History’s back, baby! 

Thu 28 May, Verdurin, London

Tickets: https://verdur.in/store/historys-back-baby-admission/

It is obvious today that the “end of history”, postulated by Francis Fukuyama in 1992, is over. Liberal democracy as the final form of human organisation? Pah! The arc of history tending towards justice? Pah! 

Will the end of twentieth-century modernity be the start of something new? The building blocks of the past – political parties, ideologies, and institutions – are decaying around us, and nothing new emerges to take their place. 

Yet history now has new protagonists: states, corporations, and oligarchs, often acting in synthesis. What if history’s back but not as we wanted it? The stakes are high: the sunset of the US hegemony is in sight and even Fukuyama now agrees on the impending primacy of the “Chinese model”. Yet even such geopolitical shifts aren’t leading to the creation of a new hegemony – disorder is the order of the day. 

Five years on from the publication of The End of the End of History, its authors and hosts of Bungacast reflect on a world in a state of accelerated decay, with responses from guests Lee Jones and Nina Power.

They say that “nothing ever happens”. Pah! Something ever happens.