the end of history thesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A debt to Hegel and others

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more: Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

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

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

Limitations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A more sober stance

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

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

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

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

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Bring back ideology: Fukuyama's 'end of history' 25 years on

I n the summer of 1989, the American magazine the National Interest published an essay with the strikingly bold title "The End of History?". Its author, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, announced that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. With anti-communist protests sweeping across the former Soviet Union, the essay seemed right on the money. Fukuyama became an unlikely star of political science, dubbed the "court philosopher of global capitalism" by John Gray . When his book The End of History and the Last Man appeared three years later, the qualifying question mark was gone.

The "end of history" thesis has been repeated enough to acquire the ring of truth – though it has also, of course, been challenged. Some critics have cited 9/11 as a major counterexample. Others have pointed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab spring as proof that ideological contests remain.

But Fukuyama was careful to stress that he was not saying that nothing significant would happen any more, or that there would be no countries left in the world that did not conform to the liberal democratic model. "At the end of history," he wrote, "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."

Fukuyama was talking about ideas rather than events. He believed that western liberal democracy, with its elegant balance of liberty and equality, could not be bettered; that its attainment would lead to a general calming in world affairs; and that in the long run it would be the only credible game in town. "What we are witnessing," he wrote, "is not just the end of the cold war, or a 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 universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Fukuyama drew on the philosophy of Hegel, who defined history as a linear procession of epochs. Technological progress and the cumulative resolution of conflict allowed humans to advance from tribal to feudal to industrial society. For Marx, the journey ended with communism; Fukuyama was announcing a new destination.

For a long time his argument proved oddly resilient to challenges from the left. Neoliberalism has been pretty hegemonic. Over the last three years, however, in a belated reaction to the 2008 bank bailouts, cracks have started to appear. Global Occupy protests and demonstrations against austerity have led many commentators on the left – including the French philosopher Alain Badiou in The Rebirth of History and Seumas Milne in his collection of essays The Revenge of History – to wonder whether history is on the march once again. "What is going on?" asks Badiou. "The continuation, at all costs, of a weary world? A salutary crisis of that world, racked by its victorious expansion? The end of that world? The advent of a different world?" He tentatively regards the uprisings of 2011 as game-changing, with the potential to usher in a new political order. For Milne, likewise, developments such as the failure of the US to "democratise" Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crash and the flowering of socialism in Latin America demonstrate the "passing of the unipolar moment".

What remains an open question is whether these developments – dramatic as they are – will actually result in anything. Leaderless and programme-light, dissent keeps failing to cohere, fragmenting into online petitions and single-issue campaigns. Is the left going to mount a coherent ideological challenge to the right, or are these just border skirmishes? Has history ended, or not?

As some on the left have long realised, Fukuyama was performing an ideological sleight of hand. Is "western liberal democracy", as he argued, really an application of the principles of the French revolution? Or is it in fact a way of cloaking rightwing politics in benignly incontestable disguise? "Man's universal right to freedom" sounds inspiring, but if you are on the right it is another way of saying economic liberalism. Besides, even that is a fiction: capitalism pretends to love free markets; in reality, it rigs markets for elites.

When he wrote "The End of History?", Fukuyama was a neocon. He was taught by Leo Strauss's protege Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind ; he was a researcher for the Rand Corporation, the thinktank for the American military-industrial complex; and he followed his mentor Paul Wolfowitz into the Reagan administration. He showed his true political colours when he wrote that "the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the west … the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx." This was a highly tendentious claim even in 1989.

In 2006, in the wake of George W Bush's catastrophic blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan, Fukuyama repudiated neoconservatism in a book titled America at the Crossroads . In order to keep his end-of-history thesis intact, Fukuyama argued that the neocons had gone off on a Leninist tangent of historical determinism and artificial nation-building, and had departed from the correct understanding of historical evolution as an organic byproduct of material comfort and access to consumer goods.

The "post-ideology" sleight of hand nevertheless continues. "The markets", which he hailed as the engine of progress, were and are talked about as "natural" – as if they were forces of gravity or Darwinian evolution. They are believed to impose "realistic" limits on policy; political prioritising hides behind practical references to the "public purse". "This is the sober reality I must set out for the country today," David Cameron said in June 2010, announcing his plan for cuts in public spending. "We are not doing this because we want to, driven by theory or ideology … We are doing this because we have to." Through three decades of wonkery and spin, the right has systematically constructed an ideological movement that presents itself as anything but systematic, anything but ideological.

Fukuyama distinguished his own position from that of the sociologist Daniel Bell , who published a collection of essays in 1960 titled The End of Ideology . Bell had found himself, at the end of the 1950s, at a "disconcerting caesura". Political society had rejected "the old apocalyptic and chiliastic visions", he wrote, and "in the west, among the intellectuals, the old passions are spent." Bell also had ties to neocons but denied an affiliation to any ideology. Fukuyama claimed not that ideology per se was finished, but that the best possible ideology had evolved. Yet the "end of history" and the "end of ideology" arguments have the same effect: they conceal and naturalise the dominance of the right, and erase the rationale for debate.

While I recognise the ideological subterfuge (the markets as "natural"), there is a broader aspect to Fukuyama's essay that I admire, and cannot analyse away. It ends with a surprisingly poignant passage: "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."

