After September 11 2001, a cottage industry of journalists popped up to write editorials about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” one of the most influential ideas in political philosophy during the 1990s. The consensus: Fukuyama’s ideas were now obsolete. September 11 suggested that many people, including religious fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia, were so embedded in history that they’d willingly kill themselves (and thousands others) in a terror attack that itself amounted to an historical argument: “History isn't over, bitches.” The editorialists argued that historical analysis still mattered. One damn thing continued to follow another. Fukuyama had gotten it all wrong. 

 

Such “gotcha” pieces reappeared after the 2016, the year of right-wing populism, Brexit, and Donald Trump; after the 2020 COVID pandemic; after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine; after Xi’s consolidation of total power within the Chinese Community Party; and in anticipation of the geopolitical effects of climate change. According to public intellectuals, the “peace dividend” was over. Fukuyama had been a fantasist, someone who was not merely fooled by the euphoria of 1989—the victory of Western liberalism over Eastern Bloc socialism— but who contributed to the mania of that moment. He bore responsibility for that moment. He embodied that moment as much as Jesus Jones’s hit song “Right Here Right Now” (the one with the line about “watching the world wake up from history”). Throughout the 1990s, Fukuyama had been the chief theorizer of Western hegemony: the equivalent for Anglo-American liberalism of Alexandr Dugin for Russian nationalism. (I’m exaggerating some of Timothy Snyder’s rhetoric here, but only a little.) 

 

In short, Fukuyama had turned the collapse of the Soviet Union into a dangerous fairy tale. He encouraged Western complacency, what Snyder calls “the politics of inevitability.” Because of Fukuyama, we were caught unaware by the return of history in 2001 and 2022. Despite his best efforts to defend his thesis and adjust his ideas, Fukuyama had become a punching bag for people with (I suspect) puny minds. 

 

And so earlier this year, a year of wars and ethnic cleansings, I decided to read Fukuyama’s 1992 statement of purpose, The End of History and the Last Man. I wanted to study the book as a primary document: not to mock its bad predictions or laugh at how poorly it holds up three decades later, but to understand why the idea of capital-U, capital-H “Universal History” was possible at the end of the Cold War…especially because Fukuyama grounded his ideas in the works of Kant, Hegel, and Marx: German philosophers who aren’t typically associated with the Anglo-Scottish liberalism that had just defeated Soviet Communism. Serious historians had rejected the view that history was teleological or universal long before 1989. Hegel and Marx were surely now discredited, right? 

 

But I love Hegel and Marx, and so I suspected that Fukuyama’s argument must have been more complicated than the title of his book—a deceptively simple slogan that journalists couldn’t help misinterpreting—suggested. Summaries and soundbites are usually wrong; I suspected that Fukuyama, however wrong he may have been, had been widely misunderstood. I wanted to finally sit down, read beyond the book’s title, and see what Fukuyama had really written. I wanted to understand The End of History as an historical artifact from a different time, a different world. 

The dust jacket of The End of History and the Last Man features ecstatic blurbs from Allan Bloom, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, George Will, and (perhaps worst of all) Tom Wolfe. Not a great sign. Future president of Georgia Eduward Shevardnadze—you might call him the Georgian equivalent of Václav Havel or Lech Wałęsa—is probably the least ignoble name among the blurbers. 

The dust jacket also reminds us that Fukuyama was a resident consultant at the RAND Corporation. Ruh-roh. 

Once you start reading the actual book, you’ll notice that Fukuyama’s chapters are surprisingly short and the prose is surprisingly clear. A little too short and a little too clear. The bulk of Fukuyama’s argument is that the Anglo-Scottish liberal tradition has wrongly rejected Hegel’s account of capital-H History. But Fukuyama’s summaries of Hegel and Fukuyama’s favorite interpreter of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, are either entry-level, underdeveloped, or simply wrong. For instance: Fukuyama doesn’t adequately account for the tensions between Hobbes/Locke/Smith/Mill (the philosophical tradition that most Western democracies subscribe to) and Kant/Hegel/Marx/Kojève (the tradition they reject), especially the tensions between Anglo-Scottish and German conceptions of freedom. This is a critical oversight, but exploring these tensions would have required a longer, less accessible analysis.

Fukuyama also breezes through a history of the post-war era, arguing for the unprecedented success of liberal democracy on a global scale. He describes the rise of liberalism not only in Europe and East Asia but also in Latin America and Africa (with special attention to the then-collapsing apartheid regime in South Africa). Here are some breathless selections from the book’s first half:

As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy.

