The End of History and the Last Man

Even though the author does not typically use the term “identity,” he clarifies his stance in his 2018 text Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018) and in “Identity and the End of History” published in The American Interest that same year. (Fukuyama, Francis. “Identity and the End of History,” American Interest (23 August 2018) accessed 3 September 2022) He defines identity as the “desire to be recognized as the equal of other people, and […] the emotion underlying much of modern identity politics” (ibid). Fukuyama links it to the ancient Greek concept of thymos, or “spiritedness,” as in Plato’s Republic, and describes it as “an innate human sense of justice” (165). It is a central concept in politics linked to “good political order” (169). The author also lists other relevant concepts, including Niccolò Machiavelli’s human “desire for glory” and the amour-propre, self-respect, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (162). Thymos is not the only relevant factor; so are desire and reason.

The author believes that under ideologies other than Liberalism, such as Communism, identity is suppressed. In his view, liberal democracy allows the fullest expression of identity, making it another reason why the world’s trajectory runs in this direction. Fukuyama focuses on individual identity, embodied by desire and reason, but not on collective identity. However, the logical conclusion of the type of globalization that Fukuyama advocates—the entire world transitioning to liberal-capitalist democracies—is the erasure of traditional religious and cultural identities forged over centuries or even millennia. The disappearance of traditional identities is the logical conclusion of the ideology of Liberalism which is focused on an individual without cultural and religious ties. In this form of globalization, an individual becomes an interchangeable atomized consumer, and the differences lie in his or her personality, rather than deeper ties to the past and the community. In the final section of this book, Fukuyama acknowledges the breakdown of communities in his proposed political system but continues to endorse it.

To understand the question of identity and its recognition by others, one must return to different perceptions of human nature in Western thought. For example, philosophers debated whether human nature was permanent or mutable. They also examined what separates humans from animals. Thomas Hobbes emphasized the animalistic nature of humanity and believed in the chaotic state of nature—“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—in his Leviathan (153). For this reason, a strong ruler and a social contract were the solutions. In contrast, Hegel “denied that he had a state of nature doctrine and in fact would have rejected the concept of a human nature, permanent and unchanging” (146). In the previous chapter, Fukuyama argues that Hegel acknowledged the animalistic aspects at the dawn of humanity but ultimately established humans as social beings from the onset. Being human is rooted “in the ability to overcome or negate that animal nature” (149). This first man “wants not only to be recognized by other men, but to be recognized as a man” (147).

The author moves on to suggest that liberal democracies have roots in the Enlightenment. During that period, these early Modern ideas of humanity led to the establishment of institutions and even new states, as was the case with the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Fukuyama believes that “the fear of death is what leads Hobbes to the modern liberal state” (153). In return for a social contract, humans forego their vanity. Hobbes’s powerful ruler is necessary because he equated it “with something approaching popular consent” (157). Fukuyama, however, underscores the tendency of some powerful leaders to become despotic.

The author also highlights the tension between humans’ self-preservation and the willingness to risk death to defend one’s identity. For Hobbes, society provides survival, a community, and material well-being. However, Hegel viewed humans as moral beings linking their psychological sense of freedom to dignity. The author suggests that “it is this moral dimension, and the struggle to have it recognized, that is the motor driving the dialectical process of history” (161).

The desire to be recognized is an important psychological phenomenon that is “as old as Western political philosophy itself” (162). Fukuyama traces this concept’s transformation from Plato’s Socrates in the Republic to Niccolò Machiavelli to Hegel and beyond. In the late 20th century, Fukuyama locates moments of thymos in the actions of dissidents in the Soviet bloc, such as the future Czech leader Vaclav Havel, because he believed that their identities were being suppressed. The author believes that there was a dichotomy between the Communist slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!” and the way that they were actually treated without dignity. It is worth pointing out that in the Soviet sphere of influence, workers received free education, healthcare, a long maternity leave, daycare, social status, and, after years of work, free housing. Fukuyama also says little of the status of laborers in capitalist countries and how it compares to those in socialist counterparts.

