1989 national interest essay the end of history

Most of us in the West are liberals, whether we admit it or not. We want equal rights for all, reject racial differences, cherish the freedom of worship while preserving the freedom to disagree, and seek an economic order that suits the ambitions of the individual. His argument was simple: Democracy would win out over all other forms of government because the natural desire for peace and well-being set nations on a path to progress from which it was impossible to divert. If a state—even a Communist state—wished to enjoy the greatest prosperity possible, it would have to embrace some measure of capitalism. The Berlin Wall was about to fall, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and the world was clamoring for the consumerist boom in an orgy of free-market excitement. Everything seemed to suggest that only liberal capitalist democracy allowed people to thrive in an increasingly globalized world, and that only the steady advance of laissez-faire economics would guarantee a future of free, democratic states, untroubled by want and oppression and living in peace and contentment.

What Is Fukuyama Saying? And to Whom Is He Saying It?

Global warming, nuclear proliferation, chaos in Eastern Europe. Even the notion of post is over. Post-modernism, post-history, post-culture to borrow the critic George Steiner's term - we're beyond that now.

Thurow in The New York Times. What follows post? Samuel P. Huntington, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, has a name for the latest eschatological craze: "endism.

Danto theorizes on "the end of art. On the face of it, the lead article in the summer issue of The National Interest, a neoconservative journal published in Washington, seemed like more bad news. The author, Francis Fukuyama, a State Department official, was unknown to the public, but his article was accompanied by "responses" from Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others notable for their gloomy prognostications.

The magazine's readers were in for a surprise. What was Fukuyama saying? That the end of history is good news. What is happening in the world, claimed his eloquent essay, is nothing less than "the triumph of the West. The reform movement in China? The East German exodus? In Fukuyama's interpretation, borrowed and heavily adapted from the German philosopher G.

Hegel, history is a protracted struggle to realize the idea of freedom latent in human consciousness. In the 20th century, the forces of totalitarianism have been decisively conquered by the United States and its allies, which represent the final embodiment of this idea - "that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.

Within weeks, "The End of History? Will was among the first to weigh in, with a Newsweek column in August; two weeks later, Fukuyama's photograph appeared in Time. The French quarterly Commentaire announced that it was devoting a special issue to "The End of History? Translations of the piece were scheduled to appear in Dutch, Japanese, Italian and Icelandic. Ten Downing Street requested a copy. In Washington, a newsdealer on Connecticut Avenue reported, the summer issue of The National Interest was "outselling everything, even the pornography.

Unlike that other recent philosophical cause celebre, Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," Fukuyama's essay was the work of a representative from what is often referred to in academic circles as the real world. This was no professor, according to the contributor's note that ran in the magazine, but the "deputy director of the State Department's policy planning staff.

It wasn't just the message, then; it was the source. Maybe there was an agenda here. But the elegant private dining room on the 8th floor, overlooking the Potomac, could easily be mistaken for an Ivy League faculty club. Plush carpets, chandeliers, a sideboard out of Sturbridge Village, oil portraits of 19th-century dignitaries on the walls - an environment conducive to shoptalk about Hegel.

Baker 3d, is less than a week away. Apart from assisting in the preparation of "talking points" for the Secretary of State, he's been besieged with telephone calls from book editors and agents eager to cash in on his famous article. How does he account for the commotion? It was just something I'd been thinking about. He does seem an unlikely celebrity. But so was Paul Kennedy. So was Allan Bloom.

His khaki suit has an off-the-rack look about it, and he speaks in a tentative, measured voice, more intent on making himself clear than on making an impression. A youthful 36, he emanates a professorial air - an assistant professorial air. Fukuyama doesn't quite fit the neo-conservative stereotype. Whatever ideological direction he has gone in lately, he's still a child of the 60's.

He belongs to the Sierra Club; he's nostalgic for California, where he worked for the Rand Corporation; he worries about pesticides in the backyard of the small red-brick bungalow in the Virginia suburbs where he lives with his wife and infant daughter. His father was a Congregational minister who later became a professor of religion, and Fukuyama's own direction in the beginning was toward an academic career.

