Published in 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ described a world in which he saw the 70+ year struggle between the authoritarian styles of government meeting an unequivocal end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. What triumphed – principally the American system of ‘liberal democratic capitalism’ – was a model that in many ways proceeded to envelope the rest of the world in the coming years. For this, Fukuyama gets much right, but as the title of the book implies, the notion of an end to all other forms of civilization is questionable, and in the light of the rise of rival development models in Asia and a tentatively resurgent Russia, the thesis appears inaccurate at best, or grossly absurd at worst.

Myth of the 20th Century – Episode 237 – The End of History and the Last Man

— References —

– The Decline of the West, Spengler (1918)
– The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama (1992)
– Clash of Civilizations, Hungtington (1996)
– Homo Americanus, Sunic (2007)
– The Better Angels of our Nature – Why Violence has Declined, Pinker (2011)
– Tom Sunic – Homo Americanus, Myth of the 20th Century (2019) – https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2019/05/15/tom-sunic-homo-americanus/
– Tiananmen – The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Myth of the 20th Century (2022) – https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2022/02/25/tiananmen-the-gate-of-heavenly-peace/
– Preparing for a Wake-Up Call, The Prudentialist (2022) – https://theprudentialist.substack.com/p/preparing-for-a-wake-up-call?s=r
– Russia Is Back, and So Is History, McCulloch (2022) – https://www.unz.com/article/russia-is-back-and-so-is-history/
– Democrats want the war to go on: Greenwald, Yahoo! News (2022) – https://news.yahoo.com/democrats-want-war-greenwald-050738886.html