To Fukuyama, the relative lack of material possessions in countries with socialist economics in contrast to the middle class in the West—to say nothing of their debt—is more important. For this reason, he titles this chapter “A Vacation in Bulgaria”: it “loomed large to people with few material possessions” (168).

The author uses the Nietzschean concept of a “beast with red cheeks” to describe an individual human because humans are value-based creatures who value justice. This trait is linked to the fact that humans “evaluate and assign worth to themselves in the first instance” (171). However, they are also able to assign worth to other individuals.

Fukuyama, therefore, locates a relationship between one’s sense of self-worth and one’s appreciation for the worth of others. He provides examples of human-rights activists defending marginalized groups. The author also differentiates between thymos and desire, in which thymos is not the result of selfishness but of dignity. According to the early political economist Adam Smith, human motivation to seek wealth is not primarily motivated by economic necessity but by psychology: Wealth is attention-worthy, whereas poverty is shameful.

For this reason, historical change cannot be reduced to materialism. For example, the French farmers were better off than their German counterparts but at the same time the angriest about their status on the eve of the French Revolution. Describing protesters at the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama argues that without “small acts of bravery in response to small acts of injustice, the larger train of events leading to fundamental changes in political and economic structures would never occur” (180).

To Fukuyama, material components of understanding historical progress are important. However, it is the psychological concept of identity that is the missing link for thinkers like Marx: “The failure to understand the thymotic component of what is normally thought of as economic motivation leads to vast misinterpretations of politics and historical change” (174).

Fukuyama notes that “there is a dark side to the desire for recognition as well” (181). After all, he argues, there are no guarantees that one would adequately evaluate one’s own self-worth by using proper ethics. For this reason, the author introduces the terms megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior to others, and isothymia, the desire to be viewed as an equal to others. Fukuyama thus describes the relationship between the Hegelian master/slave dynamic: the master’s desire to dominate as a way of being recognized as superior. In turn, imperialism is “the desire to be universally recognized” (182). In this dynamic, “one of the primordial combatants, fearing for his life, ‘recognized’ the other and agreed to be his slave” (192). The Early Modern period provides many examples of this “quest for glory” (183). To the Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, this quest led to the dichotomy between tyranny and slavery.

American founding fathers, such as the authors of the Federalist Papers, knew that one could not simply rid political life of this desire for recognition: “Megalothymia as well as isothymia remained a problem for the founding fathers” (187). They sought to channel them in a safe way. The author considers it a problem that the philosophers Hobbes and Locke sought to “strip man of his evaluative powers in the name of physical security and material accumulation” (189). He also views the historical process as “the emergence, growth, and eventual decline of megalothymia” (189).

A counterpoint to this argument is the fact that colonialism, imperialism, and brute power were replaced or supplemented with neo-colonialism and soft power. In the three decades since Fukuyama published The End of History, the U.S. became a global hegemon with an estimated 800 military bases and facilities around the world. According to the Military Intervention Project, the U.S. conducted 25 percent of all its military interventions and invasions after the Cold War (Kushi, Sidita and Monica Duffy Toft, “Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (8 August 2022), accessed 30 August 2022).

Fukuyama returns to the Hegelian master/slave dynamic in which the master “risks his life for the sake of recognition on the part of a slave who is not worthy of recognizing him” (193). At the same time, the slave reasserts his humanity by working. Work provides a sense of freedom because humans overcome nature and create something new by using their own labor. Because the slave conceives of abstract freedom and seeks it, “the potential freedom of the slave is historically much more significant than the actual freedom of the master” (194).

There are many historic examples of this relationship in Christianity, which Fukuyama calls “the last great slave ideology,” and its focus on the meek, oppressed, and poor (197). Christianity is a religion of equality in the sense of Christians’ moral faculties. All people are equal before God in His judgment. Fukuyama’s periodic comparisons of Christianity to liberal democracy are noteworthy. A secular liberal democracy ultimately replaced Christianity, and the Christian eschatological concept of the Last Judgment and even the end times transformed into Fukuyama’s concept of directional history, leading to a logical endpoint of a utopian liberal democracy.