Classics revisited: “The End of History?” by Francis Fukuyama (1989)
9 November 2024
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8 November 2024
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I used to know a chap who had the good fortune of looking nearly two decades younger than he actually was. Until he didn’t anymore. At some point, his biological age caught up with him with a vengeance. Nobody could say that he had “aged badly”. He simply looked his age. But I had not seen him in a year or so, and to me, it was as if he had aged almost twenty years in one go.
Francis Fukuyama’s paper “The End of History?”, originally published in the summer of 1989, has gone through a similarly non-linear ageing process. In the months and years immediately after its publication, the paper must have seemed positively prophetic. Better, in fact, than a mere prophecy, if that is possible, because actual events seemed to not just confirm, but “over-confirm” Fukuyama’s central thesis. History seemed to be even “more over” (“overer”?) than Fukuyama had anticipated. But then at some point, the paper’s age caught up with it with a vengeance. Today is the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and if you re-read Fukuyama today, it will read like what it is: a document of its time, nothing more, nothing less.
Let’s remember what Fukuyama meant by “the end of history”. He did not mean that nothing interesting was going to happen in the world anymore. He meant that the big ideological battles which had characterised the 20th century – battles between proponents of completely different socioeconomic systems – were drawing to a close, and that they had produced a clear winner:
“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: not to an “end of ideology” or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, […] but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism. […] What we may be witnessing is […] 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.”
Fukuyama did not predict that the Berlin Wall would be open before the end of the year, and certainly not that the entire Warsaw Pact was about to fall apart. His original vision of the end of history was a more modest one. It did not mean that socialist regimes would literally disappear: just that they would lose their self-belief. They may limp on, but they would do so out of sheer inertia, not ideological commitment. They may limp on, but they would do so because the cost of a transition to a different system would simply be too high, and nobody knew how to do it. However, if they could start all over again, there was no way they would introduce a socialist system again. Socialism without socialists is not “history”, in the Fukuyama sense. History means ideological conflicts between people who, sincerely and passionately, believed in completely different ways of organising a society. History in that sense was over, he thought, because there were not enough true believers in Marxism left – neither in the Eastern Bloc nor in the Western world. Regarding the former, Fukuyama said:
“The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now, nor do I think that it is terribly likely […] that the label will be thinkable any time in the near future. But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society. […] [T]he criticisms of the Soviet system sanctioned by Gorbachev have been […] thorough and devastating […]
Gorbachev has finally permitted people to say what they had privately understood for many years, namely, that the magical incantations of Marxism-Leninism were nonsense, that Soviet socialism was not superior to the West in any respect but was in fact a monumental failure.”
Regarding China, he said:
“[T]he regime continues to pay lip service to Marxism-Leninism as its ideological underpinning. But anyone familiar with the outlook and behavior of the new technocratic elite now governing China knows that Marxism and ideological principle have become virtually irrelevant as guides to policy”
And regarding the West:
“[T]he appeal of communism in the developed Western world […] is lower today than any time since the end of the First World War. […] [T]hose 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.”
What actually happened in the subsequent years was a stronger version of that. The socialist regimes of the Eastern Bloc (plus the bloc-free states) did not just lose their self-belief: they were ousted altogether, and in the best cases, replaced with liberal-leaning, pro-market reformers.
The Chinese Communist Party would retain an iron grip on power, but they would speed up their reforms towards a mixed economy. For Fukuyama, market reform in China meant “peasants’ markets and color television sets”. It would soon mean a lot more than that, and a similar process would soon follow in Vietnam.
In the West, centre-left parties would make their peace with the market economy, and demote their socialist wings. There was never a “neoliberal hegemony”: that claim was always leftist nonsense. Free-market liberalism always had far more haters than supporters. But there was a time when there was a broad consensus, across most of the political spectrum, that a successful modern economy had to be, in the main, a market economy. That could mean (and often did mean) a heavily interventionist and/or social democratic version of capitalism. But people who rejected capitalism altogether could reasonably describe themselves as dissenting voices. (They cannot do so today. If your opinion could be published in Teen Vogue, you are very much not a dissenting voice, but part of a fashionable consensus.)
Fukuyama clearly got under the skin of Western socialists. They have long had a suspicion that he was not just a messenger, describing what he thought was going to happen, but an active participant in the debate, who was trying to make the end of history happen. He was, they thought, trying to delegitimise socialism by telling its proponents that it was over, and that they should shut up and go away.