The apparent number of choices that countries face in determining how they will organize themselves politically and economically has been diminishing over time. … What is emerging victorious, in other words, is not so much liberal practice, as the liberal idea (emphasis Fukuyama’s).
 
…we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better (emphasis Fukuyama’s).

The last quote is a sunnier version of Mark Fisher’s contention that global capitalism asserts hegemony by suppressing the human imagination. We can more easily imagine the end of the world, argued Fisher, than we can imagine the end of capitalism. From a Marxist perspective, that’s basically how ideological superstructures work. Fukuyama, for his part, anticipates Fisher’s objection: “How would we know if there are any remaining contradictions in our present order?” His answers aren’t satisfying. (The correct answer, by the way, is “Wait and see.”)

Fukuyama may have been correct that, after 1991, “international life will be seen increasingly as a competition not between rival ideologies—since most economically successful states will be organized along similar lines—but between different cultures.” Samuel Huntington would agree, as would the political philosophers who are trying to make sense of the recent identitarian turn in Western politics. But if anything, cultures are even more embedded in historical structures than ideologies are. In short, I don’t understand why Fukuyama’s identifies ideology with History but not culture. I certainly don’t think you can reach that conclusion from Hegel, no matter how structural (re: transhistorical) Hegel’s concept of History may be.
 
3. Masters and Slaves
Alright, now I should probably say something about Fukuyama’s concept of thymos.   

Hegel may not have promoted liberalism (unlike Locke, Smith, and Mill), but he (for Fukuyama) best described the engines that drive History toward its liberal end. These engines are fueled by recognition (which Fukuyama identifies with the Greek thymos). This whole process is part of the master/slave dynamic that Hegel made famous.

A summary of the master/slave dynamic: in Hegel, self-conscious subjects crave recognition from other self-conscious subjects. In order to gain recognition and stature, a powerful subject (the master) will use his physical courage and “will-to-power” to exert control over another subject (the slave). But the slave can’t offer the master the recognition that the master craves because, well, he’s a slave: he cannot recognize the master as a self-conscious subject because he doesn’t control his own will.

Meanwhile, the slave (who also craves recognition) achieves self-consciousness through the world-making work of his own hands (which he does on behalf of the master). And the master is now incapable of maintaining self-consciousness because he depends on the slave’s work and recognition, which doesn’t count as real recognition because it is compulsory. Or something. I don’t totally understand it because…well, Hegel is difficult to understand. But he argues that this structural dynamic plays out throughout all human societies and generates History.

Fukuyama argues that all History (and history) is driven by this desire for recognition, or thymos; that the scientific revolutions of Enlightenment Europe gave nations the technologies to pursue recognition through new, powerful weapons of war; that the spread and adoption of these technologies promoted national and individual recognition on a mass scale; and that liberalism is the inevitable outcome of this process, a process that Fukuyama disturbingly names “the machine.”

In short, Fukuyama takes Hegel’s suprastructural notion of History and inserts it into the actual events of history.

Here’s the thing: I like Hegel. A lot. And I want to Fukuyama’s account of recognition as an organizing principle of civic life to be convincing, just as I want to find Marilynne Robinson’s glowing account of Calvinism convincing. But…it’s not. Fukuyama is mostly correct that, for Hegel, the desire for recognition (as opposed to the efficiency of markets) drives History. But Hegel’s account of History’s end is very, very far from Fukuyama’s vision of global liberalism. On this, Fukuyama relies too heavily on Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel (and I’m not even sure Fukuyama gets Kojève entirely right). This leads Fukuyama to some bizarre claims.

For instance, Fukuyama argues that struggle for recognition, not self-preservation (per Hobbes), “is the original source of imperialism.” He also claims that Britain gave up its colonies after World War II because the British “accepted the modern world’s verdict that colonialism was an illegitimate form of domination.” Which…yeah, the British Empire was a centuries-long project that was built via millions of different actions and contingencies. Were these actions and contingencies simply struggles for recognition? And did the British really abandon that empire because they craved greater recognition from their liberal peers?

In his essay “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell makes the case that the British maintained their empire into the 20th century to “avoid looking a fool.” I suppose that trying to save face is itself a kind of desire for recognition. But the fact that the British Empire gave up its colonies at the precise moment it ran out of money and manpower necessary to maintain the colonies makes me think that something other than recognition is at work here.

