The End of History and the Last Man

“Liberal democracy was challenged by two major rival ideologies—fascism and communism—which offered radically different visions of a good society. People in the West themselves came to question whether liberal democracy was in fact a general aspiration of all mankind, and whether their earlier confidence that it was did not reflect a narrow ethnocentrism on their part.”

The author discusses the three main ideologies of the Modern period: Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism. Each ideology featured a different historical subject and a different vision of a desirable future for humanity. Fascism and Communism ultimately failed to represent that vision on a global scale after World War II and at the end of the Cold War, respectively. Some proponents of Liberalism, however, question whether Liberalism could be that vision of the future for all humankind, rather than an intellectual product of the West, according to Fukuyama.

“When we speak of a crisis of legitimacy in an authoritarian system, then, we speak of a crisis within those elites whose cohesion is essential for the regime to act effectively.”

Fukuyama asserts that authoritarian states are inherently weak despite their outward posturing. However, it is not those they govern that may cause a crisis of internal legitimacy, excluding mass-scale unrest, but the elites. According to the author, rulers need to be on board with the program of an authoritarian country; otherwise, there may be an internal political crisis, and the regime may lose power.

“While democratic ideas undermined the legitimacy of communist regimes around the world, democracy itself has had tremendous difficulties in establishing itself.”

The author describes the how each round of reforms in countries like the Soviet Union led to a relative liberalization of their politics. At the same time, there was external pressure from democratic states during the Cold War. However, the transition from a more authoritarian form of government toward a liberal democracy—Fukuyama’s ideal—proved not to be easy. For example, in the case of the Soviet Union, this was an attempt to reverse course through regime change.

“It is against this background that the remarkable worldwide character of the current liberal revolution takes on special significance. For it constitutes further evidence that there is a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies—in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.”

Fukuyama interprets the end of the Cold War as the eventual transition toward liberal democracy in all countries with political systems different from the West. His interpretation is in line with the Hegelian historicism framework of this book which subscribes to the evolutionary, directional theory of history based on the dialectic triad. The author uses a Eurocentric model rooted in Western philosophy and applies it to non-Western countries.

“Thus for Hegel the Roman Empire ultimately collapsed because it established the universal legal equality of all men, but without recognizing their rights and inner human dignity. This recognition could only be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that established the universal equality of man on the basis of his moral freedom.”

The author considers the desire for recognition, thymos, to be an essential part of liberal democracy. He traces the development of liberal democracy from the way different philosophers addressed the desire for recognition: from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century. In this context, Christianity played an important role as an egalitarian religion in which all people were equal before God.

“The scientific understanding of nature is neither cyclical nor random; mankind does not return periodically to the same state of ignorance, nor are the results of modern natural science subject to human caprice.”

Fukuyama examines two different concepts of historical development: cyclical and unidirectional. He does so because he first needs to determine history’s direction prior to setting out to establish his concept of universal history. Ultimately, the author concludes that history can only be directional. One of the reasons for his conclusion is the accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological advancement. Even in a case of a global catastrophe, some accumulated knowledge would remain with the survivors.

“While the Soviet state could pamper its nuclear physicists, it didn’t have much left over for the designers of television sets, which exploded with some regularity, or for those who might aspire to market new products to new consumers, a completely non-existent field in the USSR and China.”

The author attempts to prove the superiority of liberal democracies, with their capitalist economies, over Communist (socialist) states with central planning. He concedes significant industrial and technological development in countries like the USSR and China. However, he argues that the ideological rivals of Liberalism did not produce superfluous items desirable to consumers, such as televisions and VCRs. This desirability is one of the reasons why Liberalism is superior, in Fukuyama’s view.

“The final and most powerful line of argument linking economic development with liberal democracy is that successful industrialization produces middle-class societies, and that middle-class societies demand political participation and equality of rights.”

Fukuyama underscores the perceived link between material well-being produced by capitalism and liberal democracy throughout this book. Here, he explains the way material abundance produces a middle class. That middle class then seeks political representation, solidifying a democratic form of government.

“But what then about fascism, which did arise in a highly developed country? How is it possible to relegate German National Socialism to a ‘stage of history,’ rather than seeing it as a specific invention of modernity itself?”

