, had put a subversively ambiguous spin on the idea of the end of history that had originated with Hegel.
Undoubtedly, much of the confusion surrounding 'The End of History?' can be attributed to the high-brow and continental provenance of Fukuyama’s main idea. For when he wrote of history and its end he did not have the commonplace meaning of the word "history" in mind, but rather the Hegelian one: capital-H History. From Hegel, who believed that “man is in his very nature destined to be free”, Fukuyama took his conception of History as “a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle and an end”. Or, to be more precise, he took it from Kojève's highly influential interpretation of Hegel. Fukuyama states as much in the book-length follow up to his 1989 essay, 1992's The End of History and the Last Man.
