Fukuyama: 25 years after the "End of History"
- Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the publication of his infamous essay, "The End of History?", Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal reflecting on how the world has changed since he declared the end of history:
I argued that History (in the grand philosophical sense) was turning out very differently from what thinkers on the left had imagined. The process of economic and political modernization was leading not to communism, as the Marxists had asserted and the Soviet Union had avowed, but to some form of liberal democracy and a market economy. History, I wrote, appeared to culminate in liberty: elected governments, individual rights, an economic system in which capital and labor circulated with relatively modest state oversight.
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So has my end-of-history hypothesis been proven wrong, or if not wrong, in need of serious revision? I believe that the underlying idea remains essentially correct, but I also now understand many things about the nature of political development that I saw less clearly during the heady days of 1989.
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Twenty-five years later, the most serious threat to the end-of-history hypothesis isn't that there is a higher, better model out there that will someday supersede liberal democracy; neither Islamist theocracy nor Chinese capitalism cuts it. Once societies get on the up escalator of industrialization, their social structure begins to change in ways that increase demands for political participation. If political elites accommodate these demands, we arrive at some version of democracy.
- An article by Eliane Glaser in The Guardian considers whether Fukuyama's hypothesis is a rightwing argument in disguise:
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.
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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."
- Late last year the International Forum for Democratic Studies interviewed Fukuyama about his article Democracy and the Quality of the State:
- Finally, the CATO Institute just held a conference where Fukuyama and several other scholars discussed "The End of History 25 Years Later". Videos and podcasts of the panels are available at the conference site. Description of the conference and list of participants:
In an article that went viral in 1989, Francis Fukuyama advanced the notion that with the death of communism history had come to an end in the sense that liberalism — democracy and market capitalism — had triumphed as an ideology. Fukuyama will be joined by other scholars to examine this proposition in the light of experience during the subsequent quarter century.
Featuring Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History?”; Michael Mandelbaum, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; Marian Tupy, Cato Institute; Adam Garfinkle, editor, American Interest; Paul Pillar, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Brookings Institution; and John Mueller, Ohio State University and Cato Institute.