“The End of History will be a very sad time,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in his deeply influential 1989 essay. The essay’s tremendous success made Fukuyama’s career and entered the phrase “the End of History” into popular culture. Its melancholic undercurrent—Fukuyama diagnosed an “emptiness at the core of liberalism”—may surprise those who have a second-hand understanding of the argument. Fukuyama is often portrayed as a starry-eyed liberal triumphalist: part of the intellectual firmament that led to the Iraq War. In reality, Fukuyama’s Kojèvean-Hegelian arguments about ideology and History are perhaps more credible than his critics allege—even 35 years out. Even more so, Fukuyama’s analysis of the world created by the End of History—a reality in the West if not necessarily a global inevitability—is a provocative framework for interpreting both liberalism and its dissenters. This is particularly true of Fukuyama’s description of the “Last Man” in the book-length exposition of his thesis.
Fukuyama became an intellectual celebrity in the closing stages of the Cold War. Then the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, he argued liberalism had outlasted—or defeated—its chief ideological rivals. Fascism burned out in a conflagration of violence in the 1940s. In 1989, communism was in the process of collapse, the victim of its internal contradictions. Liberalism alone stood. The reason, Fukuyama argued, was that liberalism, compared to all other ideologies, best accounted for the human need for recognition.
Notably, it was not “necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies” at the End of History, Fukuyama wrote. Rather, that alternative regimes forget their “ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.” While it may be that China has resisted liberalism, few outside China wish to live under the yoke of the CCP.
Yet, as suggested at the outset, Fukuyama had reservations about the cultural implications of liberalism. For instance, he linked the End of History closely with consumerism: “We might summarize the content of the universal homogenous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic.” Updating this for today, we might say iPhones and Spotify. Inevitably, a large part of liberalism’s appeal to outsiders has been its association with wealth and consumption, which gives short shrift to, and possibly undermines, the political values of liberalism. But Fukuyama pushed his critique further with his analysis of the inhabitants of the End of History.
The Last Men…
The Last Man is burdened with knowledge. This, Fukuyama argued in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, is the strongest objection to the End of History. It derives from Fukuyama’s reading of Nietzsche and challenges liberalism from the right.
The problem is this: liberalism is a modern ideology. It arose from the cities and demands a certain toleration for differing, even opposing, views for it to function. It relies on reason and rational argument. Liberalism exists in a world where both the scientific and the historical method reign—and perhaps exists because they do so. In other words, the citizens of a liberal society, especially those in a cosmopolitan high liberal society, are necessarily and inherently detached from their beliefs. They are confronted daily with alternatives. Consciously or not, liberal moderns understand that their identities—political, religious, and otherwise—are historically contingent. As Fukuyama explains, “This is why modern man is the last man: he has been jaded by the experience of history, and disabused of the possibility of direct experience of values.”
The Last Men inhabit a safe world. Their political regime is generally one of capitalist plenty and liberal-democratic acknowledgment of human dignity, which, Fukuyama argued, more or less satisfies our thymotic desire for recognition. Thymos, which Fukuyama takes from classical Greek thought, is a key concept here. It is a human soul’s need to be recognized and afforded the dignity it is worth, which Fukuyama holds is near universal, although in differing permutations. Liberal democracy succeeds because it grants basic recognition widely. A person receives recognition as an equal citizen, and from this basis can meaningfully recognize others. Taking this isothymia or equality of recognition, alongside modernity’s persistent challenge to the thick commitments of faith or identity, we come to see Fukuyama’s vision of liberalism. There is—thankfully—no bloody battle here. It is instead a self-satisfied broadmindedness, above the fray of, literally, human history.
According to Nietzsche, however, excellence and achievement requires commitment to a worldview, to living within a bounded horizon. It is the Last Man’s very awareness of history that forecloses this possibility for us. Modernity has corroded our ability to live inside a thick identity. We can peer into pre-modernity, but rarely if at all participate in premodern worldviews without irony. As such, post-liberal devotions are “post-post-modern,” but they struggle for attachments that are more than mere affectations. Post-post-modernism rejects the cosmopolitanism and rootlessness of post-modernity and seeks to reinstate some thick commitments; it cannot, however, fully shake itself free from the post-modern world that birthed it. It is near impossible to return to a state of premodern certainty and innocence, so to speak, once the combination of historicism and cosmopolitanism has taken hold.
