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Thirty years later, is it still the end of history?

NOEL GRIMA

‘The End of History and the Last Man’ Author: Francis Fukuyama Publisher: Penguin Books / 1992 Pages: 418

When the end of the old millennium approached it was always probable that the approaching end would call forth books evaluating human progress to date.

The spectacular collapse of communism set the scene for Francis Fukuyama to state that liberal democracy may constitute the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution as the final form of human government and therefore the end of history, understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process. This idea of history derives from Hegel, who saw an “end of history” in a liberal society.

Much of Fukuyama’s fame rested on a misunderstanding. When he wrote that history had ended, he did not mean that the grand surge of human affairs had run its course. He simply meant that the old dialectic, “those groaning railroad tracks on which Hegel and Marx saw mankind progressing (if the right people threw the switch)” had reached the terminus at last. Evolution seemed then to have brought man to a natural political apotheosis: liberal democracy, hand in hand with the free market.

That was then. And this is now. So much has happened in the intervening years – from 9/11 to Iraq, from Obama to Trump, countless Middle East crises and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

More than that, the free market seems to have taken over the world but it has not rid the world of economic crisis, poverty, hunger and inflation.

The author first put these thoughts into an obscure journal in the summer of 1989, when communism was starting to collapse and he was a consultant at the State Department. Then he expanded the thoughts into this book, an exercise of impressive but unsparkling argument.

Its interest is more historiographical: this is the first work of political theory to emerge from the practical evidence that Marx got it wrong.

Fukuyama’s original article was, if anything, too crowing. The book too has its wild-eyed pages: even Africa is claimed against all evidence to be on the path of progress, and his tables show El Salvador, as well as all the fledgling countries of Eastern Europe, firmly in the liberal-democratic camp. He also admits that the march of liberal democracy could still encounter tripwires, pits and the dark, but still believes democracy may still get through but maybe in a different and disappointing shape. We have been here before. In the 1860s progress was the order of the day: there was a universalist-liberal formula, adopted by everyone from the rulers of Guatemala to Tsar Alexander II. Lawyers, teachers, scientists were in; horses, priests and peasants were out. Backward parts would progress through commerce and maybe colonisation.

Few people saw through this, the most powerful being Dostoevsky, who, like Evelyn

Waugh, responded to progress with the most effective of weapons: satire.

They were right to do so: the world of universalist liberalism ended with two world wars, vicious dictatorships across the globe and lunatic credulities.

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2022-08-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

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