The End of History and the Last Man

Rating:
Summary: Is this as good as it gets?
Review: This is a book with a certain fame or notoriety, not least due to its title. Having finally read it, I can appreciate its appeal and yet am perplexed at why it has been misinterpreted so widely, and why such a badly-written and ill-thought-out work has been taken so seriously.

The danger of a book like this is that it can reinforce or pander to some people's prejudices - after the fall of Communism we in the West did deserve a metaphorical pat on the back, but that's a long way from just kicking back as saying "well folks, this is as good as it gets". A cursory reading of "The End of History" would no doubt assure the armchair warriors that all's well with the world now the Reds have gone.

BUT, Fukuyama is not so sure as that. He puts forward an hypothesis about the triumph of liberal democracy (this is what human history has been leading up to) but utterly fails to prove that hypothesis. That's not to say that the hypothesis is not worthy of thought and debate - Fukuyama is at least to be congratulated for that. What I found less satisfactory was the quality of argument and analysis found in the book, and I'm no professional historian or philosopher. Just two among many examples - Fukuyama classes the USA and Great Britain as a "liberal democracies" from, respectively, 1790 and 1848: utterly astounding. I was equally perplexed by this:

"A century of Marxist thought has accustomed us to think of capitalist societies as highly inegalitarian, but the truth is that they are far more egalitarian in their social effects than the agricultural societies they replaced". Well so what? Last time I was in Rome, I noticed they were no longer throwing Christians to the lions.

Yet the main problem I found was that Fukuyama's paradigms were themselves utterly conventional, causing him to either miss or duck fundamental issues such as how the rise of globalism, multi-national companies and fundamentally undemocratic super-states such as the European Union will affect liberal democracies. Is democracy a dispensable item provided we have material wealth - voter turn-outs might suggest this - or is this a real and new "internal contradiction"?

So, congratulations to Fukuyama for opening the debate. Beware of people who regard this work as some sort of Bible. Read it carefully and be prepared to plough your way through a lot of ropey analysis.

Rating:
Summary: Food for Thought: leftover Hegel & thymos of Platonic coffee
Review: "The End of History and the Last Man" is about the philosophy of history, not history itself. The few snippets of history anecdotally included are from modern Western history. Western political philosophy applied to the immediate post-Cold War world, as seen by a student of the usual Western political philosophers -- Plato Locke, Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, and some guy named Kojeve -- is what Fukuyama purveys. It's a fairly readable book, considering the sources and the points he's trying to cover.

I do not agree with the author that history is directional, just path-dependant -- though less so than he implies, the vagaries of linguistics and ephemerality of documentation being what they are. I'm not quick to agree that the essence, the soul of a person is a trinity of reason, desire, and thymos (esteem or pride). But if one is willing to at least suspend disbelief, the rest of the book flows reasonably from that premise, and there are significant insights to be gained along the way. The intrinsic sublimation of thymos by liberal democracy into commercial and electoral politics is seen as the primary factor in its successful competition with previous socioeconomic systems. The presumed 'end of history' arises when all nations have become liberal democracies, and compete solely on a nonmilitary basis. Modernization "can be understood as the gradual victory of the desiring part of the soul, guided by reason, over the soul's thymotic part."

His characterization of liberal democracy as the best of all possible worlds and its citizens as the 'last men' is tiresome in usage and presumptuous in conception. In liberal democracy as a thesis or paradigm (see Thomas Kuhn), problems will be discovered over time, which will be synthesized with durable aspects of liberal democracy into a new paradigm. An antithesis is not required for a new synthesis, just unsolved problems with better paradigmatic solutions and a crisis of belief among adherents of the predominant paradigm. Fukuyama does add a limited qualification at the end, raising the relativism of liberal democracy (which makes it consider itself as of less than absolute virtue and value; this is theoretical) and its corrosive effect on social cohesion in favor of economic flexibility (decidedly practical) as the leading problems.

Treatment of three keys issues would strengthen the book: the hegemonic master-slave relationship between the US and the rest of the world; the translation of the various philosophical theoretical considerations into sources of social power (see Michael Mann); and, while history is path-dependant, it is not teleologicaly directional: there is lack of directionality in the selection regime for States (see Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould or any other evolutionary biologist). It's the power, every day, all day, that matters. There is no Promised Land at The End of Universal History -- just another hill on the road for the wagon to climb (or descend). But ultimately this book is valuable, less for the answers it presents than the questions it raises.

Rating:
Summary: The end of history?
Review: After what happened on New York on 11th september 2001, after what happened on Argentina on december 2001, maybe someone from chicago should make a new book. A nice title will be: Is this really the end of history?
- I hope not.

Rating:
Summary: Think History is Back? Think Again!
Review: The September 11 attacks only vindicate Fukuyama's claim that
history as he treats it - the history of development of ideas - has come to an end. Terrorists have no ideas, have no vision, it cannot be supplemented by hatred and destruction. Although...
Is it ideas that shape history or something else???

Rating:
Summary: Wears Well
Review: I read this book years after it was published, after 9-11, and it holds up well, that is, when it is actually read. The fact that a commentator on Iran's Arabic-language news channel recently attacked it as the ideological basis of a war to eradicate ancient cultures points to the power of this book's arguments. So does the success of Michael Mandelbaum's "The Ideas that Conquered the World" which carries on with the same theme.

Rating:
Summary: Read it, don't abuse what many think it says.
Review: One of the most thought provoking books I have read in a long time. Contrary to the claims of the right, Fukuyama does not conclude that western liberal democray and economic liberalism are the highest form of evolution. He explores this question and in doing so embarks on a fascinating journey though history and political philosophy. There is no airtight conclusion or doctrine being espoused here, which may trouble some. However, the questions raised are critical to understanding modern society, where we have come from and where we may or may not be going. Some have criticized the book for being wordy and repetitive. Though the same themes do appear over and over, they are always to look at new questions. On the contrary, I wish I could have read on.

