What Happened After the End of History
How a misunderstood viral political theory became a self-fulfilling prophecy
“Imagine having a take so bad that, 33 years later, TIME puts out a cover dunking on it without any specific citation to your work and yet everyone knows exactly what it’s a reference to,” someone quipped this week on Twitter. The TIME cover was this one — atop an issue dominated by news about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And the reference is, of course, to Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 National Interest essay that famously asked whether we’d reached “the end of history”.
The short version of the argument is that the fall of the Soviet Union signalled that humanity had reached a kind of ideological end point. The defeat of fascism in the second world war and then of communism suggested that the ideals of the French Revolution — that is to say, of liberal democracy — could not be improved upon.
“What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” Fukuyama wrote at the time. If a society wants to be modern, he later clarified, nothing other than a market…
