The End of History Revisited

Until only a few years ago, many argued that liberal democracy was the most just and attractive political regime. The most famous manifestation of this optimism was Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the "end of history". Ironic but true: many of the social scientists who at the time rejected Fukuyama's work with a flick of the wrist were themselves adherents of similarly far-reaching assumptions. Now, with the tides of history turning fast, theory's hypotheses are turned on their head. Indeed, a number of authors today forecast that as the conditions that made liberal democracy possible fade, it is likely to be supplanted by illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, or outright dictatorship. Such conclusions risk being just as rash as the more optimistic ones that preceded them.

Until only a few years ago, the optimists were riding high: for many, liberal democracy clearly was the fairest and most appealing political regime; it had already won out in many of the world's most militarily powerful, economically advanced, and culturally influential countries, and others would surely follow in due course.

The most sensationalised form that this optimism took was Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the "end of history." Writing several months prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama believed humankind's ideological evolution had reached its termination point. Whereas a number of twentiethcentury political movements had promised to transcend Western liberalism, by the century's end their elan had been dissipated. Communism might still have "some isolated true believers" in such far-flung places as "Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts,"1 but it was no longer a viable contender for ideological hegemony. Without any valid competitors, the world was stable for liberal democracy: "The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man's universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed."2

Now, at the same time that historical fortunes change dramatically, the propositions of theory become flipped around. Less than a decade has passed since Great Britain voted for Brexit, the United States elected Donald Trump, and from Brazil to India, from Italy to the Philippines, the authoritarian populists came to the reins of power, while elected strongmen launched an all-out assault on liberal democracy in Ankara, Budapest, Caracas, Moscow, and Warsaw, not to mention scores upon scores of places that attract far less attention either in the world press or academic journals.

Where the certainties of yesteryear have melted into air, it has become fashionable to gloss recent political developments as "the end of the end of history."5 In a spate of books and essays on the topic-at least one of them my own-the significance of recent developments is explicitly framed in terms of evidence for the failure of Fukuyama's thesis.6 History, a swelling chorus sings from the new hymnbook, has not ended. The values of liberal democracy are no longer hegemonic, if ever they truly were. Some authors go even farther: As the conditions that made liberal democracy possible fade away, they predict, it is likely to be supplanted by illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, or outright dictatorship. Whatever may come next, the democratic era is sure to end. But these conclusions, born from trauma, risk being just as rash as the more optimistic ones that preceded them.

The Triumphalist Philosophy of History

The triumphalist view of history that held such great intellectual sway until recently is so easy to dismiss in part because it has, all along, been so poorly understood. In the case of Francis Fukuyama, that misunderstanding begins with the very title of his most famous work. Influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama intended his essay not as a prediction that historical events would no longer occur, but rather as a rumination on the purpose of history: "This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs' yearly summaries of international relations," he slyly wrote in the pages of the august journal's upstart rival, the National Interest, "for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world."7 [End Page 23]

For most of the ancients, there were a small number of basic political regimes, each of which was liable to prove unstable. Until the eighteenth century, virtually all philosophers shared this assumption: The realm of politics was, in their minds, marked by cyclical revolution rather than purposive evolution. Fukuyama believes that this account is unsatisfying due to the insuffisance of attention it pays to the human ability to accumulate knowledge.