on.
How is history to end? If history is the evolution of humanity towards a universal state, as Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel saw it, then history ends when it reaches a society that satisfies the ideals of Enlightenment
philosophy. Since this thought was articulated at the University of Berlin in 1822, political thinkers have
striven to interpret Hegel’s historical determinism and apply it to their own era.
Fukuyama’s essay, which he then republished as the book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), was
an academic sensation, with scholars from Samuel Huntington to Jacques Derrida writing responses and
commentaries. To this day, Fukuyama’s title is used as a byword for the mistaken triumphalism of western
liberals after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.
Fukuyama’s chef d’oeuvre was self-consciously a “great book”, which claimed to espouse a timeless and
universal theory of political evolution. His thesis was as follows: the “victory” of liberal democracy over
monarchism in the 19th century, over fascism in the first half of the 20th century and finally over
communism in 1989 marked the “endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of
western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.
In short, his was a Marxist reading of the long run of History, with its endpoint as liberal democracy instead
of communism. History, with a capital “H”, referring to the progression of human society towards an
“ideal”, a “single, coherent evolutionary process”, rather than the history of events or people, had ended.
There was thus nothing radically new that humans could theorise or create in politics.
Yet what made Fukuyama stand out among Cold War theorists was his use of political philosophy to
support his ideas. He ostensibly draws on, among others, the idealist philosophy of Hegel, who believed
that history advanced “dialectically” towards an endpoint. The story of how Hegelianism reached the
foreign policy circles of Washington DC is not a simple one. But given the historical determinism and
neoconservative foreign policy thinking in the US that followed the end of the Cold War, it is an important
one.
Hegel is best known for his “idealism”, his notion that human actions are preceded by a consciousness, and
that in the long run, this consciousness will manifest itself in the physical world. For Fukuyama, this
consciousness is the philosophically perfect state of western liberal democracy, exemplified by liberal
democratic, internationalist and prosperous Denmark.
Almost as a challenge, Fukuyama admits in his initial article: “I have neither the space nor, frankly, the
ability to defend in depth Hegel’s radical idealist perspective.” Fukuyama was educated in Hegelian idealist
philosophy throughout his academic career; he studied at the universities of Chicago, Yale, Paris and
Harvard. His time in the French capital introduced him to Hegel’s most intriguing emissary in the 20th
century, Franco-Russian philosopher and European bureaucrat Alexandre Kojève.
Kojève’s famous debate on philosophy and modernity with German Jewish scholar Leo Strauss, who taught
Fukuyama’s professor, Allan Bloom, at Chicago, set the intellectual foreground for Fukuyama’s article.
More broadly, Fukuyama serves as a case study on the reception of a strand of political Hegelianism and
historical determinism in American policy circles, mostly neoconservative, in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Hegel’s philosophy is a key point of origin for the notion that history would lead to a final state of
perfection. This “historicism before the fact” is the essential thesis of Hegel’s work The Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807). The book establishes three key Hegelian concepts with respect to history: the dialectic of the
master and slave, the Spirit (Geist) and the development of Consciousness (Bewusstsein).