"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."
The End of History and the Last Man. p. xii
Modern readers are apt to understand the expression "the End of History" in an eschatological sense; this is incorrect. Read "End" as "stable state" and "History" as "experimentation with different social systems".
History can be viewed as a succession of different social arrangements, successive experiments in different systems of satisfying human needs and desires.
The premise of Hegel and Fukuyama is that a that a "best" social system, a system which optimizises this satisfaction, is possible and would be stable.
With the global adoption of this "best" social system, other social systems become untenable, in something of the same way that stone tools were replaced by metal ones or foraging by agriculture.
The "End of History" is not some cessation of daily events of greater and lesser note (how could such a thing be possible?), but rather the global adoption of this "best" social system, at which time the historical progression of trials of various systems comes to a halt.
Thus commentators who seize upon noteworthy events and say, "See, history continues!" miss Fukuyama's point. Such events are history in the ordinary sense of "chronicle of events". However they are not history in his specialized sense of "events which make the eventual triumph of a particular social system more likely".
Fukuyama's picture of evolution toward stability is one more example of the Western myth* of Progress and/or of Cosma Shalizi's "secular millenium".
* "Myth" here in the sense of "ideal" or "paradigm", without implication of falsehood.
"It is not often that one has the opportunity to argue about Hegel in The National Interest
(or anywhere else, for that matter). One must take advantage of it."
Gertrude Himmelfarb
-- from the Special Reprint
"...the first serious attempt to provide a rounded evaluation, which is sympathetic to Fukuyama's aims.
...it corrects both many misinformed criticisms which have been made of Fukuyama, and some of Fukuyama's own mistakes and omissions, particularly his failure to think of the 'end' of history in the sense in which that has been developed in realised eschatology. Written with great learning and clarity, it makes a powerful case for the fundamental importance and contemporary relevance of Fukuyama's work and for works of the same genre.... Their work should be read both by all who share this belief and, as a challenge, by those who do not."
review by Professor Leon Pompa, University of Birmingham.
"Consider for a moment Fukuyama's premises. He suggests that there are two motors of history, which drive the evolution of all social institutions. First, there is the logic and direction of modern science. Scientific inquiry is a rational process whose resulting knowledge is cumulative and, ultimately, irreversible--though some knowledge may be lost, the underlying truths upon which this knowledge is founded persist, leading to its eventual rediscovery. The fruits of science greatly affect the distribution and efficient use of scarce human and natural resources, serve as a tool for governments (particularly, as a means of affecting the outcome of military actions), permit the creation of new economic markets, and, ultimately, directly influence the quality of life for the individual. The second motor of history is the individual's struggle for recognition. This innate drive for significance and meaning in the presence of a much larger and potentially dehumanizing society causes individuals to fight for human dignity, to rise above their current conditions, and, in the process, to change themselves and often the nature of the social institutions around them."
"On August 3, 2004, Dr. Francis Fukuyama, the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, spoke at a dinner jointly sponsored by The National Interest and The Nixon Center. ...
'I still consider myself to be a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative' , he declared.
Dr. Fukuyama identified three areas where the Bush Administration has made mistakes in the conduct of American foreign policy, errors that have come to be identified with the neoconservatives. First, the embrace of social engineering as embodied in the whole process of exporting democracy, especially to the Middle East. Second, the lack of appreciation of the need for international legitimacy. Finally, taking an Israeli mindset about the Middle East and misapplying it to America’s role in the world. ...
Dr. Fukuyama’s neoconservatism and that of some identified as being close to the Bush Administration, such as Dr. Krauthammer, can be distinguished by the care with which the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom) is exercised."
-- a page on this site on / Noam Chomsky
"The Han, then, developed a rigorously factual approach to history at a very early time in Chinese history. In government, the Han thinkers essentially adapted the Legalist attitude that human beings fundamentally behave badly, but they changed the doctrine significantly. The Han thinkers believed that people behaved in a depraved way because they had no choice; economic and social conditions forced them to behave badly. For at heart, all human beings desire only material well-being; in order to make people behave virtuously, the government should make it possible that the ends of virtue (the well-being of others) and the pursuit of individual well-being should be coterminous, that is, material benefits should accrue to virtuous acts (that's one-half of the Legalist formula). The emperor would bring this about through two means. First, the emperor and the government is responsible for setting up conditions in which people can derive material benefit from productive labor; the stress on productivity, of course, is derived from the Legalists and Mo Tzu. Second, the emperor can provide an example. It is the job of the emperor to care for the welfare of his people (Confucianism), yet at the same time, the Emperor should withdraw from active rule (Taoism). How did the Emperor rule then? By providing a living example of benevolence. This model of Chinese government would remain dominant well into the twentieth century."
"My observation, made in 1989 on the eve of the collapse of communism, was that this evolutionary process did seem to be bringing ever larger parts of the world toward modernity. And if we looked beyond liberal democracy and markets, there was nothing else towards which we could expect to evolve; hence the end of history. While there were retrograde areas that resisted that process, it was hard to find a viable alternative civilisation that people actually wanted to live in after the discrediting of socialism, monarchy, fascism and other types of authoritarianism.
This view has been challenged by many people, and perhaps most articulately by Samuel Huntington. ...
Modernity has a cultural basis. Liberal democracy and free markets do not work everywhere. They work best in societies with certain values whose origins may not be entirely rational. It is not an accident that modern liberal democracy emerged first in the Christian west, since the universalism of democratic rights can be seen as a secular form of Christian universalism."
"Of all contemporary cultural systems, the Islamic world has the fewest democracies (Turkey alone qualifies), and contains no countries that have made the transition to developed nation status in the manner of South Korea or Singapore.""The Islamic world" would be what? Indonesia is the largest Muslim country and is industrializing. Personally, I suspect a lack of material resources may be handicapping the development of many countries in the Islamic sphere.
"This redemption narrative is our most persistent myth, and it has a dangerous flip side. When a few men decide to live their myths, to be larger than life, it can't help but have an impact on all the lives that unfold in regular sizes. People suddenly look insignificant by comparison, easy to sacrifice in the name of some greater purpose. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was supposed to have buried this epic narrative in its rubble. This was capitalism's decisive victory. Ideology is dead, let's go shopping.
The end-of-history theory was understandably infuriating to those whose sweeping ideas lost the gladiatorial battles...."
"... can every country become a democracy?
My answer here is a cautiously optimistic one."
"We always tend to think that our present state of affairs is the End of History, the final perfection of a long historical process of trial and error. Probably most Americans have internalized the idea that full-franchise representative democracy is the best possible system of government, the end and summit of Anglo-Saxon constitutional development."