It is hard not to conclude that this passage offers an accurate portrait of our age, in which the campfire conversations of young activists merely concern relative concentrations of CO2; the politics of nudge and solutionism are embraced by right and left alike; and the hordes camped out on the streets of Rio de Janeiro are awaiting the opening of Latin America's first Apple store.

"In the post-historical period," Fukuyama continues, "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." Doesn't this vision seem exactly right? We appear to be losing a clear sense of both our history and our future, living in a perpetual present in which we have forgotten that things were different in the past and that there are, therefore, alternatives. (A parallel can perhaps be drawn with pop: we are in the post-postmodern age of the retro-authentic mashup. Contemporary songs - by Adele, Lady Gaga, La Roux - are simulacra of those produced in the 60s, 70s and 80s.)

I grew up in the 80s, marching against Thatcher. The left laid into the right. In 1990, when I turned 16, John Major became prime minister and the ideological clashes of British politics faded out. Major's "back to basics" campaign was against highfalutin ideology; a disavowal of politics. (In recent advice to Conservative MPs, Major told them to focus less on "ideology" and more on "issues that actually worry people in their daily lives". His rejection of the hardline right is to be applauded, but since when did daily issues have nothing to do with ideology?) Next came the triangulation of Tony Blair, his saintly transcendence of left and right; Barack Obama's call for "a declaration of independence … from ideology"; and David Cameron saying he "doesn't do isms". Politics is now a matter of technocratic optimisation, of doing "what works" and "getting the job done". In 2010, even the veteran conviction politician Shirley Williams praised the coalition government for its pledge to "work together in the national interest". "The generation I belong to, steeped in ideology and partisan commitment, is passing away," she wrote, commending a new spirit of "co-operation" over "the safe, long-established confrontation". While declaring that the old polarities no longer pertain, all the main parties have shifted to the right.

Meanwhile, the performance of confrontation continues. Popular disaffection with mainstream politics manifests as a rejection of its tribal, shouty style. PMQs is criticised for being too raucous, but that is a distracting irrelevance now that policy differences seem imperceptible. The problem is not "divisiveness" but its opposite: the lack of democratic choice.

In the recent commentary on the death of Tony Benn , he has been repeatedly described as one of the final representatives of a sharply delineated political culture. "To the modern eye he broke the mould: a brazen, aristocratic ideologue in an age of middle-class triangulation and third ways," wrote  Mark Wallace , an editor at ConservativeHome. "But if those things seem so alien today, it's not because he was a one-off but because he was the last of his kind." The passing of political conviction is accepted as a given whatever one's political conviction, but it is the left that stands to lose most.

In The End of History and the Last Man , Fukuyama writes that the "enormously productive and dynamic economic world created by advancing technology" has a "tremendous homogenising power": global political harmony is the "ultimate victory of the VCR". But are consumerism and technology, as he suggests, really progressive? The internet came of age at the same time as I did. My undergraduate essays were handwritten, but in my third year I sent my first email using a green interface called Pine. My childhood correspondence fills several cardboard boxes, but during the 1990s the paper trail peters out. The rest is on email accounts owned by corporations with infantile names; some of those accounts are lost.

Is it an accident that the digital blitzing of boundaries between historical eras, work and play, this book and that, is happening at the same time as the seeming end of movements of all kinds, both cultural and political? My nostalgia for my own childhood is bound up with my nostalgia for political opposition and the material written word. I miss history, just as I miss my own history, and my childhood visions of the future. In my grander moments I feel like an embodiment of Slavoj Žižek 's Living in the End Times , meandering mournfully around Spotify and fretting about the left's intellectual bankruptcy.

"The modern age was a time when human beings, alone or together, could sculpt the marble of history with the hammer of will," writes the writer and activist Franco "Bifo" Berardi . Today, this has "vanished from sight. There is no longer … a progressive temporal dimension."

As modernist housing projects fall into ruin, it is hard to recall the sincerity of Tomorrow's World or SF that is not ironically space age or steampunk. It is barely possible to articulate a utopia, even (or especially) if you are on the left. Is this because of neoliberalism's domination of the ideological landscape, or is it that we are in a post-ideological age, of which the internet is either a symptom or a cause? When every single person in a train carriage is staring at a small illuminated device, it is an almost tacky vision of dystopia. Technology – along with turbo-capitalism – seems to me to be hastening the cultural and environmental apocalypse. The way I see it, digital consumerism makes us too passive to revolt, or to save the world. If we accept it as inevitable it will indeed lead to the end of history, in more ways than one.

Is the recent challenging of Fukuyama's thesis grounds for new optimism? It is still too early to tell. "What is happening to us in the early years of the century," Badiou writes, is "something that would appear not to have any clear name in any accepted language." Fukuyama himself speculated that the absence of idealism and struggle might yet spark their rekindling: "Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history," he wrote, "will serve to get history started once again." There is a glimmer of perverse hope in the fact that boredom is a luxury most of us can no longer afford.

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The End of History Revisited

• Yascha Mounk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Triumphalist Philosophy of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empirical Political Science Says History Has Ended

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Challenges to the Triumphalist View

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

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

The Democratic Recession

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

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

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

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

A Change in Attitude

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of the Populists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Contradictions of Populist Dictatorships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.  Fukuyama, “End of History?” 5.