As a freshman at Cornell in , he was a resident of Telluride House, a sort of commune for philosophy students; Allan Bloom was the resident Socrates. They shared meals and talked philosophy until all hours, living the good life Bloom would later evoke in "The Closing of the American Mind," the professor and his disciples sitting around the cafeteria discussing the Great Books. Fukuyama majored in classics, then did graduate work in comparative literature at Yale, where he studied with the deconstructionist Paul de Man who would achieve posthumous notoriety when it was discovered that he'd published pro-Nazi articles in the Belgian press at the height of World War II.

After Yale, he spent six months in Paris, sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose abstruse and fashionable discours would become required reading for a generation of American graduate students. Fukuyama was less than impressed. I developed such an aversion to that whole over-intellectual approach that I turned to nuclear weapons instead.

Three years later he got a Ph. Fukuyama's first job out of the academic world was at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. Then, in , Paul D. Wolfowitz, director of policy planning in the Reagan Administration and also a former student of Bloom's , invited him to join his staff.

Fukuyama worked in Washington for two years, then returned to Rand. The message of these heavily footnoted articles was clear: The cold war is still on. Last February, shortly before he returned to Washington to become deputy to Dennis Ross, the new director of policy planning, Fukuyama gave a lecture at the University of Chicago in which he surveyed the international political scene.

It was sponsored by his former professor, Allan Bloom. As it happened, Owen Harries, co-editor of The National Interest, was looking around for a think piece on the current situation - a piece, as Harries explains it, that would "link history with the great traditions of political thought.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, calls them "policy intellectuals. Some of these policy intellectuals are in government; Carnes Lord, the author of a highly regarded translation of Aristotle's "Politics," is national security adviser to Vice President Quayle.

Others are "fellows" or "scholars" at the Heritage Foundation or the Brookings Institution. Many are fugitives from academic life. The political orientation is well to the right. And what does he mean by "traditional"? A belief in the efficacy of force. The National Interest is clearly a well-heeled outfit. Olin Foundation, established by a wealthy manufacturer who made his fortune largely in munitions, and the Smith Richardson Foundation -which, says Harries, "supports a number of good causes around the place.

The magazine's quarters, in a modern office building on 16th Street in Washington, are a far cry from the grubby cubicles one associates with political journals on the left if there still are any. The floors are carpeted and the phones ring with a muted chirp. The elevator has piped-in Mozart instead of Muzak. Directly across the street, behind a high wrought-iron fence, is the Russian Embassy. The National Interest, now four years old, is the creation of Irving Kristol - listed on the masthead as its publisher.

His desk at the magazine is sort of in the lobby area; but then, he occupies many desks. Apart from his two magazines he's also publisher of The Public Interest , Kristol is a distinguished fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Last year, he gave up his professorship at New York University and moved to Washington. New York was no longer the nation's intellectual center, he wrote in The New Republic a few months later, explaining his decision. The intellectuals had disappeared into the universities.

The culture of Washington was just as "nasty and brutish," in Kristol's Hobbesian view, as anywhere else. Living in Washington doesn't make Kristol any less a New Yorker. The cigarette, the rumpled seersucker jacket, the shrewdly self-deprecating wit are more congenial to a seminar room at the City University of New York's graduate center on 42d Street than to a Washington think tank.

Why did "The End of History? And Fukuyama's thesis? Neither did a lot of other prominent opinion-makers around town. If it wasn't nonsense, Fukuyama's basic thesis wasn't exactly news, either. For months, conservatives had been gloating over the demise of Communism. So how did "The End of History?

It was the Hegel spin that did it. Not only is America winning, Fukuyama claimed, but the flourishing of democracy around the world is the fulfillment of a grand historical scheme. The end of the cold war and the disarray of the Soviet Union reflected a larger process -the realization of the Idea.

