Fukuyama22TheEndofHistory22.pdf

The End of History

The End of History?
The National Interest, Summer 1989

Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama is deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff and former analyst at the
RAND Corporation. This article is based on a lecture presented at the University of Chicago’s John M. Olin
Center and to Nathan Tarcov and Allan Bloom for their support in this and many earlier endeavours. The
opinions expresses in this article do not reflect those of the RAND Corporation or of any agency of the U.S.
government.

In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something
very fundamental has happened in world history. The past year has seen a flood of articles
commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact that “peace” seems to be breaking out in many
regions of the world. Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing
between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably
superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the
millennium for a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble to
announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict.

And yet, all of these people sense dimly that there is some larger process at work, a process that gives
coherence and order to the daily headlines. the twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a
paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then
bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate
apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of
Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: no to an “end
of ideology” or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an
unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.

The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable
systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes
in the intellectual climate of the world’s tow largest communist countries, and the beginnings of
significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be
seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the
peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative
restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese
department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.

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. This is
not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries of
international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred 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

file:///G|/Classes/End%20of%20History_files/content_files/Fukuyama_the_end_of_history.htm (1 of 18)6/20/2003 7:04:26 AM

The End of History

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.

I

The notion of the end of history is not an original one. Its best known propagator was Karl Marx, who
believed that the direction of historical development 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
beginning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

For better or worse, much of Hegel’s historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual
baggage. The notion that mankind has progresses through a series of primitive stages of consciousness
on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization,
such as tribal, slave owning, theocratic, and finally democratic egalitarian societies, has become
inseparable form 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 and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less
fixed “natual” attributes. The mastery and transformation of man’s natural environment through the
application of science and technology 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 moment — 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 our 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 resurrect him as the philosopher who most correctly speaks to our time. Among those
modern French interpreters of Hegel, the greatest was certainly Alexandre Kojeve, a brilliant Russian
emigre who taught a highly influential series of seminars in Paris in the 1930’s at the Ecole Practique
des Hautes Etudes.1 While largely unknown in the United States, Kojeve had a major impact on the
intellectual life of the continent. Among his students ranged such future luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre
on the Left and Raymond Aron on the Right; post war existentialism borrowed many of its basic
categories from Hegel via Kojeve.

Kojeve sought to resurrect the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who proclaimed history
to be at an end in 1806. For 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 Revolution, and the imminent universalization
of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality. Kojeve, far from rejecting Hegel in light
of the turbulent events of the next century and a half, insisted that the latter had been essentially correct.2
The Battle of Jena marked the end of history because it was at that point that the vanguard of humanity

file:///G|/Classes/End%20of%20History_files/content_files/Fukuyama_the_end_of_history.htm (2 of 18)6/20/2003 7:04:26 AM

The End of History

(a term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the principles of the French Revolution. While there was
considerable work to be done after 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 tow world wars in this century and their attendant
revolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending those principles spatially, such that the
various provinces of human civilization were brought up to the level of its most advanced outposts, and
of forcing those societies in Europe and North America at the vanguard of civilization to implement
their liberalism more fully.

The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognize and protects 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 Kojeve, this so-called “universal homogenous state” found real-life embodiment in
the countries of postwar Western Europe — precisely those flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward-
looking, weak-willed states whose grandest project was nothing more heroic than the creation of the
Common Market.3 But this was only to be expected. For human history and the conflict that
characterized it was based on the existence of “contradictions”: primitive man’s quest for mutual
recognition, the dialectic of the master and slave, the transformation and mastery of nature, the struggle
fo the universal recognition of rights, and the dichotomy between proletarian and capitalist. But in the
universal homogenous state, all prior contradictions are resolved and al human needs are satisfied. There
is no struggle or conflict over “large” issues, and consequently no need for generals or statesmen; what
remains is primarily economic activity. And indeed, Kojeve’s life was consistent with his teaching.
Believing that there was no more work for philosophers as well, since Hegel (correctly understood) had
already achieved absolute knowledge, Kojeve left teaching after the war and spent the remainder of his
life working as a bureaucrat in the European Economic Community, until his death in 1968.

To his contemporaries at mid-century, Kojeve’s proclamation of the end of history must have seemed
like the typical eccentric solipsism of a French intellectual, coming as it did on the heels of World War
II and at the very height of the Cold War. To comprehend how Kojeve could have been so audacious as
to assert that history has ended, we must first of all understand their meaning of Hegelian idealism.

