
The End of History? (1989) - gwern
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm#2
======
gwern
FWIW, I feel that the first paragraph in particular is eerily applicable to
the punditocracy over the past 5 years or so with regard to both Putin and
ISIS, and that gives this old essay especial interest at the present moment.

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bcbrown
Fukuyama's 25-year retrospective on his essay:
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/at-the-end-of-history-still-
stan...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/at-the-end-of-history-still-stands-
democracy-1402080661)

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rpgmaker
This has always been laughable. I'm surprised it wasn't derided as a joke even
back in 1989.

~~~
mcnamaratw
It was, but only by a minority.

~~~
mrec
Yes, I remember arguing about it with a fellow Pol student at the time. He was
convinced the author was a brilliant parodist, I was convinced the author was
an idiot.

This was way before Poe's Law had been coined, but it would have applied
perfectly.

------
edward
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)

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eli_gottlieb
If there isn't a famous aphorism about how blithe ideological triumphalism
gets proven wrong by the real world 100% of the time, there ought to be. For
instance:

>The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to
liberalism, communism, was far more serious. Marx, speaking Hegel's language,
asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental contradiction that could
not be resolved within its context, that between capital and labor, and this
contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever
since. But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in
the West. As Kojève (among others) noted, the egalitarianism of modern America
represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by
Marx. This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the
United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But
the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying
legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally
egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and
social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the
historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in the United
States is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the "legacy of
slavery and racism" which persisted long after the formal abolition of
slavery.

This sounds blithe, silly, and downright ahistorical by today's standards. 26
years were apparently all it took for class conflict, in fact _world-wide_
class conflict, to re-emerge alongside imperial and religious conflicts,
environmental challenges, and energy shortages as a chief driving factor in a
conflicted, multipolar geopolitics. Meanwhile, the "democratic, egalitarian"
West appears to have ended up neither democratic (in the sense that state
policy reflects the will of the common people as expressed through such
devices as polls, elections, and social movements) nor egalitarian (in the
sense of income and wealth inequality, in the sense of social gaps between
races and classes, and even in the sense of applying human-rights laws
universally).

>The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the
willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide
ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and
idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of
technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of
sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be
neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of
human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful
nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will
continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world
for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the
most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe
since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very
prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get
history started once again.

It really must be asked what Fukuyama was thinking when he actually published
this nonsense.

The only possible "End of History" would be the extermination of the human
race.

~~~
dingaling
He was stating that history as a unique series of distinguishable events would
be superseded by an interminable river of incremental activity with no real
purpose;no empires being built or demolished, no great ideologies locking
horns. Post-history would just be people tinkering at systems because there's
nothing else to do.

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mamon
The most laughable part is about "Western liberal democracy" being ultimate
form of government. Given the following:

\- NSA surveillance in USA

\- Muslim minorities in EU

\- flood of Syrian "refugees"

\- Chinese Communist Party

\- etc.

I can then formulate hypothesis that the ultimate form of government will be:

1\. Surveillance based dictatorship in US

2\. Sharia-law based religious dictatorship in Europe and Middle East

3\. Communism-based dictatorship in Russia, China and Latin America

4\. Tribal/nationalism based dictatorship in Africa

To sum that up: DICTATORSHIP RULEZ :)

~~~
crpatino
Agreed but on the communism based dictatorship point. Elites seem equally
business friendly in China, Latin America, and to a lesser degree Russia.
Maybe stateism would be more appropriate? >> "You are free to pursue your pig-
capitalist thing as long as you fork us our due share."

