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An Empire at the End of History? : Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” Thesis

This paper revisits Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the “end of history,”first presented in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, from a broader perspective of American cultural history. In “The End of History?” (1989) and its sequel, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama declares that Hegel’s idea of the end of history has been finally realized in the forms of market economy and liberal democracy. Reinstating Alexandre Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Fukuyama argues that there is an undeniable historical trend toward liberal democracy and that there is no historically meaningful alternatives to it. The end of history for both Hegel and Fukuyama is a state in which the “universal recognition” is completely realized and the “struggle for recognition” as the locomotive of history is not necessary any more. Fukuyama’s application of the right-Hegelian philosophy to the moment when the historically existing socialism collapsed is not only a subjective wishful thinking but it is also an Americanocentric intellectual commodity. Fukuyama’s thesis might also be a recycling of a certain trend in the history of American collective imagination, which has a strong trend of “endism” that ranges from the millennial city upon the hill, the American Jeremiad, and the end of the frontier thesis to the Heaven’s Gate, the panic about the Y2K bug, and various contemporary “post-” theories. Contrary to its appearances, this tradition of American endism has almost always been a political call for a new beginning expressed in disguised forms of good news or laments. Read in connection with this tradition of American endism, Fukuyama’s thesis reveals both American triumphalism and its anxieties at the moment of global closing of the late capitalist frontier. His theory of history and its conclusion that liberal democracy is the ultimate realization of human saga can also be an expression of the anxieties and sorrows of the American empire confronting its own decline after losing its other, the socialist tradition to build a different utopia here and now in this world.