Ending "The End of History" Trope

Fukuyama's thesis has become a lazy analytical tool, one that is divorced from his actual argument.

Francis Fukuyama at Fronteiras do Pensamento São Paulo, Wikimedia Commons.

I propose a moratorium on references to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History until people have read the book and understood its content. Louise Perry wrote last week that Fukuyama’s thesis claims that we have reached an era where “conflict is impossible”. While former BBC Correspondent, Nick Bryant, has recently launched a Substack called History Never Ended. Barely a week goes by without someone using the book as a lazy analytical trope to contrast its ideas with the turbulent reality of our current period – “Fukuyama said history had ended, but look at everyone getting roused up!”

Fukuyama’s initial essay for The National Interest had contained a much overlooked question mark, while the subsequent expansion of his thesis was titled The End of History and the Last Man, with this additional analysis proving critical to understanding the argument in full.

His thesis began by arguing that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not merely mean a practical victory for the West of the Cold War, but something more philosophically ambitious – that liberal democracy offers the best possible framework for human flourishing. Both of the 20th Century’s ideological challenges to liberal democracy had failed to create a better or coherent alternative, one that could understand humanity’s natural pluralism and produce conditions that advanced the human condition. Fascism’s savage lusts and wanton violence could never provide stability – let alone moral dignity – while the totalitarian restrictions and economic illiteracy of communism failed to grasp humanity’s innate individual agency and desire to associate freely.

Drawing heavily on the work of Georg Hegel – albeit filtered through Hegel’s philosophical interpreter Alexandre Kojève – Fukuyama argued that History should be understood not as simply a sequence of events, but instead as a struggle between competing ideas about how societies should be organised. His thesis wasn’t that liberal democracy was perfect, but instead that there was no serious rival to it that could adequately produce more positive social outcomes.

Fukuyama did not argue that there would not continue to be challenges to liberal democracy. He highlights that liberalism’s universalism is difficult for some to accept. Ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism and socialism (amongst others) would create permanent agitations, but these were more reactionary emotions rather than serious structural alternatives. Fukuyama explained that the striving towards liberal democracy by states not possessing it would be messy, potentially incomplete, and often violent. Events would still happen, many of which would be highly consequential.

Yet it was the addition of the concept of “The Last Man” that Fukuyama grappled with what conditions could be like if liberal democracy had no serious competitor. Fukuyama borrowed the concept from Nietzsche as the archetype of a comfortable, self-satisfied modernity. Someone whose horizons have shrunk to simple personal satisfaction – what restaurants to eat at, what film to stream, or what tropical resort to holiday at.

Fukuyama pondered whether such a life was enough to satisfy human beings’ thymos – the part of the soul that desires not merely comfort but recognition, esteem, and the sense of having struggled for something. The concern was not that liberal democracy would be defeated by a credible rival alternative, but instead that it would be hollowed out from within, by producing a populace that was too uninterested, too risk-averse, and too cowardly to defend itself from the agitations of reactionary emotions.

Fukuyama viewed The Last Man with dread. He feared that without a serious ideological challenge, liberal democracy’s comfort and prosperity removes from our existence the great contests, sacrifices, and commitments that historically gave human life its purpose. Without the paths for our thymos to express itself, we would instead resort to discord to try and create a sense of struggle. Not because people are poor or oppressed, but because they are restless.

Which is where we find ourselves today. Far from being wrong about our current political agitations, Fukuyama predicted them. His analysis explicitly identifies the elements of humanity that lead us to struggle, and to struggle against peace and prosperity if that is all we are offered. Which makes the way his thesis is used in most contemporary commentary ironic at best, or deceitful at worst (or, more likely, just plain lazy).

In his 2018 book Identity, Fukuyama expands on how these agitations are now materialising in our current era. The book is framed by three elements of the human soul – alongside thymos’s desire for esteem, there is isothymia: the desire to be recognised as equal, which is central to democracy, and megalothymia: the need to be seen as superior – which threatens it.

