The End of History?
The End of History?
Author(s): Francis Fukuyama
Source: The National Interest , Summer 1989, No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-18
Published by: Center for the National Interest
Stable URL: http:
www.jstor.com/stable/ XXXXXXXXXX
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
ange of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact XXXXXXXXXX.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https:
about.jstor.org/terms
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The National Interest
This content downloaded from
������������� XXXXXXXXXXon Tue, 21 Jul XXXXXXXXXX:32:48 UTC��������������
All use subject to https:
about.jstor.org/terms
http:
www.jstor.com/stable/ XXXXXXXXXX
The End of History?
-Francis Fukuyama.
IN WATCHING the flow of events process that gives coherence and order to the over the past decade or so, it is daily headlines. The twentieth century saw hard to avoid the feeling that the developed world descend into a paroxysm
something very fundamental has happened in of ideological violence, as liberalism contend
world history. The past year has seen a flood ed first with the remnants of absolutism, then
of articles commemorating the end of the Cold bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updat
War, and the fact that "peace" seems to be ed Marxism that threatened to lead to the ul
eaking out in many regions of the world. timate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the cen
Most of these analyses lack any larger con- tury that began full of self-confidence in the
ceptual framework for distinguishing be- ultimate triumph of Western liberal democ
tween what is essential and what is contingent racy seems at its close to be returning full
or accidental in world history, and are pre- circle to where it started: not to an "end of
dictably superficial. If Mr. Go
achev were ideology" or a convergence between capital
ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah ism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to
proclaimed the millennium from a desolate an unabashed victory of economic and polit
Middle Eastern capital, these same commen- ical liberalism.
tators would scramble to announce the rebirth The triumph of the West, of the Western
of a new era of conflict. idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaus
And yet, all of these people sense dimly tion of viable systematic alternatives to West
that there is some larger process at work, a ern liberalism. In the past decade, there have
been unmistakable changes in the intellectual
Francis Fukuyama is deputy director of the State climate of the world's two largest communist
Department's policy planning staff and former countries, and the beginnings of significant
analyst at the rand Corporation. This article reform movements in both. But this phenom
is based on a lecture presented at the Univer- enon extends beyond high politics and it can
sity of Chicago's John M. Olin Center for In- be seen also in the ineluctable spread of con
quiry Into the Theory and Practice of De- sumerist Western culture in such diverse con
mocracy. The author would like to pay special texts as the peasants' markets and color tele
thanks to the Olin Center and to Nathan Tar- vision sets now omnipresent throughout
cov and Allan Bloom for their support in this China, the cooperative restaurants and cloth
and many earlier endeavors. The opinions ex- ing stores opened in the past year in Moscow,
pressed in this article do not reflect those of the Beethoven piped into Japanese depart
the rand Corporation or of any agency of the ment stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike
U.S. government. in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.
The National Interest—Summer 1989 3
This content downloaded from
������������� XXXXXXXXXXon Tue, 21 Jul XXXXXXXXXX:32:48 UTC��������������
All use subject to https:
about.jstor.org/terms
What we may be witnessing is not just
the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of postwar 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. This
is not to say that there will no longer be events
to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs's yearly sum
maries of international relations, for the vic
tory of liberalism has occu
ed primarily in
the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as
yet incomplete in the real or material world.
But there are powerful reasons for believing
that it is the ideal that will govern the material
world in the long run. To understand how this
is so, we must first consider some theoretical
issues concerning the nature of historical
change.
THE NOTION of the end of history is not an original one. Its best
known propagator was Karl Marx, who be
lieved that the direction of historical devel
opment was a purposeful one determined by
the interplay of material forces, and would
come to an end only with the achievement of
a communist Utopia that would finally resolve
all prior contradictions. But the concept of
history as a dialectical process with a begin
ning, a middle, and an end was bo
owed by
Marx from his great German predecessor,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
For better or worse, much of Hegel's his
toricism has become part of our contemporary
intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind
has progressed through a series of primitive
stages of consciousness on his path to the pres
ent, and that these stages co
esponded to con
crete forms of social organization, such as tri
al, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally
democratic-egalitarian societies, has become
inseparable from the modern understanding
of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to
speak the language of modern social science,
insofar as man for him was the product of his
concrete historical and social environment
The National Interest—Summer 1989 .
and not, as earlier natural right theorists
would have it, a collection of more or less fixed
"natural" attributes. The mastery and trans
formation of man's natural environment
through the application of science and tech
nology was originally not a Marxist concept,
but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists
whose historical relativism degenerated into
relativism tout court, however, Hegel believed
that history culminated in an absolute mo
ment—a moment in which a final, rational
form of society and state became victorious.
It is Hegel's misfortune to be known now
primarily as Marx's precursor, and it is ou
misfortune that few of us are familiar with
Hegel's work from direct study, but only as
it has been filtered through the distorting lens
of Marxism. In France, however, there has
been an effort to save Hegel from his Marxist
interpreters and to resu
ect him as the phi
losopher who most co
ectly speaks to ou
time. Among those modern French inte
preters of Hegel, the greatest was certainly
Alexandre Kojève, a
illiant Russian emigre
who taught a highly influential series of sem
inars in Paris in the 1930s at the Ecole Practique
des Hautes Etudes.1 While largely unknown in
the United States, Kojève had a major impact
on the intellectual life of the continent.
Among his students ranged such future lu
minaries as Jean-Paul Sartre on the Left and
Raymond Aron on the Right; postwar exis
tentialism bo
owed many of its basic cate
gories from Hegel via Kojève.
Kojève sought to resu
ect the Hegel of
the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who pro
claimed history to be at an end in 1806. Fo
as early as this Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat
of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena
the victory of the ideals of the French Rev
'Kojève's best-known work is his Introduction à la
lecture de Hegel (Paris: Editions Gallimard,
1947), which is a transcript of the Ecole Practique
lectures from the 1930s. This book is available
in English entitled Introduction to the Reading
of Hegel a
anged by Raymond Queneau, edited
by Allan Bloom, and translated by James Ni
chols (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
This content downloaded from
������������� XXXXXXXXXXon Tue, 21 Jul XXXXXXXXXX:32:48 UTC��������������
All use subject to https:
about.jstor.org/terms
olution, and the imminent universalization of
the state incorporating the principles of li
erty and equality. Kojève, far from rejecting
Hegel in light of the tu
ulent events of the
next century and a half, insisted that the latte
had been essentially co
ect.2 The Battle of
Jena marked the end of history because it was
at that point that the vanguard of humanity (a
term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the
principles of the French Revolution. While
there was considerable work to be done afte
1806—abolishing slavery and the slave trade,
extending the franchise to workers, women,
blacks, and other racial minorities, etc.—the
basic principles of the liberal democratic state
could not be improved upon. The two world
wars in this century and their attendant rev
olutions and upheavals simply had the effect
of extending those principles spatially, such
that the various provinces of human civili
zation were
ought up to the level of its most
advanced outposts, and of forcing those so
cieties in Europe and North America at the
vanguard of civilization to implement thei
liberalism more fully.
The state that emerges at the end of his
tory is liberal insofar as it recognizes and pro
tects through a system of law man's universal
right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it
exists only with the consent of the governed.
For Kojève, this so-called "universal homo
genous state" found real-life embodiment in
the countries of postwar Western Europe—
precisely those fla
y, prosperous, self-satis
fied, inward-looking, weak-willed states
whose grandest project was nothing more he
roic than the creation of the Common Ma
ket.' But this was only to be expected. Fo
human history and the conflict that charac
terized it was based on the existence