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

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

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

7.  Fukuyama, “End of History,” 4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2020 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

Image Credit: David Harding/Shutterstock

Further Reading

Volume 29, Issue 3

Explaining Eastern Europe: Can Poland’s Backsliding Be Stopped?

• Wojciech Przybylski

Viewed until recently as an exemplar of democratic transformation, Poland is increasingly seen as a leading case of democratic backsliding, thanks to a series of illiberal measures pushed through by…

Volume 33, Issue 1

Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled

• Larry Diamond

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

Volume 12, Issue 4

Ten Years After the Soviet Breakup: Russia’s Hybrid Regime

• Lilia Shevtsova

In Russia, formally democratic institutions coexist uneasily with the reality of tightly consolidated bureaucratic and executive power.

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The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

David macintosh reaches the end of history ..

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

The History of The End of History

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Struggles

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

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

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

We will then indeed be the last men.

© David Macintosh 2015

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

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

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• Journal of Democracy

The End of History Revisited

• Yascha Mounk
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 31, Number 1, January 2020
• 10.1353/jod.2020.0002
• View Citation

Additional Information

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

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There are few names in the America, when it comes to the interpretation of American political and cultural history. Francis Fukuyama is one of them. He is a famous political commentator for his ‘ End of History ’ thesis that proclaimed the victory of the United States Led-liberal world order after the disintegration of Soviet Union. Perhaps, this was an open proclamation about the end of cold war and certainly the end of decade long ideological confrontation between the Capitalist and communist bloc. Initially, it was an article published by the Journal of National interest in the summer of 1989, which was later transformed into book.

The End of the History and the Last Man published by Free Press in 1992 was a landmark work of the famous geopolitical commentator Francis Fukuyama. The central theme of the book discuses about the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Liberalism led international system as an alternative to other ideological based system. The author commenced the above-mentioned dialogue after thoroughly examining the beginning of Third wave (used by famous Harvard based scholar Samuel P. Huntington) of Democracy of the early 1970s. For author, the spread of liberal democracy across various part of the globe became an ideological alternative to moribund ideological governments such as Fascism, dictatorship, monarchies, and off-course communism after the Soviet disintegration.

According to this book, after the death of communism in the 1980s, the history of the world has come to an end. Hence, from now onwards, the world will be led by the liberal based democratic international system and soon people will see the fruit of freedom, liberty and democracy. In this respect, the theoretical discussion of the book has openly declared the American liberal democracy as the viable model for the world in the coming Millennium—which the author then referred to the dawn of 21 st century. Perhaps, if we carefully analyze the synthetic vocabulary in text of the book, we will see a clear justification the irreversible historical victory of liberal democratic order over Soviet Communism.

Similarly, if we carefully examine the content of the book, in part I of the book, the author briefly opens an epistemological discussion concerning the centuries old ideological confrontation between civilizations. In this part of the book, the author clearly explains about the progress of history in the path of liberal democratic model. With this argument, the author openly claims that the progress of the human civilization has reached to the endpoint of the history. Basically, for epistemological and ontological analysis about ideological victory of the Liberal democratic system over the authoritarian communism, the author uses the philosophy of famous German philosopher Frederich Hegel, especially its interpretation by Alexander Kojeve.

Because, according to Hegelian dialectics , the whole discourse of the history an evolving phenomenon as a result of the confrontation between the two opposing forces—the pure Hegelian dialectics that refers to the confrontation between thesis and anti-thesis to form synthesis. In this regard, during the cold war the conflict between the Communist Soviet Union and Liberal capitalist United States was purely dialectical, which finally ended by propelling the pace of human historical progress in the direction of liberal democracy. Nonetheless, according to the End of history thesis, with the victory of liberal democracy after the end of cold has brought the human civilization at the final point. Hence, this historical endpoint is determined by the establishment of homogenized supranational system governed by the single ideology. Perhaps, this was the end conclusion of Alexander Kojeve interpretation of the Hegelian dialectics.

For Fukuyama, the epical end of the long time ideological battle between the authoritarian Communism and Liberal Capitalism has transformed the globe into post-political civilization free from ideological confrontation. In the respect, the establishment of the liberal based Washington led new world order is unchallenged and is the fate of humanity for the generations to come. To be more precise, according to book the term ‘ End of History’ resembles the final evolution of the human history and progress, which can be clearly understood through Hegelian dialectics. With this proposition, Fukuyama denied the Marxism view of the history that affirms that endpoint of the human history and progress will be the establishment of Communist system across the globe.

Similarly, the part II and part III of the book, the author commence the discussion about the legitimacy and rationality of the liberal democratic model by taking into the political and economic imperatives. For Fukuyama, politically, the liberal democratic model guarantees the civil liberties such as the freedom of speech, freedom of expression and the freedom of conscience. Likewise, the liberal democratic model also promises the freedom of press and public opinion. In contrast, by guaranteeing the civil liberties and other freedom, the liberal democratic model fulfills the standards of the modern society.

On the other hand, economically, the liberal democratic model supports the free-market economy that guarantees economic freedom to every person unlike the rigid and closed communist system. Hence, from the economic standpoint, the liberal democratic societies are secure and more productive in term wealth and capital. To justify this notion, Fukuyama used the Hegelian concept of labor, whose purpose of production is not only aimed at satisfying the material needs rather the labor also demands recognition and special title in the society. Perhaps, it is the human labor that changes and transforms the natural world through skills and productivity. In the latter domain, in order to justify the concept of human labor from the standpoint of Hegelian theory, Fukuyama uses the ancient Greek concept of ‘ Thymos’ —which refers to the word recognition. Thus, for Fukuyama the objectification of the human labor demands the right of property and thus, the Liberal democratic system ensures the property rights of the labor.

