The End of History?

In 1989, as the Cold War entered the bottom of the ninth inning, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a memorable essay entitled “The End of History?” And despite the question mark in the article’s title, the argument resolved itself in a straightforward answer: “Yes.” It was a nifty bit of Hegelian reasoning, filtered through the thinking of a Russian-born Frenchman named Alexandre Kojève, and it fit the temper of the times perfectly: communism was collapsing; the great debates of the past two centuries were being resolved in the victory of market-based economies and democracy over state-based economies and authoritarianism; “history,” understood in grand philosophical terms, was over; and while things were likely to be more peaceful, they were also likely to be more boring.

In a Wall Street Journal article two months ago, my friend Fukuyama revisited his 1989 essay and began with the obvious: “The year 2014 feels very different from 1989.” Indeed. Authoritarianism is resurgent in Russia and China. Radical Islam is roiling world politics along a band of political conflict and anti-Christian persecution running from the west coast of Senegal to the eastern edge of Indonesia. Various socialist experiments are trying a comeback in Latin America. But Fukuyama stuck to his analytic guns, arguing that, while he’s learned a lot more about political development than he knew a quarter-century ago, and while different peoples are going to get there at different times, democracy and the free economy would still characterize the “end of history.”