The End of History and the Last Man

Historical pessimism in the 20th century led to a departure from the concept of universal history. Fukuyama believes that such a history is possible. However, he must first examine whether history’s trajectory is unidirectional or cyclical. Fukuyama deliberately leaves morality out of his analysis. Cyclical history does not mean that social change is impossible. Meanwhile, unidirectional history is linked to science:

The scientific understanding of nature is neither cyclical nor random; mankind does not return periodically to the same state of ignorance, nor are the results of modern natural science subject to human caprice (72).

Fukuyama provides a standard view of Western science stemming from the Enlightenment and focused on rationality and objectivity of the scientific method. Science’s link to technology, specifically military innovation, is relevant in the context of historic directionality. This is because the “possibility of war is a great force for the rationalization of societies” (73). For example, the arrival of the American Matthew Perry and his superior naval weapons in Japan on the cusp of the Edo and Meiji periods compelled the reluctant Japanese to open their country to foreigners. In some countries, like Russia, military activities translated into broader reforms and technological modernization.

Like military innovation, broad economic development is linked to unidirectional history. With it came the replacement of traditional bonds, such as clans, with modern bureaucratization. Division of labor which comes from technological development has a homogenizing effect on the places where it occurs: For example, it erases distinctions between the center and the periphery.

Fukuyama acknowledges the culturally specific notion of directional, universal history. Yet he does not fully explore the idea of historical cycles that exist even if one assumes that technological advancement is generally directional. This notion is embodied by the rise and fall of ancient empires and civilizations, including Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Roman. There are also boom-and-bust cycles within capitalism that highlight the importance of cyclical processes within Fukuyama’s proposed directional universal history of humankind. 

Technological development is a double-edged sword. For example, it could bring mass-scale destruction through nuclear weapons. Only complete destruction would bring about cyclical history, according to Fukuyama. Also, various environmental movements, “the most coherent and articulate source of opposition to technological civilization,” voluntarily want to pull back progress (82). The author recognizes that technological development does not automatically translate into moral actions. Using the example of the Holocaust carried out by an advanced Western country, Germany, Fukuyama writes, “[W]e have no guarantee and cannot assure future generations that there will be no future Hitlers or Pol Pots” (127). However, he suggests that “the Holocaust was both a unique evil and the product of historically unique circumstances” (129). He appears to gloss over the fact that technological developments helped facilitate the mass-scale violence of the Second World War, the repressions in the 1930s Soviet Union, and the greatest bombing campaign in history carried out by the U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. These atrocities were carried out by the proponents of three different ideologies, which makes them less unique than Fukuyama suggests.

The author finds the roots of anti-technological thinking in the work of the Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau differentiated between human wants and needs and argued that wants arise from human vanity. He also criticized civilization and idealized the so-called “noble savage.” However, for many reasons, such as economic growth, it is unlikely that the world would choose radical environmentalism, according to Fukuyama. In the 21st century, critics argue that the so-called green energy movement in Europe and North America seeks to prevent the Global South from developing further. Ultimately, only “the possibility that a given civilization can vanish entirely without leaving any imprint on those that follow” could make history cyclical in broad terms (88).

Another important question of technological development is one of ideology. Like the general question of history’s direction, the more specific subject of technological advancements is dictated by science. Historically, the process of industrialization saw countries “suddenly propelled into economic modernity,” even if the political system did not immediately catch up (90).

Fukuyama argues that technology alone is insufficient to guarantee liberal democracy. For example, the Soviet Union rapidly industrialized from an agricultural country to an industrial superpower in the late 1920s and 1930s. However, its form of government at that time was authoritarian. The Soviet Union was also seemingly unable to transition from its emphasis on heavy industries to the post-industrial information age: an age where “Marxism-Leninism as an economic system met its Waterloo” (92).

As a result, the Soviet Union had nuclear physicists but not many designers of superfluous items like televisions. Fukuyama uses this example to criticize central planning and its perceived inability to maneuver with technological paradigm shifts. The author believes that decentralization pushed the democratic world into the post-industrial, information age. However, 30 years after writing this book, the one-party state of China shows the kind of advancements in the realm of science and technology that challenge Fukuyama’s assumption. His assertion that central planning undermines “an all-important aspect of human capital, the work ethic” also meets a challenge in 21st century China (94). China’s 996 rule has some people working from 9 am until 9 pm six days a week and has been criticized for promoting an adherence to an excessive work ethic. (Wang, Jenny Jing. “How managers use culture and controls to impose a ‘996’ work regime in China that constitutes modern slavery. Accounting and Finance. Volume 60, Issue 4 (Dec. 2020.)