The author examines the question of mass-scale violence in the 20th century within the framework of different ideologies. He argues that economic prosperity, technological development, and democracy are linked. Yet, he is forced to acknowledge that Nazi Germany had all the necessary elements and still succumbed to an extremist ideology responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust. He concludes that this event must have been exceptional. However, there are other industrial-scale violent events of the 20th century like the Vietnam War, which represented a struggle between Liberalism and Communism.

“While we need not abandon our economic account of history, ‘recognition’ allows us to recover a totally non-materialist historical dialectic that is much richer in its understanding of human motivation than the Marxist version, or than the sociological tradition stemming from Marx.”

Fukuyama believes in the link between the development of liberal democracies and material well-being generated by capitalism. However, he challenges Marxist historic evolution solely rooted in materialism by introducing another essential element: thymos, the need to be recognized for one’s identity by others. In the author’s view, this element enhances one’s understanding of historical development and present-day societies.

“The limitations of the liberal view of man become more obvious if we consider liberal society’s most typical product, a new type of individual who has subsequently come to be termed pejoratively as the bourgeois: the human being narrowly consumed with his own immediate self-preservation and material well-being, interested in the community around him only to the extent that it fosters or is a means of achieving his private good.”

One of the author’s concerns in The End of History is to find a balance between the earlier, historical bloody battles that occurred as a result of making one’s identity recognized, as per Hegel, and the passive Nietzschean “last men” solely concerned with self-preservation and material security. Keeping the passion for one’s identity alive and channeling it in positive, productive, and creative ways is one of Fukuyama’s solutions to this problem. 

“The megalothymia of would-be masters to dominate other people through imperialism was an important theme in a good deal of medieval and early modern political thought, which referred to the phenomenon as the quest for glory.”

Fukuyama identifies the desire for the recognition of one’s identity, thymos, as one of the key factors in human development. There are two types of thymos. One type is megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as others as superior. In the past, megalothymia expressed itself through military and colonial conquest. In contrast, in liberal democracies, the quest to be seen as superior remains in such fields as sporting competitions and political elections. Left unsaid is an analysis of foreign policy in which liberal democracies participated in military conflicts as aggressors, such as the proxy conflicts of the Cold War.

“For Hegel, by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other. If Hobbesian or Lockean liberalism can be interpreted as the pursuit of rational self-interest, Hegelian ‘liberalism’ can be seen as the pursuit of rational recognition, that is, recognition on a universal basis in which the dignity of each person as a free and autonomous human being is recognized by all.”

The author places key Western thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hegel along a single trajectory of intellectual development. In this framework, the Liberal ideology of Hobbes and Locke was primarily focused on material self-interest. Hegel, in contrast, represented a more complex view of the Liberal ideology by shifting focus toward one’s desire to be recognized by others.

“The liberal state, on the other hand, is rational because it reconciles these competing demands for recognition on the only mutually acceptable basis possible, that is, on the basis of the individual’s identity as a human being.”

Whereas the need to be recognized for one’s identity, thymos, is important, this need does not always take constructive forms. One of the destructive forms the author mentions is megalothymia, the need to be recognized as superior through aggressive means, as well as political nationalism and religion. Fukuyama considers these forms irrational.  For this reason, the author believes Liberalism to be the optimal ideology that tames the politicization of these negative forms, while maintaining individual human identity.

“Culture—in the form of resistance to the transformation of certain traditional values to those of democracy—thus can constitute an obstacle to democratization.”

Fukuyama believes that culture, especially in its political form, is a hindrance to democratization. He argues for declawing culture and leaving only its benign elements such as ethnic cuisine. In sum, he seeks to free the individual of the traditional communal ties. In Part 5 of the book, however, the author admits that this form of democratization atomizes communities.

“The second cultural obstacle to democracy has to do with religion. Like nationalism, there is no inherent conflict between religion and liberal democracy, except at the point where religion ceases to be tolerant or egalitarian.” 