What Identity argues is that the frictionless comfort of liberal democracy has not extinguished our megalothymia but has instead inflamed it. Deprived of the grand ideological contests that once gave struggle its meaning, the thymotic impulse has curdled into something smaller and angrier. It has powered the rise of authoritarian nationalism – where strongmen offer not policy but status through the intoxicating sense of belonging to a people whose superiority has been unjustly denied and must now be reclaimed.

It has also led to the fragmentation of identities into competing grievance groups, each asserting its own hierarchy of injury. This has created the rise of identity exceptionalism, where the “authentic inner self” has been elevated above all external obligations. Generating a demand for public validation, where institutions, norms, and fellow citizens bend themselves around the recognition of identities that are expressed as being beyond question or negotiation.

These expressions of megalothymia are often framed as opposites in public debates, but are instead symptoms of the same underlying disorder. The lack of grander ideological struggle borne from liberal democracy having no peer competitor has instead turned liberal democratic societies into internal battles for status and power. The Last Man, it turns out, doesn’t last for long.

However, while these reactionary agitations persist – and some have gained enormous power capturing governments and institutions – they are built on hollow foundations rather than establishing serious structural alternatives. The megalothymia that drives them is ultimately self-defeating, prone to the corruption, incoherence, and overreach that comes from movements built on resentment rather than any coherent vision of how complex societies should actually be governed.

As we have seen with the landslide defeat of Fidesz at the recent Hungarian election, there is a weakness to these attempts to create ideological competitors to liberal democracy. The system Viktor Orbán built promised greater pride and prosperity through politically captured institutions, but when material improvements failed the broader attempt to morally restructure the society had nothing left to rest upon. It is likely that MAGA will suffer the same fate.

Governance that relies on the permanent identification of enemies is constitutionally incapable of the patient, unglamorous, and often anonymous work that functional societies actually depend upon. Liberal democracy’s unsatisfying procedures are not its weakness but its load-bearing walls.

Despite the inflamed megalothymia of our era, people still do understand that legal and institutional frameworks that provide neutral rules which apply to all citizens are preferable to those that are driven by identity, belief, or nefarious conmen. This becomes apparent when ideological challengers prove incapable of improving the practical aspects of daily life.

When given the opportunity to struggle for liberal democracy humans can draw upon extraordinary reserves of courage and effort, as we have seen in Ukraine. The complacency of liberal democracies is not replicated by those who have a clear understanding that the alternatives cannot provide anything remotely like its fruits.

Ukraine fights with valour because Russia has made the choice concrete: liberal democracy or corrupt brutality. The stakes may be high for Ukraine, but to consolidated liberal democracies, Russia is merely an irritant, not an ideological competitor – despite attempts to frame it as such by elements in the West hostile to liberalism.

While China possesses the scale and ambition to fill that role, it has so far failed to export a coherent ideological alternative. Its model of authoritarian capitalism is admired by opportunists and strongmen, but it offers no universal claim on human dignity or organising principle that could genuinely rival liberalism’s appeal. Beijing sells efficiency and order, but the interests of the party take precedence over any conception of the good life. Until a credible ideological competitor emerges, liberal democracies will continue to lack the external pressure that forces citizens to reckon with what they actually have.

This is the paradox that Fukuyama identified. When the struggle is existential like in Ukraine our thymos can activate with determination and conviction. Yet when liberal democracy is consolidated, the patient and unglamorous work of proceduralism doesn’t offer the soulcraft that humans often crave. Liberalism’s defining commitments to tolerance and pluralism means it cannot offer the romantic moral community or civilisational purpose that authoritarian nationalism peddles, or the thrill of self-righteous grievance that postmodern progressive politics currently presents.

Here lies our eternal vulnerability as a complex emotional species.

It is the nature of public writing for commentators to want a neat binary to frame their analysis, but The End of History simply does not provide that. The misreading of Fukuyama is convenient to create a whipping boy to illustrate the world’s current ills. But his book is not triumphalist as it is often caricatured, and it doesn’t offer any satisfyingly definitive answers. It is a profoundly inquisitive work, and one that generates far more dilemmas to the human condition than solutions.