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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A debt to Hegel and others

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more: Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

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

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

Limitations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A more sober stance

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

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

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

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

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• The End of History and the Last Man Summary

by Francis Fukuyama

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To start describing democracy and its effect on the worldwide population, you have to start at the beginning. Well, maybe not the very beginning in Athens, Greece, but Fukuyama does throw readers back to the 18th century during the French Revolution. Though often overlooked in America, the French Revolution was a pivotal event in shaping the history of the globe. For one, feudalism was abolished once and for all, leaving the bottom spectrum of social classes to fend for themselves.

Deciding that democracy was the best choice (and partly inspired by the choice for democracy after the American Revolution), the French subsequently inspired surrounding countries to adopt democracy as well, creating a pre-Vietnam War domino effect.

Democracy continued spreading across Europe, up until World War II. Previously, the Soviet Union had sided with democratic nations, like America and present-day United Kingdom in both World Wars I and II, but now there was no buffer between the two ideas (democracy and communism) geographically.

Some argue that the Cold War began after World War I, other say after World War II, and other extend the deadline to the 1950's. But when did it really start? Tensions between democratic and communist nations were already visible after World War I - communists were even running for the United States presidency against Roosevelt. But, the Red Scare didn't take hold until after World War II, when the Soviet Union quickly discovered the secret to nuclear warfare and became an established nuclear power.

Despite diplomatic and verbal wars, no "real" fighting took place during the Cold War. That is to say, not directly. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis are prime examples of how each side saw the other as a threat, and wanted to push their lifestyle.

The Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, after internal struggles could no longer be contained. Surrounding "satellite states" (in eastern Europe) dropped their communist tendencies in search of democracy. Though some of these nations remained communist, like China, the true aspect of Communism has been significantly eased.

Now that there is no "real" communism, all that is left is democracy, right? Not exactly. Still, there are nations, like North Korea, that are authoritarian in nature. Some countries have little or no centralization. But, as time goes on, the trend continues - the world is shifting towards being democratic, as the system is beneficial to both business and people alike.

Fukuyama continues by explaining the pros and cons of a fully democratic world, which he is convinced we are heading into soon. The pros are obvious - free trade, equal rights, and overall better living conditions. But, he does bring to light the fact that there will still be class divisions, with some disadvantaged countries remaining disadvantaged - even if they shift to democracy.

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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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More Proof That This Really Is the End of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An Analysis of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man

Welcome to the "Ways In" section of this Macat analysis. This is an introductory section, summarising the most important points of this work in one 10-minute read. Macat's Analyses are definitive studies of the most important books and papers in the humanities and social sciences. Each analysis is written by an academic specialist in the field. Each one harnesses the latest research to investigate the influences that led to the work being written, the ideas that make it important, and the impact that it has had in the world. A powerful resource for students, teachers and lifelong learners everywhere, our analyses are proven by the University of Cambridge to improve critical thinking skills. Read the whole of this analysis and explore our library at www.macat.com.

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United States of America (USA) is country which known as superpower country after collapse of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as like mentioned by Francis Fukuyama on his book; The end of history and the last man. He assumed that the end of history is won by USA, there is not rival for USA anymore in order to against his argument. The writer is going to analysis the existences of USA as superpower country, is it still exist or not? The purpose of this paper is to give evidence that Francis Fukuyama was wrong, about the winner of the world till end of the world. To challenge the USA which as like Fukuyama assumed, the writer is using the realism theory to simply this paper. On this paper the writer is using secondary data which based qualitative methods that based on books, journal, article, legal document and news which can be used as references to support this paper.

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Eric Gans has consistently endorsed Francis Fukuyama’s "End of History" thesis that liberal democracy and free markets constitute the ultimate if not final system of human organization. While Fukuyama was indeed often persuasive on geopolitics and globalization, I argue that at the societal level his projections are contradicted by demographic and psycho-social trends in Japan. In this context, I also re-consider Fukuyama’s "last man," as an index not of heroism, but happiness. Fukuyama himself made much of Japan as a kind of advance guard for world historical developments, but Japan’s "bubble economy" was already collapsing when his thesis came out. A continuous period of stagnation and economic insecurity has followed, along with persistently elevated levels of suicide and depression. The widespread psychological distress, excellently documented by Junko Kitanaka (Depression in Japan), has ushered in the trend of mass palliative medication and to some extent redefined the terms of social existence itself. There has also been a rise in social isolation: a substantial number of people are removing themselves from society, or any social interaction at all. Finally, the burgeoning population of the elderly has presented increasingly urgent, even intractable problems of care in a society no longer buffered by the bonds of extended families or traditional associations. Given these demographics, democratic mandates tend more and more to be socialist in nature. Fukuyama was not wrong to put Japan, and by extension East Asia, at the cutting edge of history, but developments like these call into question the sustainability of his "post-historical" future. Advanced consumer culture seems to manifest a disconcertingly literal interpretation of "last man."

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The End Of History And The Last Man

Reviewed by andrew j. pierre, by francis fukuyama.

The most intriguing aspect of this best seller is that its author is a former official of the State Department's policy planning staff, a RAND Corporation analyst and a Harvard Ph.D. in Soviet foreign policy. The causal relationship is not clear between this experience and the controversial thesis that liberal democracy as a system of government has emerged fully victorious over other philosophies such as fascism, communism and socialism. The notion that "history" has reached its end with the emergence of liberal democracy owes much to the ideas of Hegel and, more particularly, an obscure French interpreter of his named Alexandre Kojeve. But one wonders how this "feel good" thesis is viewed in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where liberal democracies are often fragile at best and where basic human needs are not being met. Even in Western terms this provocative tract seems more attuned to the self-congratulatory 1980s than the problematic years ahead. Yet whatever one's response, we are indebted to Fukuyama for such an ambitious work of political philosophy, more typical of the European intellectual tradition than our own, and look forward to his next thoughts-beyond the "last man."

• More By Andrew J. Pierre

The End of History and the Last Man

63 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Why did Francis Fukuyama use a Hegelian framework for The End of History and the Last Man ? What are the benefits and drawbacks of using Western evolutionary historicism to understand the development of history and ideology?

Is Fukuyama’s theory about directional historical evolution leading toward the formation of liberal democracies around the world still relevant in the 21st century? Use textual evidence as well as events that took place after 1992 to back up your claims.

How does the historic context of the Cold War inform Fukuyama’s thinking in this book? Use examples from distinct geographic regions, including Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, to answer this question.

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By Francis Fukuyama

Our Posthuman Future

The Origins of Political Order

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Filmed on Thursday June 28, 02007

Francis Fukuyama

'the end of history' revisited.

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

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

Democracy versus Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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