II

For Hegel, the contradictions that drive history exist first of all in the realm of human consciousness, i.e.
on he level of ideas4 — not the trivial election year proposals of American politicians, but ideas in the
sense of large unifying world views that might best be understood under the rubric of ideology. Ideology
in this sense is not restricted to the secular and explicit political doctrines we usually associate with the
term, but can include religion, culture, and the complex of moral values underlying any society as well.

Hegel’s view of the relationship between the ideal and the real or material worlds was an extremely
complicated one, beginning with the fact that for him the distinction between the two was only
apparent.5 He did not believe that the real world conformed or could be made to conform to ideological
preconceptions of philosophy professors in any simpleminded way, or that the “material” world could

file:///G|/Classes/End%20of%20History_files/content_files/Fukuyama_the_end_of_history.htm (3 of 18)6/20/2003 7:04:26 AM

The End of History

not impinge on the ideal. Indeed, Hegel the professor was temporarily thrown out of work as a result of a
very material event, the Battle of Jena. But while Hegel’s writing and thinking could be stopped by a
bullet form the material world, the hand on the trigger of the gun was motivated in turn by the ideas of
liberty and equality that had driven the French Revolution.

For Hegel, all human behavior in the material world, and hence all human history, is rooted in a prior
state of consciousness — an idea similar to the new expressed by John Maynard Keynes when he said
that the views of men of affairs were usually derived from defunct economists and academic scribblers
of earlier generations. This consciousness may not be explicit and self-aware, as are modern political
doctrines, but may rather take the form of religion or simple cultural or moral habits. And yet this realm
of consciousness in the long run necessarily becomes manifest in the material world, indeed creates the
material world in its own image. Consciousness is causes and not effect, and can develop autonomously
from the material world, hence the real subtext underlying the apparent jumble of current events is the
history of ideology.

Hegel’s idealism has fared poorly at the hands of later thinkers. Marx revered the priority of the real and
the ideal completely, relegating the entire realm of consciousness — religion, art, culture, philosophy
itself — to a “superstructure” that was determined entirely by the prevailing material mode of
production. Yet another unfortunate legacy of Marxism is our tendency to retreat into materialists or
utilitarian explanations of political or historical phenomena, and our disinclination to believe in the
autonomous power of ideas. A recent example of this is Paul Kennedy’s hugely successful The Rise and
Fall of the Great Powers, which ascribes the decline of great powers to simple economic over extension.
Obviously, this is true on some level: an empire whose economy is barely above the level of subsistence
cannot bankrupt its treasury indefinitely. But whether a highly productive modern industrial society
chooses to spend 3 or 7 percent of its GNP on defence rather than consumption is entirely a matter of
that society’s political priorities, which are in turn determined in the realm of consciousness.

The materialist bias of modern thought is characteristic not only of people on the Left who may be
sympathetic to Marxism, but of many passionate anti-Marxists as well. Indeed, there is on the right what
one might label the Wall Street Journal school of deterministic materialism that discounts the
importance of ideology and culture and sees man as essentially a rational, profit-maximizing individual.
It is precisely this kind of individual and his pursuit of material incentives that is posited as the basis for
economic life as such in economic textbooks.6 One small example will illustrate the problematic
character of such materialist views.

Max Weber begins his famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by noting the
different economic performance of Protestant and Catholic communities throughout Europe and
America, summed up in the proverb that Protestants eat well while Catholics sleep well. Weber notes
that according to any economic theory that posited man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising the piece-
work rate should increase labor productivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant communities,
raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher
rate, a peasant accustomed to earning two and one-half marks per day found he could earn the same
amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure

file:///G|/Classes/End%20of%20History_files/content_files/Fukuyama_the_end_of_history.htm (4 of 18)6/20/2003 7:04:26 AM

The End of History

over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spartan hoplite over the wealth of the Athenian trader, or
even the ascetic life of the early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured aristocrat,
cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces, but come preeminently out
of the sphere of consciousness — what we have labeled here broadly as ideology. And indeed, a central
theme of Weber’s work was to prove that contrary to Marx, the material mode of production, far from
being the “base”, was itself a “superstructure” with roots in religion and culture, and that to understand
the emergence of modern capitalism and the profit motive one had to study their antecedents in the
realm of the spirit.