Post-liberal devotions are “post-post-modern,” but they struggle for attachments that are more than mere affectations.
Fukuyama’s Nietzschean critique of the End of History hammers its homogeneity and equality. Per Nietzsche, excellence is the result of inequality. Or rather, inequality is a precondition for excellence. The safety and self-satisfaction of the Last Men hampers true excellence. Likewise, morality is a challenge to the Last Men, because moral regimes create distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong that are ultimately hierarchical. In general, in a high liberal democratic society beliefs tend to separate rather than bind, because they create demands and commitments that set us apart (rather than joining us with) our neighbors, colleagues, and friends.
This critique of the End of History is from the Right in that the key distinction between the Left and Right hinges on equality. The Left essentially takes equality to be the ideal towards which politics strives. The Right regards hierarchies variously as inevitable, natural, divinely ordained, or simply good. Modern American conservatism, at least in its social conservative form, has been nothing if not a defense of the regional, religious, racial, and other hierarchies and moral regimes. While Fukuyama does not endorse the critique fully, nor the extremes of American conservatism, his willingness to entertain it puts him in conversation at least with conservative and neoconservative thinkers.
It is not hard to feel, as Fukuyama does, that something has been lost at the End of History. The grand bargain is something like trading blood brotherhood, the deep and potentially violent bonds of group identity, for the safety of the universal state. But there are many, especially among the young, Fukuyama notes, who do in fact wish to live within a horizon. They demand of their lives more meaning than incremental change or tweaks around the edges of politics, or worse, personal financial success. “The life of the last man is one of physical security and material plenty… Is this really what the human story has been ‘all about’ these past few millennia?” asks Fukuyama rhetorically. The recent college campus protests against Israel’s invasion of Gaza is testament to this desire for deeper meaning and more transformative politics.
Fukuyama specifically worries that the lowered horizons of liberal democracy sow the seeds of its own destruction. He suspects a subset of those who wish to live within a horizon desire to prove themselves in battle—the ultimate test of commitment, brotherhood, faith, and glory. If democratic peace theory, another concept that grew in cachet following the Cold War, is correct, then the End of History closes this possibility for most people. There are “metaphorical wars,” Fukuyama suggests, but these are soundly within the liberal-democratic-capitalist paradigm: “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” We will recognize entrepreneurial success, hostile takeovers, celebrity, sporting prowess, and electoral victories. Fukuyama specifically names Donald Trump as an exemplar. Critically, however, these arenas for megalothymia—the desire to be recognized as superior to others, not merely equal—are not accessible through primal and martial values, like bravery and strength. The price of entry is often narrowly meritocratic or beholden to impersonal structural forces. There is, in short, no room for heroism.
“Perhaps,” wrote Fukuyama in his initial essay, “this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.” In the early 1990s, Fukuyama did not think the prospect of “re-starting” history was a foregone conclusion. It was more of a live possibility: a possible inference of his premises of the human need for recognition and struggle. In his words:
But supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
Ultimately, Fukuyama calls this “dissatisfaction with liberty and equality.” Those who “remain dissatisfied will always have the potential to restart history.”
…and Their Implications
We can, I think, leave aside Fukuyama’s strongest teleological claims about the directionality of History. In his book-length treatment, he softens the perceived triumphalism anyway through a “wagon train” metaphor. Various states meander, diverge, break down, or follow dead ends while all generally moving toward the same destination of liberal democracy. Whether accurate or not, the End of History does accurately reflect Western expectations (and perhaps wider to include, say, the OECD). In developed democracies, it is taken for granted that liberal democracy is the only viable form of politics and that managed market economics best accommodate reality and generate prosperity. Regardless of whether developing countries, or regimes like Russia or China, are heading toward an End of History, liberal democracies act and think as if it is so, and have imposed it to a greater or lesser extent upon other states.
Instead, Fukuyama’s sketches of the End of History and especially of the Last Men are a friendly critic’s analysis of liberalism, its limits and especially of those who butt up against them.