Similarly, in Part IV of the book, the author briefly discusses about the existence and survival of the liberal democratic model, which in the author view can only survive by upholding the democratic virtue of Thymos . Likewise, in Part V and final part of the book discusses about the emerging challenging and coming reservation concerning his legitimacy of the Liberal Democratic Model. In this part of the book, the author discusses about the coming about challenges to liberal democratic system in the Nietzschean context. Because, for the Nietzsche, the so-called universalization principle of the Liberal philosophy will result in the devaluation of all its values and virtues. In this respect, according to Fukuyama, the ontological persistence of the liberal values is key for the survival and preservation of the liberal democratic model.

In a nut shell, through the famous ‘ End of History ’ thesis, Francis Fukuyama has marked his name in the important pages of the American History. It is because, his theory has declared the victory of liberal democracy as the victory of the victory of the United States which became morbid with the dawn of the XXI century. As a matter of fact, Fukuyama proved himself wrong and distorted the historical realities by interpreting it through fictitious liberal outlook. Perhaps, his resentment concerning his outdated End of History thesis can be understood in his recent book “ Identity ” in which he retreats from his End of history thesis .

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Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History

By Louis Menand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Francis Fukuyama Predicted the End of History. It’s Back (Again).

In a new book, the political theorist offers a stout defense of liberalism against threats from left and right — and predicts that Ukraine will revive “the spirit of 1989.”

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By Jennifer Schuessler

• May 10, 2022

STANFORD, Calif. — On a recent morning, Francis Fukuyama was sitting in his basement office on the idyllic campus of Stanford University, talking about drones.

Not the Turkish-made drones that have been crucial to the defense of Ukraine, a cause that Fukuyama, a leading voice on American foreign policy for decades, has vocally championed. But the humbler, D.I.Y. ones he started building again about six months ago in his home workshop.

He has also built his own land-based rovers and fine furniture — a painstaking pursuit he picked up decades ago when he decided to turn a walnut tree that toppled in his yard into a pair of Pembroke tables. Just drying the wood, he said, took three years.

“What happens is I start this very ambitious project and it’s so exhausting that at the end of it, I get sick of it,” he said. “I have a lot of hobbies,” he added, a bit sheepishly.

One thing Fukuyama, 69, has not gotten sick of is trying to answer the biggest questions about democracy, human nature and the long arc of historical progress. In 1989, he shot to unlikely celebrity with his essay “The End of History?,” which argued that the decline of Communism marked the end of grand ideological struggle and the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Published a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall (and expanded into a best-selling book in 1992), it was an instant sensation, and has continued to inspire debate, mockery, memes and at least one nuclear-strength craft beer packaged inside a taxidermied squirrel.

Fukuyama moved on to more earthbound subjects, writing books on social trust, biotechnology, governance, the origins of political order and the decline (by his lights) of the neoconservative movement he emerged from. But he has also kept tinkering with — and defending — the thesis that made his name.

It looms behind his new book, “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” a short, staunch defense of classical liberal values against what he sees as threats from both the identitarian left and — far more dangerously — the populist, nationalist right.

The Fukuyama of 1989 saw the end of grand ideological struggle as potentially a little “boring.” But the Fukuyama of 2022 has mustered a bit more passion, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a country he has been visiting regularly since 2013.

In early March, he predicted that Russia was “headed for an outright defeat,” which will revive “the spirit of 1989” and “get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy.” He has been deluged with interview requests ever since.

“There’s been so much cynicism about the idea of democracy, including in many democratic countries,” he said. “This makes it so vivid why it’s better to live in a liberal society.”

Fukuyama (Frank to his friends) grew up in New York City, where his father was a minister and an academic. (He traces his own love of making things partly to his paternal grandfather, a Japanese immigrant who opened a hardware store in the Little Tokyo neighborhood in the early 1900s.)

He fell in love with philosophy at Cornell University, where he studied classics. If “The End of History” had a beginning, it might be a seminar on Plato’s “Republic” taught by the charismatic political philosopher Allan Bloom, the future author of “The Closing of the American Mind.”

In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates begins by debating the nature of justice. “It struck me as what people ought to be doing, asking these really big questions,” Fukuyama said. But how he got from there to neoconservative foreign policy, he said, “is a bit more complicated.”

After a dalliance with postmodern literary theory at Yale, he transferred to Harvard’s Ph.D. program in government, where he wrote a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East. Early in the Reagan administration, his friend and fellow neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz hired him at the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning.

It was during a later stint there, in the George H.W. Bush administration, that Fukuyama wrote “The End of History?,” which was originally delivered at an academic conference organized by Bloom.

Published in the journal The National Interest with commentaries by a half dozen leading figures, the essay (which was grounded in a reading of Hegel’s abstruse philosophy of history) landed like a bombshell, “outselling everything, even the pornography,” one Washington newsstand owner reported .

For some, it was one of the most important foreign policy essays since George Kennan’s famous “X” article, which called for the “containment” of Soviet Communism. For others, it was dangerous Cold War triumphalism.

