Political scientist, advisor and author FRANCIS FUKUYAMA declares the triumph of liberal democracy in ‘The End of History?’, an essay published in the Summer 1989 issue of The National Interest. The reform waves sweeping through the Soviet Union and China in the 1980s signal not merely the end of an era of great-power opposition, says Fukuyama; they are evidence of the final victory of liberalism over its alternatives. Liberalism here refers not to a left-of-centre sensibility, but to the ideological basis of a polity whose laws protect individual rights, which obtains the consent of those over whom it exercises authority, and whose economic organisation is based on free markets. Liberalism has been ascendant since the French Revolution. It dispatched absolutism during the nineteenth century, and faced two mighty rivals in the twentieth: fascism and communism. The former was decisively defeated in the Second World War. The latter proved to be a more formidable opponent because it combined a promethean drive with genuinely universalist premises and a promise to make egalitarianism definitive of social and political organisation. By the 1980s, communism is exhausted and the Soviet and Chinese governments are tentatively adopting liberal practices and policies. It is only a matter of time, Fukuyama suggests, before the wholesale adoption of Western-style liberal institutions in the two titans, after which liberalism’s conquest of the rest of the world will be a trivial matter. The failure of central planning to deliver prosperity in communist states is an important variable in the unfolding story. Although economic liberalisation and consequent growth appear to drag political liberty along with them, to attribute causal power to economic forces would be to succumb to crass materialist thinking, Fukuyama cautions. The material prosperity of the West and, certainly, Western consumer products have much to do with the appeal of liberal democracy. But the main setting of this drama, like all human dramas, is human consciousness — material forces are downstream of ideas. Levi's jeans are highly sought-after items in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, but they are primarily vehicles of the idea of liberty and its associated institutional framework. The intellectual authority for these claims comes from the German philosopher GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, whose conception of history as a process with a purpose and a direction permeates modern social science. History, per Hegel, progresses through stages, each defined by a foundational idea. This idea is a product of the synthesis of two opposing ideas, and provides resolution to a contradiction that was inherent in the previous stage. It follows that humanity is marching toward an end (telos), toward the conception of an idea that launches a historical stage without any contradiction in need of resolution. Hegel thought that end was reached when the French Revolution enshrined the principles of liberty and equality, and that these would see universal application thanks largely to Napoleon’s apostolic labours. Marxists, on the other hand — partial as they are to materialist thinking — thought history’s final act was yet to be played out: the very material capital-labour contradiction would find resolution in the revolutionary establishment of a a classless communist society. Liberalism, however, by combining capitalist economic dynamism with redistributionist policies, has outplayed its great foe. In 1989, humanity finds itself on the cusp of an era that lacks a basis for large-scale conflict, Fukuyama asserts. With liberalism’s last credible rival bloodlessly dispatched, Hegel’s envisioned end is about to be realised. Henceforth, societal affairs will be run for the most part on a bureaucratic autopilot, both at the state level and internationally. Any excess energies will be absorbed by consumerist culture. This will not happen overnight: quotidian politics, the odd unruly population on the periphery of global affairs, the occasional skirmish will all be with us for a while. But liberalism will reign ‘in the long run’.
Unfortunately for Fukuyama, history exposed his thesis as a product of academic parochialism. Post-Soviet Russia, as history-bound as ever, has emphatically rejected liberalism. China has demonstrated that economic liberalisation and political authoritarianism mix rather well. There is an erosion of faith in democratic institutions in liberalism’s historic North-Atlantic core. In the context of the War on Terror, many liberal democracies have began to treat due process of law, a liberal-democratic legal cornerstone, as optional. Some have reintroduced torture as a law-enforcement tool. The early twenty-first century is not even remotely post-historical. But one struggles to find clues in the text itself to explain the failed prognostication. Fukuyama’s analysis is measured and sober and his account of Hegelian idealism provides persuasive theoretical scaffolding, despite the limitations of a general-reader publication.1 One could instead seek recourse to the analogy of a priest delivering a sermon to the congregation: the text is perfectly cogent when read within its self-contained, parochial universe. It is worth lingering on this analogy for a moment because modern minds, especially secular ones, have been conditioned to view church and academia as polar opposites, and convinced that scholarly attainment and the frequent crossing of international borders render academics immune to parochialism. Back to our parish priest and his sermon: his command of pacing, plot and character may be on par with that of a novelist; his digressions may be gripping and informative; deceiving or pandering to his audience may have never crossed his mind. But he still needs to reach a predetermined conclusion. He must offer a neat and tidy resolution that is aligned with the community’s pieties and sensibilities. His reasoning is not necessarily flawed; it is highly motivated. His supporting facts are not necessarily false; they are highly curated. His text may appear to be organically composed; it is, in fact, a piece of discursive reverse engineering. Whether in church or in academic coteries, parochialism and learnedness work together to achieve coherence and elegance; they are far from mutually exclusive.2 One might protest that this line of thinking rests purely on hindsight. But Fukuyama was not the first to boldly proclaim the coming of an era of permanent peace and prosperity — either on techno-optimist or spiritual grounds or a combination of the two — only to have his predictions shattered moments later. This fact alone could have given him pause. Nonetheless, it should be noted that a good deal of anti-Fukuyama criticism is rather frivolous. He may be announcing the triumph of liberal democracy but his tone is not triumphalist, as is the frequently aired accusation. In fact, he concludes the piece by lamenting the passing of history. He does not look forward to a time when hedonistic consumption will be the only remaining source of the frisson that historical drama used to supply so generously. Moreover, at the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama was not the only one who saw a unipolar future whose prevailing cultural winds would have west-to-east directionality. Many of the disapproving voices shared these very assumptions. He simply stated the case unequivocally and eloquently. Speaking one’s mind clearly is apparently a breach of etiquette in some circles. The fact is that ‘The End of History?’ is highly illuminating — as the focal point in a cautionary tale.
He subsequently gave his thesis volume-length treatment under the title The End of History and the Last Man.
‘Cognitive bias’, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s monumental discovery, had not yet entered public consciousness in 1989, and was therefore not available as a critical tool. See post no. 5, ‘But can he hit?’, and post no. 11, ‘Bet on the Hawk’.