T3L2

• Francis Fukuyama wrote a paper for the right-leaning international relations magazine in 1989
• The paper stirred such interest and caused such controversy that Fukuyama was soon contracted to expand his 18-page article into a book
• The book was published in 1992 and was titled "The End of History and the Last Man"

  
• Fukuyama's argument


  The unfolding of history had revealed - even though in fits and starts - the ideal form of political organisation: liberal democratic states tied to market economies (the least-worst form)
• Liberal democratic state

  • Requires democratic elections resulting in implementation of citizen's will
  • Sufficient strength and authority to enforce its laws and administer services
  • The state and its highest representatives are limited by the law
• Fukuyama's idea


  Has a debt to Hegel and others
• German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) created the term "the end of history"
• Hegel's modern interpreters Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) also discussed the end of history
• Hegel (according to Kojève) had witnessed this end of history (or at least the beginning of such an end) with the French Revolution and its universalisation of the ideas of equality and liberty
• For Marx, the resolution of historical development would take the form of global communism
• By the end of the 1980s, Fukuyama - along with a host of others - began to suspect we weren't going to see a Marxist "end of history" after all