Rating:
Summary: Wordy and repetitive
Review: I was recommended this book from my friend, and I was eager to start reading it. But I have to warn you; "The End of History and the Last Man" is not an easy book to read. It is not just badly written, but it is written in such a way that you end up reading the same points at least three times.. I commented this for my friend who recommended me the book, and he said: "Yeah, that's right. I forgot to say that it is a bit wordy and repetitive. I should have recommended you something a little bit easier to read."

That being said, there is not doubt that Fukuyama possesses much knowledge on the subject, and I find some of the issues brought up in this book to be very interesting, even provoking. But after reading this book, I was left with the feeling of spending much time on acquiring very little (new) information.

Maybe one would be better off, doing what my friend suggested for me (of course, he did that *after* I had struggled my way through the book). Go to your library and find the original 1989 National Interest article - read that one, and skip the book. Apparently you'll get the same main ideas, without having to struggle through hundreds of pages..

Rating:
Summary: security or freedom ?
Review: What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a 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. -"X" (Francis Fukuyama), The End of History? (The National Interest)

One assumes that only George F. Kennan's "Containment" memo, likewise published under the pseudonym "X", can rival Francis Fukuyama's essay "The End of History"--first published in 1989, in The National Interest--in terms of impact on the public consciousness of a foreign policy brief. Fukuyama's essential argument was not that history, in terms of events and conflicts and the like, had actually come to and end, rather that liberal capitalist democracy represented the final step in Man's political evolution. With its overtones of Cold War triumphalism, the piece set off a huge kerfuffle and turned a State Department cypher into a significant political philosopher almost overnight.

In this book, Fukuyama expands on the ideas in his original essay and introduces several new ones, the most important of which, embodied by the idea of "thymos", is that the greatest threat to the End of History is the fact that people demand recognition. By recognition, he means something fairly broad, but which we all intuitively recognize :

...that part of man which feels the need to place value on things--himself in the first instance, but on the people, actions, or things around him as well. It is the part of the personality which is the fundamental source of the emotions of pride, anger, and shame, and is not reducible to desire, on the one hand, or reason on the other. The desire for recognition is the most specifically political part of the human personality because it is what drives men to want to assert themselves over other men... .

Liberal democracy succeeds brilliantly at fulfilling Man's basic desires--food, clothing, shelter--but it raises several questions. Will Man, once satiated, still have the kind of thymos which has driven the species to achieve technologically and culturally ? Will the most able in society be content to be treated equally with those they consider their inferiors, or will they demand a level of political recognition commensurate with their contributions to society ? Will those at the bottom of the social scale--and liberal democracy does, undeniably, produce a hierarchy from poor to rich--be content to have less than those at the top of the scale, or will they demand that the high be brought low ? Fukuyama seeks to provide answers to these questions, drawing upon thinkers like Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Alexandre Kojeve, and upon the experiences of modern times.

The book is always fascinating, sometimes wrongheaded and frequently brilliant. In the end, the question that animates the discussion is the same that mankind always faces ; which will ultimately triumph, the desire for security or the urge to freedom. There is no more important issue in human history and the ways in which we answer it will, as always, determine our future. Even if he does not arrive at any final answers, Fukuyama adds immeasurably to our understanding of the question and its importance.

GRADE : A+

Rating:
Summary: "It ain't over, 'til it's over."
Review: Fukuyama's persistence that history has come to an end reflects all that is wrong with our current socio-economic system. I would contend that it is the tension between democratic principles (by the people, for the people) and capitalist ideology (by the corporate, for the corporate) that is a defining feature of our times. How can one man proclaim the end of history? Furthermore, how can a mass of people shrug their shoulders and say, "Huh? O.K." From the corporate domination of information via ownership of the media and the hoodwinks of soft money campaign contributions by corporate sponsors on the government level, to the insatiable appetites of consumers, the proliferation of television survival shows and the marketing of well-tanned teens as pop star commodities on the consumer level, we can easily see a society of unfulfilled expectations, watered-down spectator culture, deferred gratifications, and strictly defined "alternatives." Is this what mankind has strived for through years of strife, death, and struggle? If history does indeed have a teleology, surely its consummation is more than this. What exists at the moment is not a perfectly realized ideal born of any "democratic" dialectic of history. It is rather, a deeply-flawed system balanced in favor of the elite. To counter the revolutionary texts of Marx and Engels, capitalism created for itself a new agenda - consumerism. In the words of a famous guy: "We have everything that we want and nothing that we need." Fukuyama's book is the worst type of post-modern garbage. It is that type which asks us to revel in our trash culture, to breathe in the dizzying fumes of its bloated corpse because hey, it smells so good! If we as a culture and a people allow ideological garbage derivative of Fukuyama's "End of History and the Last Man" to penetrate our Americentric minds any further we will be in serious trouble of becoming the world's largest self-fulfilling prophecy. In Nietzsche's "Also sprach Zarathustra," he describes the last man: "He blinks." Don't be just another blinking TV eye, people. Participate, learn, think critically. History is only over if WE say it is.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting reading
Review: This was interesting to read, and one certainly hopes that liberal democracy sticks around, but freedom requires eternal vigilance. I would imagine that the world needs to transmit the meme (idea) that we will need to continue to rigorously educate future generations in freedom if we are to maintain a more civilized, peaceful world of freedom and free trade. As a follow up to this book, I would highly recommend reading a book entitled The Shadow University by Kors and Silverglate to get a look at what America's colleges are teaching right now (hint: it ain't freedom).