physically, leading to their exclusion, or philosophically, leading to a life of contemplation. Kojève’s “brave
new” end state would be a happy time principally because war and revolution would no longer be
conceivable. But even he appeared aware of the irony of man becoming lesser at the moment of his ultimate
triumph.
Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” thesis is rooted in previous thought on “endism” and the conclusion of
ideological strife in political life. He stated, both at the time and retrospectively, that his thesis was twofold:
there was an empirical part, examining the contemporary state of the world, and there was a normative
argument, concerning the stability and inevitability of liberal democracy.
Empirically, the basis of Fukuyama’s political and historical thought is rooted in contemporary politics. As
Hegel wrote in Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “Philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought.”
Although it can plausibly be claimed about almost any period, the summer of 1989 was an auspicious time to
publish a great theory about the passing of an epoch. Fukuyama spoke in 2013 about the counterintuitive
and optimistic spread of democracy in the 1970s and ‘80s, as in southern Europe (Portugal in 1974 and
Spain in 1978) and Latin America. Mary Elise Sarotte writes of how 1989 marked the beginning of the
struggle to create a post-Cold War world. Early in the year, the signs of a convergence between long-term
structural weaknesses in the Soviet “Empire” and short-term political pressures became apparent. In
Moscow, semi-free elections in March and April endorsed Mikhail Gorbachev’s ongoing policies of
Perestroika and Glasnost (liberalisation, democratisation and openness) in the Soviet Union and its satellite
states. In eastern Europe, national democratic movements in the Baltic states, especially in Estonia, as well
as in other parts of the Soviet Union began to gain momentum. In East Germany, citizens voted with their
feet, crossing the borders into western Europe in their tens of thousands. In short, the end of the
superpower standoff between the liberal democratic west and the state-socialist east was perceived to be
imminent.
Fukuyama was an aide to former US
secretary of state James Baker (centre),
here on a tour of the Berlin Wall exhibit in
Freedom Park in 1999 (AFP/Getty)
While Kojève theorised on world politics during a peak of Cold
War tensions in the 1950s, Fukuyama was more familiar with the
decline of the USSR and the seemingly inevitable victory of his
liberal democratic US. His initial lecture on “The End of
History?” in February 1989, from which the article in 1989
stemmed, was steeped in a contrarian optimism of the inevitable
and imminent victory of the western capitalist system. Nor was
Fukuyama merely an observer of this phenomenon. Like Kojève,
who worked as a bureaucrat in the European Community
planning the Common Market in the 1950s, Fukuyama was
deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff
in 1989. He worked under James Baker, President George Bush
Senior’s secretary of state, as they planned for the reunification
of Germany, the retreat of the Soviet sphere of influence and the
extension of liberal democracy across the world. As in Kojève’s
vision of Napoleon incarnating the values of the French
Revolution and the Enlightenment in his defeat of the Prussians,
Fukuyama saw in the fall of Soviet communism the final
important victory of liberalism, and the centrepiece of empirical
evidence for the end of History.
The normative aspect of Fukuyama’s argument, grounded in
ideas and ahistorical philosophy, is equally remarkable. All his
work has followed the same logic. History, as in the progressive