In addition to culture, politicized religion represents a challenge to liberal democracies, in the author’s view. Fukuyama argues that making religion tolerant of other faiths and philosophies would make it acceptable. However, some traditional religions and the ideology of Liberalism have conflicting eschatologies. Other religions, like Islam, may represent a total ideology altogether. The author, therefore, seeks to make religion harmless by removing some of its most important aspects and negating its purpose.

“These differences further suggest that the existing state system will not collapse anytime soon into a literally universal and homogenous state. The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.”

Fukuyama attempts to demonstrate that the world reached the end of history at the end of the Cold War by predicting that different countries around the world would gradually become liberal democracies—optimal political and ideological entities, in the author’s view. However, he stops short of selling a utopia of a stateless liberal-democratic world, akin to the Marxist notion of a stateless Communist society. In his view, the existing countries will remain in the form of nations as separate political entities.

“The genealogy of modern liberal societies in the consciousness of the slave rather than the master, and the influence on them of that last great slave ideology, Christianity, is today manifest in the spread of compassion, and a steadily decreasing tolerance for violence, death, and suffering.”

Here, Fukuyama uses the Hegelian master/slave dynamic. He argues that, despite the slave being captive, the slave has the greater potential for freedom and expressing his identity because he imagined it first, unlike the master who did not have to fight for his thymotic counterpart. The historical and political evolution toward liberal democracies, therefore, represents the gradual freeing of a slave whose identity can be fully expressed in them, according to the author. In this sense, liberal democracies are a secular expression of Christianity that sided with the meek and the poor. 

“The peaceful behavior of democracies further suggests that the United States and other democracies have a long-term interest in preserving the sphere of democracy in the world, and in expanding it where possible and prudent.”

The author argues that liberal democracies get along with one other and avoid war, based on the period between 1945 and the end of the Cold War. However, many scholars argue that the United States was and remains a hegemon in its sphere of influence with a large military presence in several foreign countries and various institutions molded by Americans since the postwar Marshall Plan. Its relationship with these liberal democracies is not always an equal partnership.

“Liberal democracies are doubtless plagued by a host of problems like unemployment, pollution, drugs, crime, and the like, but beyond these immediate concerns lies the question of whether there are other deeper sources of discontent within liberal democracy—whether life there is truly satisfying.”

Having spent four parts of The End of History attempting to demonstrate the superiority of liberal democracy, Fukuyama turns to address its weak points in the final section of this book. Many practical problems remain in democratic societies, ranging from crime to substance abuse and mental health. However, the author believes that a greater question is whether liberal democracies can offer a truly meaningful life to their citizens, both materially and psychologically.

“Moreover, while capitalism may be capable of creating enormous amounts of wealth, it will continue to fail to satisfy the human desire for equal recognition or isothymia.”

Fukuyama lauds the so-called free market and capitalism while criticizing socialist economic forms such as central planning. However, he believes there are limits to capitalism, even though he considers it a superior economic system. Here, he suggests that material abundance is insufficient for human existence which also seeks to have its identity recognized.

“Individuals like Lenin or Trotsky, striving for something that is purer and higher, are therefore more likely to arise in societies dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal. Democratic societies, dedicated to the opposite proposition, tend to promote a belief in the equality of all lifestyles and values. They do not tell their citizens how they should live, or what will make them happy, virtuous, or great. Instead, they cultivate the virtue of toleration, which becomes the chief virtue in democratic societies.”

Throughout this book, Fukuyama seeks to show that the ideology of Liberalism is superior to its opponent, Communism (socialism), as the most accurate representation of Modernity. Lenin and Trotsky, leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, changed the course of history for a time by implementing Marxist ideas. However, they both came from a hierarchic, monarchic (tsarist) society with great social inequalities and a relative lack of social mobility. For this reason, they sought to establish a utopian ideal of a classless society. In contrast, democratic societies, in theory, should not produce such revolutionaries, because such societies are already egalitarian.

“Nature, on the other hand, will conspire to preserve a substantial degree of megalothymia even in our egalitarian, democratic world.”

Despite the egalitarian nature of liberal democracies, megalothymia, the need to be recognized as superior by others, will never fully dissolve, according to the author. However, in liberal democracies, megalothymia will take on constructive forms like athletic competition, as opposed to its earlier forms of war and colonial conquest.