Fukuyama, currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, still seems a bit amazed by it all, recalling a “Woody Allen-like experience” on an airplane.

“The guy next to me pulled out a copy of Time with an article about it,” he said. “I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, that’s me!’”

He realized he wanted to be a writer, not a bureaucrat. And success gave him the freedom, as he put it, “to teach myself stuff I didn’t know.”

For “ Trust ,” a study of the connections between culture and economic life, he dived into the work of the sociologist Max Weber. “Our Posthuman Future” took on biotechnology. His two-book “Origins of Political Order” series surveyed 50,000 years of human evolution. (“The research got a little out of hand,” he admitted.)

Fame, he said, also made him “less reliant on the good opinion of a circle of friends.” In 2004, he broke with his fellow neoconservatives over what he saw as their delusionally sunny assessment of the Iraq war.

In an article in The National Interest, he blasted people like the columnist Charles Krauthammer for promoting a reckless nation-building project untethered to reality, and betraying neoconservatism’s traditional wariness of grand social experiments.

Today, Fukuyama called the resulting schism “difficult” but liberating. “I could think on my own,” he said. He said he hasn’t spoken since to Wolfowitz (at the time, the deputy secretary of defense), though Fukuyama — a strong critic of Donald Trump — recently patched it up with another old neoconservative friend, William Kristol, following Kristol’s Never Trump turn.

Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of “ They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons” and current editor of The National Interest, said Fukuyama had a more reality-based perspective than his ex-friends.

“Intellectuals have a predilection for extremism,” Heilbrunn said. “He came out of an extreme movement, but I think he managed to keep his bearings.”

Fukuyama described it as a matter of correcting your ideas when experience proves them wrong. As for his politics today, he described himself as “more left-wing” on economics but center-right on many cultural issues.

Fukuyama has a modest, straight-shooting demeanor, but he can display a wry competitive streak. Asked about the contest between his “end of history” thesis and Samuel Huntington’s West-against-the-rest “clash of civilizations,” he offered a state of play.

“In the 1990s and early 2000s, it looked like I was ahead, but after Sept. 11, people started arguing he was right,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s conclusive that I’m going to lose.”

Liberal democracy, he believes, isn’t just an accidental, culturally contingent byproduct of a particular historical moment, as some of his critics have argued. “I do believe there’s an arc of history, and it bends toward some form of justice,” he said.

In his new book, released on Tuesday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Fukuyama argues that liberalism is threatened not by a rival ideology, but by “absolutized” versions of its own principles. On the right, the promoters of neoliberal economics have turned the ideal of individual autonomy and the free market into a religion, warping the economy and leading to dangerous systemic instability. And on the left, he argues, progressives have abandoned individual autonomy and free speech in favor of claims of group rights that threaten national cohesion.

“The answer to these discontents,” he writes, “isn’t to abandon liberalism, but to moderate it.”

Fukuyama said that Eric Chinski, his editor at Farrar, Straus, pushed him to engage with the most thoughtful critics of race-blind liberal individualism, like the Black philosopher Charles W. Mills , rather than the latest media-driven outrage stoked by anti-critical race theory activists.

He may disagree with them, but many critical race theorists in the academy, Fukuyama said, “are making serious arguments” in response to liberalism’s historical, and continuing, failure to fully extend equal rights to all.

He’s more scathing about the “postliberal” intellectuals of the American right, with their admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, like the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule (whom he describes as having “flirted with the idea of overtly authoritarian government”) and the political scientist Patrick Deneen .

But Fukuyama is less interested in polemics than practicalities. If he emerged in 1989 as a kind of prophet, today he’s a boots-on-the-ground social scientist, concerned with what it takes to keep systems and structures working.

One recent morning, as part of a class called “Policy Problem-Solving in the Real World,” he led two dozen graduate students through a simulation of a real-life anticorruption campaign in Indonesia. It’s an exercise he has led in countries around the world ( including Ukraine ), as part of a leadership-training program run by Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed until last year.

The students broke into groups playing the president, the police, civil society and so on, as Fukuyama peppered them with questions. “Oooh,” he said as one team issued a veiled ultimatum. “Someone is making threats.”

“It’s all about political power,” he explained, as the teams huddled. “You don’t win by making academic arguments. You win because you bring people to your side.”

The solutions he offers at the end of “Liberalism and Its Discontents” may seem boringly technocratic (“devolve power to the lowest appropriate level of government”) or abstract (“protect freedom of speech, with an appropriate understanding of limits”).

And his final sentence — a plea to recover “a sense of moderation, both individual and communal” — is hardly the kind of thing that sends people pouring into the streets.

He said he’s not sure what will. “One of the problems with ‘The End of History’ is that it did breed complacency,” he said. “But you have to be vigilant. And you have to keep struggling.”

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

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

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• Print length 464 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; Reissue edition (March 1, 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743284550
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743284554
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.44 inches
• #19 in Modern Western Philosophy
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About the author

Francis fukuyama.

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

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

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

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

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The End of History and the Last Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Francis Fukuyama (1992)

The End of History and the Last Man

Source : The End of History and the Last Man (1992), publ. Penguin. Just the Introduction reproduced here; Transcribed : by Andy Blunden in 1998, proofed and corrected February 2005.

By Way of an Introduction

The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled “The End of History?” which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such constituted the “end of history.” That is, while earlier forms of government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today’s stable democracies, like the United States, France, or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.