It’s possible that a technocratic liberal-democratic polity is the only imaginable political order, yet also proves incapable of meaningfully responding to climate change or major economic transformations.
Fukuyama suggests tensions at the End of History that could cause illiberal eruptions. For example, his description of the political situation at the End of History is of an overwhelmingly technocratic regime. Focused on resolving technical problems, the political parties of the End of History will likely be incrementalist, professionalized, cautious, and similar to one another. They will exist within a narrow ideological continuum, and there will be limited possibilities for radical political change. Unaddressed in his early work is the question of what happens to a technocratic regime that does not or cannot address technical problems. It’s possible that at the End of History, a technocratic liberal-democratic polity is the only imaginable political order, yet also proves incapable of meaningfully responding to climate change or major economic transformations. This disjuncture is fertile ground for illiberal imagining and activism.
Since the End of History is based on extending recognition, the political order will likely entail the increasingly ornate extension of equality through legal and cultural measures. This subject is the theme of Fukuyama’s short book Identity. Increasing visibility and legal status for previously marginalized groups, including women and LGBTQ+ communities, has the complexion of recognition. But for those groups who feel deprived of traditional pathways to recognition, including military adventurism, this can lead to an especial resentment towards these groups as recipients of a perceived unearned recognition. Those searching for identity particularly rebel at those lauded for “woke” reasons because it offends. It, to them, is the elevation of the slave morality.
Fukuyama points to the traditional neoconservative remedy of local associational and community organizations. But even here he undermines their possibilities. Social commitment undercuts communitarian solutions, including ethnic and religious ones, by calling into question the distinction between those in a group and those without. Illiberal critics of the End of History will therefore either be isolated and atomized, or post-post-moderns, hyper-aware of their identitarian claims and the hierarchies implied therein.
The people who reject the End of History and the world of Last Men want meaning, thick identity, and above all, recognition. Recognition requires opportunities for glory, which can mean real or metaphorical violence. Fukuyama claims “the dissatisfaction arises precisely where democracy has triumphed most completely.” This claim needs to be tested in countries and regions where the wagon train of history has not advanced fully. It seems more likely to me that it is where political alternatives are most plausible and religio-ethnic identities are most compelling that dissatisfaction with liberal democracy is most pronounced and actualized.
The people who reject the End of History and the world of Last Men want meaning, thick identity, and above all, recognition.
In Western countries, there is no clear alternative to liberal democracy. Instead, illiberals concoct and promote pseudo-alternatives of varying coherence or relation to reality. These pseudo-alternatives require post-post-modern commitments, which are selected on personal lines. Illiberal critics of liberalism seem, as Fukuyama predicts, overwhelmed by choice and making ultimately arbitrary decisions about the identities they assume or emphasize. Because they are the Last Men, these critics are inescapably liberal and their decisions related to identity are largely based on personal choice. Lacking deep roots in a wider culture, these commitments can often fade in ways organic identities do not. The ideological wanderings of some major American illiberal critics demonstrates this tendency. Perhaps in the end, those who reject the End of History are in fact the most interested in recognition via self-dramatized opposition to modernity.
In Western countries, there is no clear alternative to liberal democracy. Instead, illiberals concoct and promote pseudo-alternatives of varying coherence or relation to reality…Listless moderns, they offer only anomie. Illiberals have already rejected the liberalism that dislocated them.
This arbitrariness and aestheticization of identity is especially true online. Fukuyama’s emphasis on thymos is especially perceptive when applied to social media. Social media simulates recognition and heightens all the individualized identity creation and ersatz community-building of the Last Men. At one end of the spectrum, through “likes” and “followers,” social media turns political identity creation into a form of entertainment and gratification. At the other end, similar dynamics may fuel the stochastic violence of “lone wolf” terrorists.
Fukuyama has a knack for conveying sometimes bleak assessments in a sunny manner. One final implication of his work is that the Last Men will have nothing convincing to say to those dissatisfied with the End of History. Listless moderns, they offer only anomie. Illiberals have already rejected the liberalism that dislocated them.
Joshua Tait is a historian of American conservatism and right-wing thought. He has a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He tweets at @Joshua_A_Tait.
