The End of History and the Last Man

Организация: Maxwell Macmillan International

Издательство: The Free Press

ISBN: 0-02-910975-2

In his 1989 article, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama raised a storm of controversy. THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN is the author’s response. His thesis is simple. The failure of communism and the disappearance of the Soviet Union has resulted in the victory of liberal democracy and capitalism. There are, he claims, no more challengers. Security and freedom have been achieved, and consequently history has ended. THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN ignores the confusing events and details of most history and is more philosophical, even teleological, in its orientation. The author states that only liberal democracy and the market economy have satisfactorily provided what Plato claimed to be necessary for happiness: the appetitive (food and sex), the reasoning (knowledge and truth), and the need to be recognized as human. Hegel’s concept of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis explained the process of history, with liberal democracy as the final synthesis according to Fukuyama. Marx, like Hegel, saw the world in a clash of evolving opposites, but while Marx predicted that the triumph of communism would lead to the withering away of the state, Fukuyama instead argues that with the victory of liberal democracy it is history that has died.

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