History, Hegel believed or Fukuyama says he believed , "culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious. A weird thesis, utterly speculative and impossible to prove.

But "The End of History? Fukuyama's respondents greeted the piece with open arms. Hegel to Washington," declared Kristol. Senator Moynihan, himself a Harvard government professor before he discovered politics, confessed that his grasp of Hegel was shaky; but he dusted off his European history, tossing in a few references to Marx and Rousseau.

Soon after the article appeared, there was a conference held to discuss it at something called the United States Institute of Peace. The rest is. It's not only the high-flown references to Kant and Hegel, not only the message that Western democracy beat out the competition.

(From "The End of History?" By Francis Fukuyama, The National Interest, No. 16, Summer ) James Atlas is an editor of this magazine. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” Printed in The National Interest (​Summer ). IN WATCHING the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard.

Its author, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, announced that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. Fukuyama became an unlikely star of political science, dubbed the "court philosopher of global capitalism" by John Gray. When his book The End of History and the Last Man appeared three years later, the qualifying question mark was gone. The "end of history" thesis has been repeated enough to acquire the ring of truth — though it has also, of course, been challenged. Others have pointed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab spring as proof that ideological contests remain.

The total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present—all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress. While the response was far from unanimously favorable, it was extraordinarily large and passionate.

The End of History and the Last Man , by Francis Fukuyama , is a book of political philosophy which proposes that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy , which occurred after the Cold War — and the dissolution of the Soviet Union , humanity has reached "not just According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution , liberal democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system ethically, politically, economically than any of the alternatives. The most basic and prevalent error in discussing Fukuyama's work is to confuse "history" with "events".

Bring back ideology: Fukuyama's 'end of history' 25 years on

In February, , Francis Fukuyama gave a talk on international relations at the University of Chicago. Fukuyama was thirty-six years old, and on his way from a job at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where he had worked as an expert on Soviet foreign policy, to a post as the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, in Washington. It was a good moment for talking about international relations, and a good moment for Soviet experts especially, because, two months earlier, on December 7, , Mikhail Gorbachev had announced, in a speech at the United Nations , that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene in the affairs of its Eastern European satellite states. Those nations could now become democratic. It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

It's Still Not the End of History

Global warming, nuclear proliferation, chaos in Eastern Europe. Even the notion of post is over. Post-modernism, post-history, post-culture to borrow the critic George Steiner's term - we're beyond that now. Thurow in The New York Times. What follows post? Samuel P. Huntington, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, has a name for the latest eschatological craze: "endism. Danto theorizes on "the end of art. On the face of it, the lead article in the summer issue of The National Interest, a neoconservative journal published in Washington, seemed like more bad news.

Just the Introduction reproduced here; Transcribed : by Andy Blunden in , proofed and corrected February

Jonathan R. Francis Fukuyama's interesting book, The End of History and the Last Man, has garnered an astonishing amount of press. Fukuyama's essay, "The End of History," on which the book was based, appeared in The National Interest in , and its publication was followed by what Stephen Holmes aptly described as a "worldwide out-pouring of reactions.

Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History

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End of history

The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. The concept of an end of history differs from ideas of an end of the world as expressed in various religions, which may forecast a complete destruction of the Earth or of life on Earth, and the end of the human race as we know it. The end of history instead proposes a state in which human life continues indefinitely into the future without any further major changes in society, system of governance, or economics. The phrase the end of history was first used by French philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot in "to refer to the end of the historical dynamic with the perfection of civil society". The formal development of an idea of an "end of history" is most closely associated with Hegel, although Hegel discussed the idea in ambiguous terms, making it unclear whether he thought such a thing was a certainty or a mere possibility. Hegel believes that it is on the one hand the task of history to show that there is essentially reason in the development overtime, while on the other hand history itself also has the task of developing reason over time. The realization of history is thus something that one can observe, but also something that is an active task. A postmodern understanding of the term differs in that. The idea of an "end of history" does not imply that nothing more will ever happen.