As we look around the contemporary world, the poverty of materialist theories of economic
development is all too apparent. The Wall Street Journal school of deterministic materialism habitually
points to the stunning economic success of Asia in the past few decades as evidence of the viability of
free market economics, with the implication that all societies would see similar development were they
simply to allow their populations to pursue their material self-interest freely. Surely free markets and
stable political systems are a necessary precondition to capitalist economic growth. But just as surely the
cultural heritage of those Far Eastern societies, the ethic of work and saving and family, a religious
heritage that does not, like Islam, place restrictions on certain forms of economic behavior, and other
deeply ingrained moral qualities, are equally important in explaining their economic performace.7 And
yet the intellectual weight of materialism is such that not a single respectable contemporary theory of
economic development addresses consciousness and culture seriously as the matrix within which
economic behavior is formed.

Failure to understand that the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of consciousness and culture
leads to the common mistake of attributing material causes to phenomena that are essentially ideal in
nature. For example, it is commonplace in the West to interpret the reform movements first in China and
most recently in the Soviet Union as the victory of the material over the ideal — that is, a recognition that
ideological incentives could not replace material ones in stimulation a highly productive modern
economy, and that if one wanted to prosper one had to appeal to baser forms of self-interest. But the
deep defects of socialist economies were evident thirty or forty years ago to anyone who chose to look.
Why was it that these countries moved away from central palnning in the 1980’s? The answer must be
found in the consciousness of the elites and leaders ruling them, who decided to opt for the “Protestant”
life of wealth and risk over the “Catholic” path of poverty and security.8 That change was in no way
made inevitable by the material condition was in which either country found itself on the eve of the
reform, but instead came about as the result of the victory of one idea over another.9

For Kojeve, as for all good Hegelians, understanding the underlying processes of history requires
understanding developments in the realm of consciousness or ideas, since consciousness will ultimately
remake the material world in its own image. To say that history ended in 1806 meant that mankind’s
ideological evolution ended in the ideals of the French or American Revolutions: while particular
regimes in the real world might not implement these ideals fully, their theoretical truth is absolute and
could not be improved upon. Hence it did not mater to Kojeve that the consciousness of the postwar
generation of Europeans had not been universalized throughout the world; if ideological development

file:///G|/Classes/End%20of%20History_files/content_files/Fukuyama_the_end_of_history.htm (5 of 18)6/20/2003 7:04:26 AM

The End of History

had in fact ended, the homogenous state would eventually become victorious throughtout the material
world.

I have neither the space nor, frankly, the ability to defend in depth Hegel’s radical idealist perspective.
The issue is not whether Hegel’s system was right, but whether his perspective might uncover the
problematic nature of many materialist explanations we often take for granted. This is not to deny the
role of material factors as such. To a literal minded idealist, human society can be built around any
arbitrary set of principle regardless of their relationship to the material world. And in fact men have
proven themselves able to endure the most extreme material hardships in the name of ideas that exist in
the realm of the spirit alone, be it the divinity of cows or the nature of the Holy Trinity.10

But while man’s very perception of the material world is shaped by his historical consciousness of it, the
material world can clearly affect in return the viability of a particular state of consciousness. In
particular, the spectacular abundance of advanced liberal economies and the infinitely diverse consumer
culture made possible by them seem to both foster and preserve liberalism in the political sphere. I want
to avoid the materialist determinism that says that liberal economics inevitably produces liberal politics,
because I believe that both economics and politics presuppose an autonomous prior state of
consciousness that makes them possible. But that state of consciousness that permits the growth of
liberalism seems to stabilize in the way one would expect at the end of history if it is underwritten by
the abundance of a modern free market economy. We might summarize the content of the universal
homogenous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and
stereos in the economic.

III

Have we in fact reached the end of history? Are there, in other words, any fundamental “contradictions”
in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, that would be resolvable by an
alternative political-economic structure? If we accept the idealist premises laid out above, we must seek
an answer to this question in the realm of ideology and consciousness. Our task is not to answer
exhaustively the challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot messiah around the world, but
only those that are embodied in important social or political forces and movements, and which are
therefore part of world history. For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to
people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the
common ideological heritage of mankind.

In the past century, there have been two major challenges to liberalism, those of fascism and of
communism. The former11 saw the political weakness, materialism, anomie, and lack of community of
the West as fundamental contradictions in liberal societies that could only be resolved by a strong state
that forged a new “people” on the basis of national excessiveness. Fascism was destroyed as a living
ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a
defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against
it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but

file:///G|/Classes/End%20of%20History_files/content_files/Fukuyama_the_end_of_history.htm (6 of 18)6/20/2003 7:04:26 AM

The End of History

its lack of success. After the ear, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other
European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct. There was no material reason why new fascist
movements could not have sprung up again after the war in other locales, ut for the fact that expansionist
ultranationalism, with its promise of unending conflict leading ot disastrous military defeat, had
completely lost its appeal. The ruins of the Reich chancellory as well as the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of consciousness as well as materially, and all
of the proto-fascist movements spawned by the German and Japanese examples like the Peronist
movement in Argentina or Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army withered after the war.