4. There’s history, and then there’s History
Fukuyama is billed as a political philosopher, which frees him from the rigor demanded of political scientists and historians. But The End of History isn’t even a work of heavy political philosophy. Who was its intended audience? Certainly not Allan Bloom or Irving Kristol, who would have been well-acquainted with the concepts Fukuyama spends so much time explaining. His analysis is very thin…but not so thin that his engagement with Hegel would be easily digested by lay readers.

So who was Fukuyama writing for? I have to imagine his target audience was policymakers, people who imagine they are smarter than everyone else because (as George H.W. Bush once quipped) if they weren't smarter than everyone else, how come they are in charge of the government?

Such an audience is unlikely to notice just how shallow is Fukuyama’s historical analysis. In 1992, he clearly saw world-historical paradigm shifts occurring over a period of about two hundred years. He constructed a model of Universal History based on an historical record that more or less begins in the 1789 and, at best, extends back as far as the 16th century. In the book, he does make cursory references to political systems that aren’t liberalism, socialism, or fascism: he lists monarchy, oligarchy, and Greek democracy as systems that had been tried and then discarded, but he has virtually nothing to say about them. For someone writing a Universal History, Fukuyama seems disturbingly uninterested in most of human history. Early in the book, he writes:

But it is precisely if we look not just at the past fifteen years, but at the whole scope of history, that liberal democracy begins to occupy a special kind of place (author’s emphasis).
 
At this point, Fukuyama shows us a graph that displays the impressive increase of liberal democracies since 1790, an increase that becomes especially pronounced in the years since 1900 and extremely pronounced in the years following the Second World War. This is evidence for Fukuyama that “monarchy, theocracy, fascism, communist totalitarianism” are exhausted as alternatives to liberal democracy. (When describing the world’s democratic surplus, he does use the phrase “outside the Islamic world,” which is telling.) And so, Fukuyama writes, “At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy.”

Throughout the book, Fukuyama berates geopolitical realists for ignoring history, but an historian might berate Fukuyama for the same thing. He writes about history in broad strokes with little attention to local contingencies. I mean, sure, everything in 1989 must have felt like the culmination of history when you’re only analyzing the most prominent events of the 20th century and their immediate antecedents in the 19th century. But from the perspective of 2024, the traditions and institutions of earlier centuries and distant political systems feel more relevant than ever. The old alliances and grievances of those earlier centuries are resurfacing in new and surprising ways.

Consider, for instance, how European support for either Ukraine or Russia tends to break down along the lines of the old Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. Consider how East Asia, Iran, and India are organizing around political systems that, however much they are influenced by 19th/20th century European ideologies, are heavily modified to conform to political traditions within those nations. And the populations of these nations seem, for now, more attached to their own traditions and institutions than to liberal freedoms or capital accumulation. Not every nation is evolving into 1980s Japan (not even Japan).

Fukuyama’s thesis doesn’t account for the persistence of pre-liberal traditions and institutions, except to dismiss them as mere reactions against free-market liberalism. That’s Fukuyama’s favorite trick, really: if you can define a system as a reaction against liberalism, then you can argue that the system nevertheless admits liberal hegemony. He writes: “there is no inherent contradiction between democracy and at least some of the newly emerging nationalisms.” That might have seemed true in 1989, but it seems less true as those nationalisms—whether Russian, Hungarian, Chinese, Israeli, or American—have evolved over the past three decades.
 
(Aside: in his defense, Fukuyama does describe the trajectory of his Universal History over several millennia in 2011’s The Origins of Political Order and 2014’s Political Order and Political Decay…but those books have been widely criticized by both historians and political scientists for their many ellipses, overgeneralizations, and omissions of key facts.)

Fukuyama argues that compassion (the heart of Hegel’s “slave” ideology, the means through which the slave defends his own self-consciousness) is increasingly the dominant ethos of liberal societies after World War II. But again, the decades after World War II are a tiny sample of the history of political development. The period between 1945 and 1989 was uncharacteristically stable (and only really in the West). Compassion might be viewed as a luxury Western society could afford rather than an inevitability rooted in the development of liberal democracy. With the recent rise of far-right populism, the West in 2024 is arguably far less compassionate than it was in 1991.

Meanwhile, Fukuyama scoffs when realists assert that (in Fukuyama’s words) “democratization of the USSR should make no difference to its strategic position; indeed, many observers schooled in realism predicted quite flatly that Gorbachev would never permit the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or the loss of Soviet glacis in Eastern Europe.” He confidently cites the “small Russia” policy of Yeltsin, which encouraged healthy Russian nationalism sans expansionism. (He compares this to Ataturk’s non-expansionist Turkish nationalism and describes the “Turkification” of Russia after the fall of the USSR.)