The original article excited an extraordinary amount of commentary and controversy, first in the United States, and then in a series of countries as different as England, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and South Korea. Criticism took every conceivable form, some of it based on simple misunderstanding of my original intent, and others penetrating more perceptively to the core of my argument. Many people were confused in the first instance by my use of the word “history.” Understanding history in a conventional sense as the occurrence of events, people pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chinese communist crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as evidence that “history was continuing,” and that I was ipso facto proven wrong.

And yet what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times. This understanding of History was most closely associated with the great German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. It was made part of our daily intellectual atmosphere by Karl Marx, who borrowed this concept of History from Hegel, and is implicit in our use of words like “primitive” or “advanced,” “traditional” or “modern,” when referring to different types of human societies. For both of these thinkers, there was a coherent development of human societies from simple tribal ones based on slavery and subsistence agriculture, through various theocracies, monarchies, and feudal aristocracies, up through modern liberal democracy and technologically driven capitalism. This evolutionary process was neither random nor unintelligible, even if it did not proceed in a straight line, and even if it was possible to question whether man was happier or better off as a result of historical “progress.”

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an “end of history”: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

The present book is not a restatement of my original article, nor is it an effort to continue the discussion with that article’s many critics and commentators. Least of all is it an account of the end of the Cold War, or any other pressing topic in contemporary politics. While this book is informed by recent world events, its subject returns to a very old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy? The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other has to do with what is termed the “struggle for recognition.”

It is of course not sufficient to appeal to the authority of Hegel, Marx, or any of their contemporary followers to establish the validity of a directional History. In the century and a half since they wrote, their intellectual legacy has been relentlessly assaulted from all directions. The most profound thinkers of the twentieth century have directly attacked the idea that history is a coherent or intelligible process; indeed, they have denied the possibility that any aspect of human life is philosophically intelligible. We in the West have become thoroughly pessimistic with regard to the possibility of overall progress in democratic institutions. This profound pessimism is not accidental, but born of the truly terrible political events of the first half of the twentieth century – two destructive world wars, the rise of totalitarian ideologies, and the turning of science against man in the form of nuclear weapons and environmental damage. The life experiences of the victims of this past century’s political violence – from the survivors of Hitlerism and Stalinism to the victims of Pol Pot – would deny that there has been such a thing as historical progress. Indeed, we have become so accustomed by now to expect that the future will contain bad news with respect to the health and security of decent, liberal, democratic political practices that we have problems recognising good news when it comes.

And yet, good news has come. The most remarkable development of the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the revelation of enormous weaknesses at the core of the world’s seemingly strong dictatorships, whether they be of the military-authoritarian Right, or the communist-totalitarian Left. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union to the Middle East and Asia, strong governments have been failing over the last two decades. And while they have not given way in all cases to stable liberal democracies, liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe. In addition, liberal principles in economics – the “free market” – have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in countries that had been, at the close of World War II, part of the impoverished Third World. A liberal revolution in economic thinking has sometimes preceded, sometimes followed, the move toward political freedom around the globe.

All of these developments, so much at odds with the terrible history of the first half of the century when totalitarian governments of the Right and Left were on the march, suggest the need to look again at the question of whether there is some deeper connecting thread underlying them, or whether they are merely accidental instances of good luck. By raising once again the question of whether there is such a thing as a Universal History of mankind, I am resuming a discussion that was begun in the early nineteenth century, but more or less abandoned in our time because of the enormity of events that mankind has experienced since then. While drawing on the ideas of philosophers like Kant and Hegel who have addressed this question before, I hope that the arguments presented here will stand on their own.

This volume immodestly presents not one but two separate efforts to outline such a Universal History. After establishing in Part I why we need to raise once again the possibility of Universal History, I propose an initial answer in Part II by attempting to use modern natural science as a regulator or mechanism to explain the directionality and coherence of History. Modern natural science is a useful starting point because it is the only important social activity that by common consensus is both cumulative and directional, even if its ultimate impact on human happiness is ambiguous. The progressive conquest of nature made possible with the development of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has proceeded according to certain definite rules laid down not by man, but by nature and nature’s laws.

The unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it, for two reasons. In the first place, technology confers decisive military advantages on those countries that possess it, and given the continuing possibility of war in the international system of states, no state that values its independence can ignore the need for defensive modernisation. Second, modern natural science establishes a uniform horizon of economic production possibilities. Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires. This process guarantees an increasing homogenisation of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances. All countries undergoing economic modernisation must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralised state, urbanise, replace traditional forms of social organisation like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism. The experiences of the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries indicate that while highly centralised economies are sufficient to reach the level of industrialisation represented by Europe in the 1950s, they are woefully inadequate in creating what have been termed complex “post-industrial” economies in which information and technological innovation play a much larger role.

But while the historical mechanism represented by modern natural science is sufficient to explain a great deal about the character of historical change and the growing uniformity of modern societies, it is not sufficient to account for the phenomenon of democracy. There is no question but that the world’s most developed countries are also its most successful democracies. But while modern natural science guides us to the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy, it does not deliver us to the Promised Land itself, for there is no economically necessary reason why advanced industrialisation should produce political liberty. Stable democracy has at times emerged in pre-industrial societies, as it did in the United States in 1776. On the other hand, there are many historical and contemporary examples of technologically advanced capitalism coexisting with political authoritarianism from Meiji Japan and Bismarckian Germany to present-day Singapore and Thailand. In many cases, authoritarian states are capable of producing rates of economic growth unachievable in democratic societies.