Since then, Western socialists have often, in a way, defined themselves against Fukuyama. In 2012, the French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou wrote a book called The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. A year later, Seumas Milne, a British Marxist-Leninist, followed suite with The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century. (Among other things, he argued that history had restarted, because Venezuela had developed a “Socialism of the 21st Century”, which was working brilliantly.) And yet, in an otherwise very sympathetic discussion of those books, even the Guardian could not quite convince itself that history really had restarted. At that time, it still looked as though Fukuyama’s paper refused to age.
But, as Lenin might have said, there were decades when Fukuyama’s paper did not seem to age at all, followed by months when it aged by decades. In 2014, Russell Brand’s infantile quasi-communist manifesto Revolution became a bestseller, and in 2015, Corbynmania broke out. In 2019, both the Economist and the New Statesman wrote about “The rise of millennial socialism”. In 2020/21, the socialist Black Lives Matter movement became the national agenda-setter for a while. Last year, a survey by the Fraser Institute (co-published by us) showed that one in three British Millennials, and one in four British Zoomers, believe that “the ideal economic system for the United Kingdom is communism”. It complements my own findings from my 2021 paper “Left turn ahead: Surveying attitudes of young people towards capitalism and socialism”. Today, orthodox Marxist-Leninist books can very easily make it into the Sunday Times bestseller list. Marxism is back in fashion, and it is very much part of the mainstream again.
Does this mean that in the near future, Britain, or some other Western country, is going to break with capitalism, and embark on some new Marxist experiment?
Maybe not – but history, in the Fukuyama sense, has nonetheless restarted. As mentioned above, in Fukuyama’s original version, the end of history did not require the end of actually existing socialism. It just required the people leading those projects to lose their passion, and self-confidence. Today, we have what you could call a “reverse Fukuyama situation”. Instead of Fukuyama’s socialism without socialists, we have socialists without the socialism. You can accuse the socialists of the 2020s of many things, but not of a lack of passion, or self-confidence. There is no shortage of true believers, even if there is not actual socialist project they can identify with.
But if “history” means ideological clashes between proponents of completely different socioeconomic models, then we are definitely back in history.
Fukuyama ended his paper on a slightly downcast note, which was out of character with the rest of the paper:
“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. […] I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. […] Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
That is precisely what happened – and more’s the pity. Because, to misquote Fukuyama:
I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history had stopped existing. Because history is annoying. The end of history was not a sad time at all. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, are overrated. I much prefer economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. Down with history!
Francis Fukuyama’s paper “The End of History?”, originally published in the summer of 1989, has gone through a similarly non-linear ageing process. In the months and years immediately after its publication, the paper must have seemed positively prophetic. Better, in fact, than a mere prophecy, if that is possible, because actual events seemed to not just confirm, but “over-confirm” Fukuyama’s central thesis. History seemed to be even “more over” (“overer”?) than Fukuyama had anticipated. But then at some point, the paper’s age caught up with it with a vengeance. Today is the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and if you re-read Fukuyama today, it will read like what it is: a document of its time, nothing more, nothing less.
Let’s remember what Fukuyama meant by “the end of history”. He did not mean that nothing interesting was going to happen in the world anymore. He meant that the big ideological battles which had characterised the 20th century – battles between proponents of completely different socioeconomic systems – were drawing to a close, and that they had produced a clear winner:
“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: not to an “end of ideology” or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, […] but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism. […] What we may be witnessing is […] 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.”
Fukuyama did not predict that the Berlin Wall would be open before the end of the year, and certainly not that the entire Warsaw Pact was about to fall apart. His original vision of the end of history was a more modest one. It did not mean that socialist regimes would literally disappear: just that they would lose their self-belief. They may limp on, but they would do so out of sheer inertia, not ideological commitment. They may limp on, but they would do so because the cost of a transition to a different system would simply be too high, and nobody knew how to do it. However, if they could start all over again, there was no way they would introduce a socialist system again. Socialism without socialists is not “history”, in the Fukuyama sense. History means ideological conflicts between people who, sincerely and passionately, believed in completely different ways of organising a society. History in that sense was over, he thought, because there were not enough true believers in Marxism left – neither in the Eastern Bloc nor in the Western world. Regarding the former, Fukuyama said:
“The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now, nor do I think that it is terribly likely […] that the label will be thinkable any time in the near future. But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society. […] [T]he criticisms of the Soviet system sanctioned by Gorbachev have been […] thorough and devastating […]
Gorbachev has finally permitted people to say what they had privately understood for many years, namely, that the magical incantations of Marxism-Leninism were nonsense, that Soviet socialism was not superior to the West in any respect but was in fact a monumental failure.”
