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Francis FukuyamaThe End of History and the Last Man
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Hegelian Historicism, Liberal Eschatology, and the End of History
The use of Hegel’s historicism is one of the central themes in The End of History and the Last Man. The Hegelian approach to history makes it clear that Fukuyama is less interested in specific events and more focused on broadscale historical, political, and ideological trends to establish a secular eschatology of his universal history of humankind. At the same time, this approach to interpreting history seems to take agency away from ordinary people and subordinate them to what could be described as historic destiny. Hegelian historicism is also rooted in Western philosophy even though Fukuyama applies it to both Western and non-Western countries where such thinking may not be as effective at describing historical phenomena.
Hegel was a seminal philosopher of German Idealism and the history of Western thought at large. As a system builder, he was in the same category as Plato and subsequent thinkers whom he influenced, such as Karl Marx. The individual parts of his philosophy are to be understood within the system that he devised. One of the key aspects of this system is the dialectic triad comprised of a thesis and an antithesis, two opposites, which merge to form a synthesis. This process then repeats, becoming more complex with each turn. According to Hegel, this process is the basis of historical progress.
Historical progress is informed by the Spirit of History both driving and defining the given time period. Linked to the Spirit of History is the World-Historical Personality: important historic figures responsible for key political decisions and shaping major historic events. Later, this concept came to be known as the great man in history, a theory that history is defined by leaders rather than ordinary people. Hegel used these ideas to arrive at his own periodization of history, including Asian despotism and Greco-Roman democracies (Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 261). Hegel also characterized the history of German-speaking lands after the Middle Ages as a German Monarchy comprising such periods as the Protestant Reformation (Ibid). Hegel, therefore, relies on historicism, the extreme forms of which interpret history as destiny.
In the End of History, Francis Fukuyama uses this Hegelian framework to inform his understanding of history and what he perceives to be directional historic evolution toward an endpoint: global liberal democracies. His focus is therefore not on specific events but on the perceived ideological trajectory of the world. Fukuyama believes that the politics of different countries are moving toward the ideology of Liberalism, its democratic politics, and its capitalist economic system. Because Liberal democracy with a capitalist economy is the endpoint of Fukuyama’s eschatology, he challenges the other ideologies of Modernity that once attempted global reach: Communism and Fascism. These two ideologies failed in 1945 and in 1991, respectively, but Liberalism remained. Using the Hegelian idea that what is present is what is good and right, Liberalism is the best representation of Modernity in the author’s view.
One of the key aspects to the superiority of Liberalism, in the author’s view, is technological progress. Since technological development has a single directional trajectory, it is the West that is ahead of the curve. Because non-Western countries are at a different place on this perceived trajectory, Fukuyama calls them “backward” and “semi-European” as was the case with early 20th century Russia (6). Absent is an acknowledgement of the negative effects of European colonialism. Fukuyama also examines the technological superiority of the West in a short period between the scientific revolution and the late 20th century. A broader historical view would have located other advanced civilizations of their time such as ancient Egypt or China. The use of technological progress as a measure of a country’s worth could be perceived as a form of paternalistic Eurocentrism.
Another important aspect of using a Hegelian framework is the fact that it had been criticized by Fukuyama’s fellow Liberal thinkers in the past. The most prominent example is the Austrian-British academic Karl Popper in his postwar work The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper argued that Hegel was the main source of 20th century authoritarian ideologies. According to Popper, Hegel used his dialectics to argue that might is right and to prop up a powerful state at the expense of the individual. The Austrian academic also disparaged “the claim that the realm of social sciences coincides with that of the historical or evolutionary method, and especially with historical prophecy” (Popper, p. 316). Fukuyama’s predecessor went even further and suggested that fascists took Hegel’s Spirit of History and replaced it with race as the driving force in the historical evolution by equating it with destiny (Popper, p. 273). These are important factors to consider, given that Fukuyama criticizes the authoritarian ideologies of the 20th century yet argues that Hegel is a philosopher of freedom.
The Use of Metaphorical Titles
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is an intellectually rigorous text dense with theoretical information sourced from political philosophy and other relevant fields. Despite its density, the book is written in clear language seeking objectivity, which enhances its accessibility to the public. However, some of the chapter and section titles in the text use the opposite approach. They are evocative and metaphorical, sometimes referencing famous texts. This contrasting approach is meant to provide an additional layer to the relevant chapters, highlight some of the overarching themes, and improve readers’ understanding of the overall book.
Some chapters and sections are named matter-of-factly, including “The Struggle for Recognition,” “National Interests,” and “An Old Question Asked Anew” (142, 266, 2). This choice makes the unusual titles stand out even more from the contrast. Some noteworthy titles include “Leaping over Rhodes” (Part 4), “The Coldest of All Cold Monsters” (Chapter 20),” and “Men without Chests” (Chapter 28) (210, 211, 300).