Our first effort to establish the basis for a directional history is thus only partly successful. What we have called the “logic of modern natural science” is in effect an economic interpretation of historical change, but one which (unlike its Marxist variant) leads to capitalism rather than socialism as its final result. The logic of modern science can explain a great deal about our world: why we residents of developed democracies are office workers rather than peasants eking out a living on the land, why we are members of labor unions or professional organisations rather than tribes or clans, why we obey the authority of a bureaucratic superior rather than a priest, why we are literate and speak a common national language.

But economic interpretations of history are incomplete and unsatisfying, because man is not simply an economic animal. In particular, such interpretations cannot really explain why we are democrats, that is, proponents of the principle of popular sovereignty and the guarantee of basic rights under a rule of law. It is for this reason that the book turns to a second, parallel account of the historical process in Part III, an account that seeks to recover the whole of man and not just his economic side. To do this, we return to Hegel and Hegel’s non-materialist account of History, based on the “struggle for recognition.”

According to Hegel, human beings like animals have natural needs and desires for objects outside themselves such as food, drink, shelter, and above all the preservation of their own bodies. Man differs fundamentally from the animals, however, because in addition he desires the desire of other men, that is, he wants to be “recognised.” In particular, he wants to be recognised as a human being, that is, as a being with a certain worth or dignity. This worth in the first instance is related to his willingness to risk his life in a struggle over pure prestige. For only man is able to overcome his most basic animal instincts – chief among them his instinct for self-preservation – for the sake of higher, abstract principles and goals. According to Hegel, the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to seek to make the other “recognise” their humanness by staking their lives in a mortal battle. When the natural fear of death leads one combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born. The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige. And precisely because the goal of the battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first glimmer of human freedom.

The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western political philosophy, and constitutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human personality. It was first described by Plato in the Republic , when he noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos , or “spiritedness.” Much of human behaviour can be explained as a combination of the first two parts, desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things outside themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get them. But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today’s popular language we would call “self-esteem.” The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos . It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger . Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame , and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride . The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.

By Hegel’s account, the desire to be recognised as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to the death for prestige. The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death. But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have characterised the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves. The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way whatsoever. But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as well, because he was not recognised by other masters, but slaves whose humanity was as yet incomplete. Dissatisfaction with the flawed recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a “contradiction” that engendered further stages of history.

Hegel believed that the “contradiction” inherent in the relationship of lordship and bondage was finally overcome as a result of the French and, one would have to add, American revolutions. These democratic revolutions abolished the distinction between master and slave by making the former slaves their own masters and by establishing the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The inherently unequal recognition of masters and slaves is replaced by universal and reciprocal recognition, where every citizen recognises the dignity and humanity of every other citizen, and where that dignity is recognised in turn by the state through the granting of rights .

This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of contemporary liberal democracy differs in a significant way from the Anglo-Saxon understanding that was the theoretical basis of liberalism in countries like Britain and the United States. In that tradition, the prideful quest for recognition was to be subordinated to enlightened self-interest – desire combined with reason – and particularly the desire for self-preservation of the body. While Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison believed that rights to a large extent existed as a means of preserving a private sphere where men can enrich themselves and satisfy the desiring parts of their souls, Hegel saw rights as ends in themselves, because what truly satisfies human beings is not so much material prosperity as recognition of their status and dignity. With the American and French revolutions, Hegel asserted that history comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process – the struggle for recognition – has now been satisfied in a society characterised by universal and reciprocal recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible.

The desire for recognition, then, can provide the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics that was missing from the economic account of History in Part II. Desire and reason are together sufficient to explain the process of industrialisation, and a large part of economic life more generally. But they cannot explain the striving for liberal democracy, which ultimately arises out of thymos , the part of the soul that demands recognition. The social changes that accompany advanced industrialisation, in particular universal education, appear to liberate a certain demand for recognition that did not exist among poorer and less educated people. As standards of living increase, as populations become more cosmopolitan and better educated, and as society as a whole achieves a greater equality of condition, people begin to demand not simply more wealth but recognition of their status. If people were nothing more than desire and reason, they would be content to live in market-oriented authoritarian states like Franco’s Spain, or a South Korea or Brazil under military rule. But they also have a thymotic pride in their own self-worth, and this leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognising their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realisation that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition.

An understanding of the importance of the desire for recognition as the motor of history allows us to reinterpret many phenomena that are otherwise seemingly familiar to us, such as culture, religion, work, nationalism, and war. Part IV is an attempt to do precisely this, and to project into the future some of the different ways that the desire for recognition will be manifest. A religious believer, for example, seeks recognition for his particular gods or sacred practices, while a nationalist demands recognition for his particular linguistic, cultural, or ethnic group. Both of these forms of recognition are less rational than the universal recognition of the liberal state, because they are based on arbitrary distinctions between sacred and profane, or between human social groups. For this reason, religion, nationalism, and a people’s complex of ethical habits and customs (more broadly “culture”) have traditionally been interpreted as obstacles to the establishment of successful democratic political institutions and free-market economies.