But the whole history of the Russian Federation since 1991 has demonstrated that a) Gorbachev was probably the only Soviet politician who would have tolerated the collapse of the Berlin Wall (and he likely had little choice but to tolerate it, given the USSR’s weak position in 1989) and b) democratization, such that it ever occurred in Russia, did little to alter Russia’s geopolitical strategy.

5. Universal History versus Contingent Histories
So The End of History and the Last Man consists of short chapters that race through the book’s principle ideas; oversimplified summaries of Hegel, the thinker who undergirds Fukuyama’s main thesis; and not enough attention to actual history as the essential context for any model of Universal History. 

And what, exactly, does Fukuyama mean by “Universal History”? This is what his critics misunderstand most about his thesis. Whenever a big historical event occurs, whenever liberal democracy is under attack, these critics resurrect The End of History and mock its sunny optimism. But Fukuyama isn’t interested in the direction or duration of historical events: he’s interested in the end—the purpose, the structural trajectory, the telos—of History writ large. He admits that “we have no guarantee and cannot assure future generations that there will be no future Hitlers or Pol Pots.” But capital-H History for Fukuyama is not about a sequence of events, but rather a kind of suprahistorical structure.

However, Fukuyama also writes that “a true Universal History of mankind would have to be able to explain not only the broad and incremental evolutionary trends, but the discontinuous and unexpected ones as well.” And so Fukuyama slips back and forth between Universal History and small-h history. This is especially true when he a) attempts to explain the universal desire for recognition/thymos in terms of historical events (like the invention/discovery of the scientific method during the European Enlightenment) and b) on those occasions when he does make predictions about the near future.

One example of the latter: at one embarrassing point, Fukuyama describes “the political maturity of the Russian people, in particular Boris Yeltsin as their first popularly elected president, rather than a semi-fascist demagogue like Serbia’s Milosevic, or a half-hearted democrat like Gorbachev. The maturity was further demonstrated when the Russian people rose to Yeltsin’s call to defend their new democratic institutions against the conservative coup launched in August 1981” (unsure if he meant 1991). In this quote and others like them, Fukuyama has a very generous definition of “the Russian people.” (He also makes the critical mistake of conflating “the Russian people” with the population of the former Soviet Union, a mistake that is clearer after 2022).

For someone invested in suprastructural historical analysis, Fukuyama seems suspiciously incurious about structuralist accounts of history. He writes:

Contemporary liberal democracies did not emerge out of the shadowy mists of tradition. Like communist societies, they were deliberately created by human beings at a definite point in time, on the basis of a certain theoretical understanding of man and of society.

To what extent is that true and to what extent is that not true? History is an interplay between circumstance (political and geographic), cultural tradition, and human agency. Fukuyama is, like a good conservative, leaning heavily on human agency…a strange approach for the author of a Universal History. And insofar as he leans on ideology as an historical driver, he gives a poor account of the historical transmission of ideology. In one of his many defenses of Hegel, Fukuyama writes: “[W]hile the Anglo-Saxon democracies may have been founded on explicitly Lockean grounds, their self-understanding has never been purely Lockean.” That’s just…not true. Right?

6. Totalitarianism and Cold War Propaganda
A major red flag for me: Fukuyama relies heavily on Jean Kirkpatrick’s definition of totalitarianism, a concept that (to me) is little more than a neoconservative buzzword. Intellectuals in the West came to use the term totalitarian to link Stalin’s genuinely totalizing regime of power with Hitler’s genocidal ideology of racial anarchy. In short, totalitarianism was an invented concept intended to equate Soviet Communism with Nazism, discrediting the former by linking it to the latter. (You would think Stalin's crimes would be enough to discredit his regime, but apparently not...especially when the West was committing crimes of its own.)