Part 4, “Leaping over Rhodes,” focuses on nationalism and religion, communally and individually oriented societies, attitudes toward work, the nature and purpose of the state, and foreign policy. Rich in scope and information, this section is comprised of seven chapters. The section title provides a glimpse into the overarching theme tying all these subjects together. A leap over Rhodes refers to the ancient Greek monument, the Colossus of Rhodes, estimated to have been the size of the present-day American Statue of Liberty. One fable by the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop described a pompous athlete boasting of jumping over the Colossus. He is then asked to show how he did so. The fable is meant to underscore the importance of actions over words. Readers may assume that this is the theme of Part 4. For example, when Fukuyama examines foreign policy, he argues that individuals must look at the actual behavior, including military actions, of a given country, rather than its intentions.
The next example is Chapter 20, “The Coldest of All Cold Monsters.” The title comes from the 19th century German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people.' It is a lie! (211).
In this quotation, Nietzsche is critical of the state. Fukuyama brings the reader’s attention to this statement because he, too, examines the development of the state, primarily in the West, and proposes the optimal state: a liberal democracy with a capitalist economic system. He underscores the fact that the early examples of liberal democracies did not arise out of the ether but were the result of intentional actions taken by political thinkers based on Enlightenment-era philosophy. Similarly, democratic values considered the norm in the late 20th and early 21st centuries had a “purely instrumental function” at first (214). Therefore, establishing an optimal state must be a conscious act, according to Fukuyama.
Finally, Chapter 28 is provocatively called “Men without Chests.” Fukuyama argues that an optimal liberal democracy depends on objective factors such as the financial well-being of a country. However, it also depends on irrational, psychological factors such as identity. He primarily refers to identity as the need for recognition or the Greek term thymos which has been translated in different ways, including “spiritedness.” Humans want their identity recognized by others: They want to be seen, heard, and understood in the way that they perceive themselves. According to Fukuyama, Hegel believed that such recognition was even worth dying for. When one is proud of one’s identity, one’s chest puffs up with a feeling of pride.
The author then introduces the Nietzschean “last man” (Letzter Mensch) from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This last man is solely focused on material comforts and security. He is no risk taker and may even be a nihilist. He is passive and uninterested in defending his identity, so he lacks a puffed-up chest full of pride. The last man symbolizes the decline of Western civilization. The author brings up this concept as a warning that the citizens of liberal democracies must not degenerate into such last men lacking individual identities. This is a balancing act because Fukuyama also considers excessive pride in one’s ethnic, racial, and religious background in the political sense to be detrimental to an optimal liberal democracy.
The Compatibility of Capitalism with a Liberal Democracy
The question of an optimal economic system for a liberal democracy constitutes a running thread in The End of History and the Last Man. Throughout the text, the author underscores the importance of economic development and correlates material abundance with establishing democracy as one of its conditions. He argues that the so-called free market is a desirable form of cooperation between different countries for their mutual benefit based on the idea of self-interest, citing the early Scottish political economist, Adam Smith.
At the same time, Fukuyama concedes that late 20th century liberal democracies, such as Northern European states, have large public sectors. Other liberal democracies, like Japan, practice economic protectionism in favor of domestic producers and suppliers. He realizes that capitalism does not completely eliminate social inequalities and poverty. Fukuyama suggests that the powerful may engage in election manipulation even in a democracy. The author also argues,
The possibility of strong community life is also attacked by the pressures of the capitalist marketplace. Liberal economic principles provide no support for traditional communities; quite the contrary, they tend to atomize and separate people (325).
The furthest that the author ventures in his criticism of capitalism, however, is that its competitive nature needs to be tempered by the legal framework of democratic institutions. However, the author does not engage in fundamental and comprehensive analysis of whether capitalism is compatible with a truly democratic form of government. He takes it for granted that liberal democracies must be underpinned by capitalism.
Fukuyama suggests that the questions of basic social inequality found in capitalist states are naturally resolved by raising the overall standard of living through the material abundance of a country within a capitalist system. However, the example of the United States, one of the historically wealthiest countries in the world, and its lack of universal basic healthcare challenges this assertion. Universal basic healthcare exists in countries with a larger public sector than the United States, such as Canada, Japan, and countries in Western Europe. The improvements in labor conditions in the late 19th-early 20th century—for instance, eliminating child labor and introducing an eight-hour workday, and the present-day concern with the environment—are also the result of state interventionism rather than the goodwill of large business owners. Predatory capitalist expansion overseas may also be used for tax evasion, uprooting entire industries from one country to export them to a different country with cheaper production costs.
In short, there are numerous challenges to Fukuyama’s contention that capitalism is synonymous with a well-functioning democracy.
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