The End of History and the Last Man

Francis Fukuyama dedicates the first part of this book, “An Old Question Asked Anew,” to set the parameters of his investigation. He tackles broad questions about the development of the three key ideologies of the Modern period: Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism. The author also briefly introduces the Hegelian framework that informs the way he perceives the question of history, its progress, and its end. His goal is to “write the universal history of mankind” (52). The author supplements this theoretical framework with many 20th century examples of political and ideological developments worldwide.

First, Fukuyama examines the historical and ideological development of the 20th century in broad strokes. He suggests that there was great pessimism about liberal democracy in the West which translated into the false belief about the stability of Communist states like the Soviet Union and China. The Soviet Union remained competitive with the United States and therefore appeared strong. Fukuyama reviews the internal contradictions of the Soviet system such as economic stagnation and the question of nationalities, which made it an internally weak state without appearing to be so.

For this reason, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s and the country itself in 1991 came as a surprise. However, the author does not examine the United States, as a Cold War competitor, from this perspective despite the history of racial strife, regional differences, and class inequality. The other reason for pessimism about democracy was the horrific events of the 20th: world wars, the Holocaust, authoritarian ideologies, and other “unimagined evils” (3). World War I was “only a foretaste of the new forms of evil that were soon to emerge” (5).

After this, Fukuyama moves on to discuss the big questions of ideology and history. He suggests that the West believes liberal democracy and its related institutions to be “decent and humane” (3). He takes this notion for granted and does not examine the reasons why the Western models of government and society are optimal and should be adopted by the rest of the world. In his opinion, the rest of the world is—or should be—moving in this direction. The author, therefore, uses a Hegelian framework to inform historic development. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a key early 19th century German philosopher and one of the most important philosophical system builders in the history of Western thought at large.

According to Hegel, historic progress arises from the dialectic triad: a synthesis of two opposing concepts, a thesis and an antithesis. Each time this process occurs, it produces a more complex result, only for the process to repeat and reach a higher level of development. Hegel believed that what is present is good, moral, and just. History, therefore, is not just a series of past events, but a “record of progress” (4).

Fukuyama assumes that since the world seems to be inexorably moving in the direction of liberal democracy, it is the proper direction of historical progress. And given his view that liberal democracy is the best form of government, it is the ultimate desired result of historical evolution.

Herein lies Liberal eschatology, and the reason why Liberalism was in competition with Fascism and Communism for the best historical representation of the Modern period in world history. Communism, for example, had its own eschatology in which a classless society was the pinnacle of historical development, as the German thinker Karl Marx predicted. In turn, after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the new Bolshevik government challenged the Orthodox Church because the latter presented an alternative eschatology in line with the Christian perspective, which was popular and socially significant in Russian society.

Fukuyama describes this struggle for the right version of ideological eschatology as follows:

From the moment the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the Soviet state systematically attacked all potential competing sources of authority in Russian society, including opposition political parties, the press, trade unions, private enterprises, and the Church (23).

However, he overlooks the fact that after 1928 Joseph Stalin returned to many social and cultural forms traditional to Russia. He banned abortion legalized by the early Bolsheviks, promoted procreation, and later legalized the Church. Historians call this period Soviet top-down neo-traditionalism. Therefore, the Soviet state had to make many concessions and limit the views that were completely foreign to Russia.

It is noteworthy that Fukuyama uses Hegelianism to inform his thinking. Key intellectuals who endorsed Liberalism were quite critical of Hegel. For example, Karl Popper, an Austrian-British academic, considered Hegel dangerous because he believed Hegel was the source of 20th century authoritarianism. Popper argued that it was Hegel’s historicism—the belief in the definitive role of historical development—that supported his idea of a strong state and the great man in history, also known as a “world-historical personality.”

Because Fukuyama subscribes to the notion of historical progress, he positions those countries that did not or do not follow the Western trajectory as underdeveloped or worse. For example, he refers to Russia in the first third of the 20th century as a “backward, semi-European country” (6). If this is the case, then it is worth wondering where this singular trajectory leaves the countries of Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. One could argue that using the notion of historical progress in the Modern period, based primarily on technological development, as a key measure of a people’s culture and civilization is an insidious form of racism, given the extent to which the West’s technological progress was driven by its own colonial projects. This thinking also ignores the technological primacy of other civilizations such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, or China over Europe in the distant past. Looking at historical development through this lens shows how relative such thinking is.

Fukuyama acknowledges that technological progress alone does not guarantee moral and just domestic and foreign policy: Nazi Germany, which committed unspeakable atrocities, was a technologically advanced state. The Industrial Revolution paved the way for the development of war technologies. Fukuyama argues that “Hitler and Stalin put both modern technology and modern political organization in the service of evil” (6). He also uses a quote by the Jewish thinker Emile Fackenheim about the nuclear strikes on the Japanese city of Hiroshima as an example of the technological horrors of the 20th century. However, the author omits the fact that it was the United States, an exemplar of liberal democracy, that used this form of weapons against civilians. A liberal democracy was the only country in history to use such weapons.

Next, Fukuyama discusses the two discarded ideologies of the 20th century, Fascism and Communism. They failed in their aspirations of global dominance, whereas Liberalism remains. He often uses the term “totalitarianism” to describe left-wing Communism, but “authoritarianism” to describe right-wing Fascism. For example, he refers to the Soviet Union as “communist-totalitarian alternative to Western liberal democracy” (7). The term “totalitarianism” was preferred at the height of the Cold War. However, since then historians have moved away from the totalitarian model to highlight a more nuanced relationship between society and the powerful state.

Fukuyama also seems to equate Fascism and Communism even though the two ideologies had distinct historical subjects. Fascism was focused on the state in the case of Italy and on race in the case of Nazi Germany. Communism, in contrast, did not have a racialist, biological hierarchy and focused on class in an egalitarian way instead. It is therefore erroneous to equate Communism and Fascism. This false equivalence also erases the real historic circumstances in which 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died to fight the Nazi war machine.

The industrial scale of violence is a significant aspect of 20th century ideologies. Fukuyama writes,

The Russian and Chinese revolutions and the Nazi conquests during the Second World War saw the return, in a magnified form, of the kind of brutality that characterized the religious wars of the sixteenth century, for what was at stake was not just territory and resources, but the value systems and ways of life of entire populations (11).

However, Fukuyama does not acknowledge that violence per se is intrinsic to revolutionary situations irrespective of ideology, such as the French and American Revolutions. The French Revolution, for instance, was followed by a repressive period of terror despite its egalitarian ideals. Nor does he acknowledge the industrial scale of violence carried out by American wars of aggression such as the Vietnam War, or colonial and neo-colonial exploitation by Western countries that transformed into liberal democracies.

Fukuyama also briefly reviews the economic models of centralized, state-controlled economies of the Soviet Union and China. He refers to the “horrendous famine and constant poverty” of Communist regimes without providing the data (9). He does argue that the Soviet GDP grew significantly during the first half of the Cold War which allowed the Soviet Union to challenge the United States. Fukuyama also does not mention the American sanctions on socialist countries like Cuba which threatened their trade capabilities.

The author also takes the compatibility of democracy and capitalism for granted. He does not examine this question except to mention that elites can manipulate free elections. The influence of the wealthy and well-connected elites on elections would be an appropriate segue to examine this relationship, but he fails to do so.