Fukuyama tackles the difficult question of choosing an economic system: capitalism or socialism. The author believes that less developed countries such as South Korea and Thailand joined the capitalist order and experienced “phenomenal economic growth” (101). He argues that the Left is permitted to blame poverty on colonialism, neocolonialism, and large corporations. He links the latter to the dependency theory which asserts that the Global North parasitically exploits the resources of the Global South to its detriment. The author also asserts that there are many reasons why some socialist countries have not converted to capitalism, including the fact that in many nations, capitalism “has never been seriously tried” (103). Fukuyama considers state interventionism disastrous in some cases like Latin America, which is in line with his earlier criticism of socialist central planning. However, economic protectionism, a large public sector, and economic wars over energy resources are not signs of a free market with little state intervention.

Fukuyama is highly critical of the dependency theory and dismissive of the very real effects of both historical colonialism and neocolonialism, as well as contemporary exploitation by big businesses. For example, the United Fruit Corporation owned a significant amount of land in Guatemala and other Central American countries in the 1930s and was able to influence regional politics. This behavior led to the popularization of the term “banana republic.” (Livingstone, Grace. America's Backyard: The United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror. London, Zed Books, 2009.) Another example is the 1999-2000 water privatization issue in Bolivia. The issue involved the U.S. corporate giant Bechtel and effectively limited access to this basic necessity for a time and came to be known as a water war. (Hines, Sarah. “How Bolivians Fought For — and Won — Water Access for All,” University of California Press Blog, accessed 4 September 2022.) Some countries like Cuba, Iran, and North Korea had been living under crippling U.S. sanctions for decades, leaving them in relative economic isolation. Despite these examples, Fukuyama argues that such policies by big business and government are not significant contributors to poverty in the given regions.

The author argues that the attractiveness of economic liberalism and its excesses in favor of wants, rather than just needs, requires the transition to the principles of this system. In his view, the world is heading in the direction of “the ultimate victory of the VCR” (108). In the 21st century, countries like China demonstrated that its illiberal political system and the combination of private business and state capitalism are extremely successful in challenging Fukuyama’s thesis.

Another essential condition for liberal democracy, according to Fukuyama, is education because “the relationship between economic development and democracy is far from accidental” (109). Education, democratization, and Liberalism exist in a dynamic relationship. For example, Fukuyama links Japan’s economic successes after World War II to democratization. The fact that this success began “at the point of a gun” during the American occupation is left in parentheses. (110). At that time, the U.S Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers treated the Japanese in a condescending way and with a tint of white supremacy (Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999, p. 211).

Fukuyama argues that middle-class “societies arise as a result of universal education,” and that education “creates the conditions for democratic society” (116). In turn, middle-class societies seek political engagement. There are limits to this thinking because the Soviet Union had true universal education such as free universities. The Soviet Union dramatically improved literacy rates in the first years after its formation. It was not until decades after establishing an excellent level of education and training technical elites that the USSR dissolved for many reasons not directly related to this factor. In contrast, post-secondary education in the United States can be very expensive. 21st century East Asia also offers some of the best and most rigorous education in the world, but the political settings in China, Japan, and South Korea are quite different.

Fukuyama acknowledges that democracy alone does not guarantee the resolution of conflict in societies, especially ethnic conflict. However, he argues that “social cleavages along class, national, ethnic, or religious lines can be mitigated by the process of capitalist economic development itself” (120).

Fukuyama reasserts that science—specifically, the infallibility of the scientific metho—that “gives both a directionality and a coherence to human history” (126). It is important to note that he assigns the kind of status to science that was previously only given to God in the Christian culture of the West. In other words, science replaced God. This type of thinking is one of the key characteristics of Modernity.

Fukuyama argues, once again, that Fascism collapsed in 1945 and Stalinism in 1956 with the rise of the more liberal Nikita Khrushchev in the USSR. The fact that these two ideological concepts within Fascism and Communism, respectively, landed in the proverbial dustbin of history, seems to be the needed proof of the Hegelian historic progress at work, in Fukuyama’s view.

The author also suggests that Germany’s technological development, democracy, and education level were insufficient to prevent the rise of Hitler. Yet at the same time, “fascism is a pathological and extreme condition, by which one cannot judge modernity as a whole” (129). Ultimately, the existence of “new scope for human evil” does not thwart historic progress, according to the author (130).