End Of History

In Francis Fukuyama's article 'The End of History?', he argued that the end of the Cold War signified "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government" (Fukuyama, 1989: 3). In this quotation, Fukuyama claims that the demise of communism meant that Western principles would become the ideological basis for politics for the rest of history- a flip on Marx's claims that the world would become a communist utopia. In the review of Fukuyama's article, his central arguments will be outlined and analysed, the strengths and weaknesses of his claims will be explored, and consideration will be given to the criticism regarding his article. Fukuyama's central argument is that "the state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man's universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed" (Fukuyama, 1989: 4). This essentially means that when a form of government is reached that is liberal and …show more content…
The flaw of making any statements extrapolating the future and what is to come, is the political and ideological environment in which the text was written has not been constant. As Öner explains, 1989 marked the fall of the Berlin wall, and therefore held "an optimistic atmosphere, during the collapse of Socialist regimes". This is not to say that every piece of political thought is invalid due to the influences which caused it to be written, but an awareness of the political unrest of the last few years show flaws in Fukuyama's central argument. Kimball also suggested that the timing made it easy to claim that Western theory had won, as Fukuyama was "writing at a moment when Communism was everywhere in retreat"