The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to liberalism, communism, was far
more serious. Marx, speaking Hegel’s language, asserted that liberal society contained fundamental
contradiction that could not be resolved within its context, that between capital and labor, and this
contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class
issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. As Kojeve (among others) noted, the
egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society
envisioned by Marx. This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United
States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of economic
inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains
fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social
characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern
conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather
the “legacy of slavery and racism” which persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery.

As a result of the receding of the class issue, the appeal of communism in the developed Western world,
it is safe to say, is lower today than any time since the end of the First World War. This can be measured
in any number of ways: in the declining membership and electoral pull of the major European
communist parties, and their overtly revisionist programs; in the corresponding electoral success of
conservative parties form Britain and Germany to the United States and Japan which are unabashedly
pro-market and antistatist; and in an intellectual climate whose most “advanced” members no longer
believe that bourgeois society is something that ultimately needs to be overcome. This is to say that the
opinions of progressive intellectuals in Western countries are not deeply pathological in any number of
ways. But those who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old, or very
marginal to the real political discourse of their societies.

One may argue that the socialist alternative was never terribly plausible for the North Atlantic world,
and was sustained for the last several decades primarily by its success outside of this region. But it is
precisely in the non-European world that one is not struck by the occurrence of major ideological
transformations. Surely the most remarkable changes have occurred in Asia. Due to the strength and
adaptability of the indigenous cultures there, Asia became a battleground for a variety of imported
Western ideologies cultures there, Asia became a battleground for a variety of imported Western
ideologies early in this century. Liberalism in Asia was a very weak reed in the period after World War
I; it is easy today to forget how gloomy Asia’s political future looked as recently as ten or fifteen years
ago. It is easy to forget as well how momentous the outcome of Asian ideological struggles seemed fore

file:///G|/Classes/End%20of%20History_files/content_files/Fukuyama_the_end_of_history.htm (7 of 18)6/20/2003 7:04:26 AM

The End of History

world political development as a whole.

The first Asian alternative to liberalism to be decisively defeated was the fascist one represented by
Imperial Japan. Japanese fascism (like its German version) was defeated by the force of American arms
in the Pacific war, and liberal democracy was imposed on Japan by a victorious United States. Western
capitalism and political liberalism when transplanted to Japan were adapted and transformed by the
Japanese in such a way as to be scarcely recognizable.12 Many Americans are now aware that Japanese
industrial organization is very different from that prevailing in the United States or Europe, and it is
questionable what relationship the factional maneuvering that takes place with the governing Liberal
Democratic Party bears to democracy. Nonetheless, the very fact that the essential elements of economic
and political liberalism have been so successfully grafted onto uniquely Japanese traditions and
institutions guarantees their survival in the long run. More important is the contribution that Japan has
become both a symbol and a underpinning of the universal homogenous state. V.S. Naipaul traveling in
Khomeini’s Iran shortly after the revolution noted the omnipresent signs advertising the products of
Sony, Hitachi, and JVC, whose appeal remained virtually irresistible and gave the lie to the regime’s
pretensions of restoring a state based on the rule of he Shariah. Desire for access to the consumer
culture, created in large measure by Japan, has played a crucial role in fostering the spread of economic
liberalism throughout Asia, and hence in promoting political liberalism as well.

The economic success of the other newly industrializing countries (NICs) in Asia following on the
xample of Japan is by now a familiar story. What is important from a Hegelian standpoint is that
political liberalism has been following economic liberalism, more slowly than many had hoped but with
seeming inevitability. Here again we see the victory of the idea of the universal homogenous state. South
Korea had developed into a modern, urbanized society with an increasingly large and well-educated
middle class that could not possibly be isolated from the larger democratic trends around them. Under
these democratic trends around them. Under these circumstances it seemed intolerable to a large part of
this population that it should be ruled by an anachronistic military regime while Japan, only a decade or
so ahead in economic terms, had parliamentary institutions for over forty years. Even the former
socialist regime in Burma, which for so many decades existed in dismal isolation from the larger trends
dominating Asia, was buffeted in the …