The End of History and the Last Man

If the Hegelian “universal and homogenous state” transformed the former slaves into their own masters, then the Nietzschean last man was a “victorious slave” (300). In this framework, Christianity is a “slave ideology,” and democracy is a “secularized form of Christianity” (301). By extension, the equality of people before God in a religious context is comparable to democratic equality in the legal context. For Nietzsche, this concept was negative because of his conviction that authentic creativity and freedom could only exist in hierarchic, aristocratic societies. According to Fukuyama, Nietzsche’s dislike of liberal democracy is extreme, but there is some truth to his assessment:

Modern-day America has managed to contrive it so that its brightest and most privileged young people produce things that are neither beautiful nor useful, such as the mountains of litigation produced by lawyers every year (309).

For Hegel, a “liberal democratic state did not constitute a synthesis of the morality of the master and the morality of the slave” (301). However, it is the “universal and homogenous state” that could give an individual the kind of recognition that he or she desires, according to the German philosopher.

Fukuyama compares Nietzsche and Hegel as opposites in this context. For Nietzsche, a proponent of social hierarchies, the egalitarianism of a democratic society creates the last men—passive humans without pride. For Hegel, it is the democratic society that offers the optimal recognition of one’s identity.

The author believes that the best and the brightest heading into business rather than more creative fields is “in the very design of democratic capitalist countries” (316). He wonders whether the amazing human feats of the past millennia amounted to the modern-day democratic politicians promising safety and security. The author suggests, therefore, that megalothymia will remain even in the most egalitarian of societies in such fields as competitive sports. The realm of politics is also one of competition and recognition because “[e]lectoral politics is a thymotic activity” (317). This form of society and government resolved “the problem of megalothymia by constraining and sublimating it through a complex series of institutional arrangements” (333).

Fukuyama provides examples to back up his argument about these harmless expressions of megalothymia. One such example is the World Cup in which people express pride in one’s team and one’s country in a non-military setting. The author suggests that “high-risk leisure activities that have no purpose but to shake the participant out of the comfort of a bourgeois existence” are another healthy way of channeling megalothymia (319). These activities range from skydiving to running marathons. 

Another area of interest for Fukuyama is the relationship between people’s rights and their duties within a liberal democracy. In this dynamic, “[m]oral obligation is entirely contractual” (323). As a result, communities that are not bound by traditional ties such as religion and culture, but in this abstract way instead, display weaknesses in terms of their cohesion and the obligations for their members. For example, in the smallest unit of a community—a family—the personal interactions are often irrational. Communities are also threatened by “the pressures of the capitalist marketplace” (325).

Fukuyama argues that capitalism creates atomization and loneliness in many ways such as relocating for a job. He concludes that something significant is missing in Liberalism, and that community life “must ultimately come from a source different from liberalism itself” (326). Herein lies the danger of “becoming secure and self-absorbed last men” (328). Yet in the previous sections, the author celebrated the destruction of traditional communal ties by the individualistic Liberal ideology and argued that only benign and surface-based forms of cultural differences, such as ethnic cuisines, should remain.