Review of “The End of History?” (1989)
Francis Fukuyama (writer).
Read in 2026.
The implications of the apparent triumph of 1806 Hegelian liberal ideology in the reform of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in “the ironic ultimate victory of Taiwan”: the gradual marketization of the Chinese economy.
This paper is less substantive than the book version that followed. There is a common misconception about both. Contrary to rumour, the paper is not an arrogant announcement that Western European and US liberalism will reign everywhere forever. Instead:
The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now, nor do I think that it is terribly likely that perestroika will succeed such that the label will be thinkable any time in the near future. But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society. And in this respect I believe that something very important has happened in the Soviet Union in the past few years: the criticisms of the Soviet system sanctioned by Gorbachev have been so thorough and devastating that there is very little chance of going back to either Stalinism or Brezhnevism in any simple way. Gorbachev has finally permitted people to say what they had privately understood for many years, namely, that the magical incantations of Marxism-Leninism were nonsense, that Soviet socialism was not superior to the West in any respect but was in fact a monumental failure.
Foolishly, Fukuyama imagines that the marginalization of Marxism-Leninism will end art and philosophy, but he ultimately denies that the new “de-ideologized” world will be very different. He isn’t measuring diversity, just looking for massively popular ideologies that have both the “universal significance” of liberalism and a positive political program that is fundamentally illiberal, finding none. These criteria are so narrow that he is begging his own rhetorical question, and the paper does come off as arrogant. For example, Fukuyama says it “matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso”, because they’re somehow not part of “the common ideological heritage of mankind”. He also implies that the opinions of progressive intellectuals in Western countries are “deeply pathological in any number of ways”, given that “our” society is “fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist”, its widening gaps notwithstanding.