But the truth is considerably more complicated, for the success of liberal politics and liberal economics frequently rests on irrational forms of recognition that liberalism was supposed to overcome. For democracy to work, citizens need to develop an irrational pride in their own democratic institutions, and must also develop what Tocqueville called the “art of associating,” which rests on prideful attachment to small communities. These communities are frequently based on religion, ethnicity, or other forms of recognition that fall short of the universal recognition on which the liberal state is based. The same is true for liberal economics. Labor has traditionally been understood in the Western liberal economic tradition as an essentially unpleasant activity undertaken for the sake of the satisfaction of human desires and the relief of human pain. But in certain cultures with a strong work ethic, such as that of the Protestant entrepreneurs who created European capitalism, or of the elites who modernised Japan after the Meiji restoration, work was also undertaken for the sake of recognition. To this day, the work ethic in many Asian countries is sustained not so much by material incentives, as by the recognition provided for work by overlapping social groups, from the family to the nation, on which these societies are based. This suggests that liberal economics succeeds not simply on the basis of liberal principles, but requires irrational forms of thymos as well.

The struggle for recognition provides us with insight into the nature of international politics. The desire for recognition that led to the original bloody battle for prestige between two individual combatants leads logically to imperialism and world empire. The relationship of lordship and bondage on a domestic level is naturally replicated on the level of states, where nations as a whole seek recognition and enter into bloody battles for supremacy. Nationalism, a modern yet not-fully-rational form of recognition, has been the vehicle for the struggle for recognition over the past hundred years, and the source of this century’s most intense conflicts. This is the world of “power politics,” described by such foreign policy “realists” as Henry Kissinger.

But if war is fundamentally driven by the desire for recognition, it stands to reason that the liberal revolution which abolishes the relationship of lordship and bondage by making former slaves their own masters should have a similar effect on the relationship between states. Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be recognised as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognised as equal. A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognise one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values. Nationalism is currently on the rise in regions like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union where peoples have long been denied their national identities, and yet within the world’s oldest and most secure nationalities, nationalism is undergoing a process of change. The demand for national recognition in Western Europe has been domesticated and made compatible with universal recognition, much like religion three or four centuries before.

The fifth and final part of this book addresses the question of the “end of history,” and the creature who emerges at the end, the “last man.” In the course of the original debate over the National Interest article, many people assumed that the possibility of the end of history revolved around the question of whether there were viable alternatives to liberal democracy visible in the world today. There was a great deal of controversy over such questions as whether communism was truly dead, whether religion or ultranationalism might make a comeback, and the like. But the deeper and more profound question concerns the goodness of Liberal democracy itself, and not only whether it will succeed against its present-day rivals. Assuming that liberal democracy is, for the moment, safe from external enemies, could we assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefinitely? Or is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system? There is no doubt that contemporary democracies face any number of serious problems, from drugs, homelessness and crime to environmental damage and the frivolity of consumerism. But these problems are not obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles, nor so serious that they would necessarily lead to the collapse of society as a whole, as communism collapsed in the 1980s.

Writing in the twentieth century, Hegel’s great interpreter, Alexandre Kojève, asserted intransigently that history had ended because what he called the “universal and homogeneous state” – what we can understand as liberal democracy – definitely solved the question of recognition by replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and equal recognition. What man had been seeking throughout the course of history – what had driven the prior “stages of history” – was recognition. In the modern world, he finally found it, and was “completely satisfied.” This claim was made seriously by Kojève, and it deserves to be taken seriously by us. For it is possible to understand the problem of politics over the millennia of human history as the effort to solve the problem of recognition. Recognition is the central problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism, and the desire to dominate. But while it has a dark side, it cannot simply be abolished from political life, because it is simultaneously the psychological ground for political virtues like courage, public-spiritedness, and justice. All political communities must make use of the desire for recognition, while at the same time protecting themselves from its destructive effects. If contemporary constitutional government has indeed found a formula whereby all are recognised in a way that nonetheless avoids the emergence of tyranny, then it would indeed have a special claim to stability and longevity among the regimes that have emerged on earth.

But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies “completely satisfying?” The long-term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question. In Part V we sketch two broad responses, from the Left and the Right, respectively. The Left would say that universal recognition in liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation’s absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognise equal people unequally.

The second, and in my view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution’s commitment to human equality. This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a “last man” who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favour of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced “men without chests,” composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos , clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognised as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human.

Following Nietzsche’s line of thought, we are compelled to ask the following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a “last man” with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the “peace and prosperity” of contemporary liberal democracy? Does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition constitute the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies, but also in modern liberal democracies? Will not their future survival depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be recognised not just as equal, but as superior to others? And might not the fear of becoming contemptible “last men” not lead men to assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial “first men” engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons?

This books seeks to address these questions. They arise naturally once we ask whether there is such a thing as progress, and whether we can construct a coherent and directional Universal History of mankind. Totalitarianisms of the Right and Left have kept us too busy to consider the latter question seriously for the better part of this century. But the fading of these totalitarianisms, as the century comes to an end, invites us to raise this old question one more time.

Further Reading: Hegel | Master-Servant Relation | Hegel on Recognition | Kojève | Kant | Nietzsche de Beauvoir on Master-Servant | Axel Honneth on Struggle for Recognition | Fukuyama on Trust and Recognition

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