Regarding China, he said:
“[T]he regime continues to pay lip service to Marxism-Leninism as its ideological underpinning. But anyone familiar with the outlook and behavior of the new technocratic elite now governing China knows that Marxism and ideological principle have become virtually irrelevant as guides to policy”
And regarding the West:
“[T]he appeal of communism in the developed Western world […] is lower today than any time since the end of the First World War. […] [T]hose 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.”
What actually happened in the subsequent years was a stronger version of that. The socialist regimes of the Eastern Bloc (plus the bloc-free states) did not just lose their self-belief: they were ousted altogether, and in the best cases, replaced with liberal-leaning, pro-market reformers.
The Chinese Communist Party would retain an iron grip on power, but they would speed up their reforms towards a mixed economy. For Fukuyama, market reform in China meant “peasants’ markets and color television sets”. It would soon mean a lot more than that, and a similar process would soon follow in Vietnam.
In the West, centre-left parties would make their peace with the market economy, and demote their socialist wings. There was never a “neoliberal hegemony”: that claim was always leftist nonsense. Free-market liberalism always had far more haters than supporters. But there was a time when there was a broad consensus, across most of the political spectrum, that a successful modern economy had to be, in the main, a market economy. That could mean (and often did mean) a heavily interventionist and/or social democratic version of capitalism. But people who rejected capitalism altogether could reasonably describe themselves as dissenting voices. (They cannot do so today. If your opinion could be published in Teen Vogue, you are very much not a dissenting voice, but part of a fashionable consensus.)
Fukuyama clearly got under the skin of Western socialists. They have long had a suspicion that he was not just a messenger, describing what he thought was going to happen, but an active participant in the debate, who was trying to make the end of history happen. He was, they thought, trying to delegitimise socialism by telling its proponents that it was over, and that they should shut up and go away.
Since then, Western socialists have often, in a way, defined themselves against Fukuyama. In 2012, the French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou wrote a book called The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. A year later, Seumas Milne, a British Marxist-Leninist, followed suite with The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century. (Among other things, he argued that history had restarted, because Venezuela had developed a “Socialism of the 21st Century”, which was working brilliantly.) And yet, in an otherwise very sympathetic discussion of those books, even the Guardian could not quite convince itself that history really had restarted. At that time, it still looked as though Fukuyama’s paper refused to age.
But, as Lenin might have said, there were decades when Fukuyama’s paper did not seem to age at all, followed by months when it aged by decades. In 2014, Russell Brand’s infantile quasi-communist manifesto Revolution became a bestseller, and in 2015, Corbynmania broke out. In 2019, both the Economist and the New Statesman wrote about “The rise of millennial socialism”. In 2020/21, the socialist Black Lives Matter movement became the national agenda-setter for a while. Last year, a survey by the Fraser Institute (co-published by us) showed that one in three British Millennials, and one in four British Zoomers, believe that “the ideal economic system for the United Kingdom is communism”. It complements my own findings from my 2021 paper “Left turn ahead: Surveying attitudes of young people towards capitalism and socialism”. Today, orthodox Marxist-Leninist books can very easily make it into the Sunday Times bestseller list. Marxism is back in fashion, and it is very much part of the mainstream again.
Does this mean that in the near future, Britain, or some other Western country, is going to break with capitalism, and embark on some new Marxist experiment?
Maybe not – but history, in the Fukuyama sense, has nonetheless restarted. As mentioned above, in Fukuyama’s original version, the end of history did not require the end of actually existing socialism. It just required the people leading those projects to lose their passion, and self-confidence. Today, we have what you could call a “reverse Fukuyama situation”. Instead of Fukuyama’s socialism without socialists, we have socialists without the socialism. You can accuse the socialists of the 2020s of many things, but not of a lack of passion, or self-confidence. There is no shortage of true believers, even if there is not actual socialist project they can identify with.
But if “history” means ideological clashes between proponents of completely different socioeconomic models, then we are definitely back in history.
Fukuyama ended his paper on a slightly downcast note, which was out of character with the rest of the paper:
“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. […] I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. […] Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
That is precisely what happened – and more’s the pity. Because, to misquote Fukuyama:
I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history had stopped existing. Because history is annoying. The end of history was not a sad time at all. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, are overrated. I much prefer economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. Down with history!
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