The problem is that regimes (i.e., state structures) and ideology are apples and oranges. Serious academics who worked with the model of totalitarianism had to admit that, when you analyzed the state structure of the Third Reich, you had to add caveat after caveat until, in the final analysis, you more or less admitted that Hitler’s Germany was not actually totalitarian. Historian Ian Kershaw is great on this point. But at the time that Kershaw was writing his groundbreaking works on Nazism, Jean Kirkpatrick (an advisor to Reagan) advanced an adjusted interpretation of totalitarianism that differentiated between totalitarian and authoritarian systems. Authoritarian systems, like Pinochet’s Chile, could be gradually reformed into liberal democracies because they relied on open markets. These regimes also ruled by brute force rather than through ideology. They sought to limit their citizens’ freedom and movement but not to control their opinions. Totalitarian regimes, on the other hand, constituted totalizing (closed) systems, immune to reform because a) they rejected open markets, giving liberal democracies no leverage over them, and b) they interpellated their citizens into ideologically compliant subjects. The fact that, in this interpretation, Nazi Germany was more authoritarian than totalitarian did not much bother Kirkpatrick. Her analysis gave the Reagan administration cover for supporting fascistic regimes in the final decade of the Cold War.

If we accept totalitarianism as a legitimate concept, then the ultimate totalitarian regime was Stalin’s, especially during the purges, when victims were not merely murdered but forced to accept and admit their guilt. Stalin did not want to punish his people so much as compel them to accept the Stalinist system in their own minds, even if this required him to murder nearly a million political prisoners. This insistence on the prisoner's conversion to the state ideology is, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, what distinguishes Stalinism Nazism.

And so, in my view, totalitarianism doesn’t really exist outside Stalinism, Maoism, and their offshoots in Eastern Europe and what we called “the Third World.” Totalitarianism, if it exists, is an ultra-leftist phenomenon with no equivalent on the political far-right. The word totalitarianism is only useful politically, when you’re trying to equate Stalin’s crimes with the Holocaust in order to rally Western liberals against the Soviet Union. And so totalitarianism is a junk term because we already have perfectly good names for the phenomenon it describes: Stalinism or (if you like) Communism.

Fukuyama admitted this fact, quietly, throughout his writings in the early 1990s. Wherever he was confronted with an example of post-Soviet illiberalism, Fukuyama saw liberal potential. Nevermind that Islamic fundamentalism or Deng’s China did offer legitimate alternatives to liberal democracy. For neoconservatives like Fukuyama, because these regimes weren’t Communist (or fully Communist), they weren’t totalitarian and were therefore on the path—however curvy—toward the End of History. Jean Kirkpatrick’s politically useful definition of totalitarianism was, for Fukuyama, too tantalizing to abandon.

7. The Last Man and What Comes Next
The final third of The End of History and the Last Man deals with “the last man,” a concept implicit in Hegel and any Universal History. I have to admit that these sections kind of lost me, but I think Fukuyama is trying to account for the problem of human agency when recognition is achieved. Is the End of History just a horizon we approach asymptotically? And if not, what will happen when History has achieved its final purpose? Will a new driver emerge to replace thymos, or will people lazily accept a world without historical tensions? Will being “the last man” suck? Would you want to have a beer with him?

To quote once more a question Fukuyama asks earlier: “How would we know if there are any remaining contradictions in our present order?” It’s not a question Fukuyama really answers in full. His writing and thinking start to become denser and more muddled, and so the final third of the book sort of went over my head.

In any event,  to ask the question “what might happen after History?” is to misread Hegel’s account of History, I think. Because History is not just one damned thing after another; it’s not an account of human actions over time. History is a process that culminates in Absolute Knowledge, and so it occurs suprastructurally above and beyond the thing we call “history.” In other words, the End of History is the culmination of a process that does not depend on actual historical events. But what makes Fukuyama’s account of the End of History so confusing is that he jumps back and forth between Hegel’s suprastructural account of History and the more commonplace understand of history as events.

Fukuyama points out how “the United States and Canada have maintained a continent-wide undefended border for nearly a century, despite the power vacuum represented by Canada.” For a foreign policy realist, he argues, a U.S. invasion of Canada would be inevitable, given this power vacuum. The fact that such an invasion hasn’t occurred (even though it has occurred on at least two occasions) is proof that liberal democracies produce the political and economic stability necessary for peoples to achieve recognition, and therefore liberalism marks the End of History. (Fukuyama’s optimism is also grounded in one of liberalism’s best-known principles, the “democracies don’t go to war” thesis.)

But why should the U.S. invade Canada when it has access to Canada’s most valuable resources without the bother of actually governing Canada? Furthermore, conflict between the two nations becomes increasingly feasible as fresh water and other natural resources become much scarcer with climate change. Tensions around access to and ownership of the Great Lakes and Canadian oil reserves are already evident in the U.S.-Canada relationship today.  

Once again, the answer to Fukuyama’s argument about the U.S. and Canada—and the answer to all of his arguments, which slip between Universal History and real-world events—will always be “Wait and see.”