Fukuyama on the End of History and Other Dystopias
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 27 October 2024 is the 72nd birthday of Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (27 October 1952 — present), who was born in Chicago on this date in 1952.
Fukuyama wrote a paper near the end of the Cold War titled “The End of History,” published in The National Interest, №16, Summer 1989). The paper caused something of a sensation, and was the object of a great deal of comment and controversy. Fukuyama turned the paper into the book The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. A great many books subsequently appeared to explain, to refute, and to revise Fukuyama, with titles like After the End of History and The Return of History and so on. I read many of these books.
Fukuyama moved on, and wrote many books on political philosophy, or, if you prefer, political science. Occasionally Hegel still out in an appearance, as with the theme of the struggle for recognition, but Fukuyama didn’t go on to expand a philosophy of history from the work that made him famous. It’s still his work on the end of the history that defines his influence. During the 1990s, the two books that most shaped discussion of geopolitics were Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996.
If you had told anyone before Fukuyama’s “end of history” paper appeared that a Hegelian idea filtered through mid-century French philosophy would become a touchstone for the US foreign policy establishment, you would have been called crazy, but you also would have been called crazy if you had told anyone that the Cold War was about to come to a sudden end. Those of us old enough to remember the end of the Cold War know that a great many people claimed after the fact to have predicted it, but the fact was that it took most of us completely by surprise. The Cold War seemed to be a permanent fixture of contemporary history, and almost no one imagined that the Soviet Union would come to an end during their lifetime. To Fukuyama’s credit, he was in print before the end of the Cold War clearly stating that communism could no longer be considered as being in the vanguard of history. This is sometimes not clear, as the book came out in 1992, after the events that brought an end to the Cold War had more-or-less unfolded, but the paper appeared before the Berlin Wall came down.
The idea that a particular ideology, and a political regime that represents a given ideology, might be in the vanguard of history, and that it might be in the vanguard for a period of time, only to lose that position to another ideology, is in itself an interesting idea in the philosophy of history, but it was the eerie and apocalyptic-sounding use of the phrase “the end of history” that caught people’s attention. A lot of people read Fukuyama’s essay who had never read Hegel, much less having read Alexandre Kojève, and they didn’t really know what to make of it. This is a lot like people quoting Heidegger who have never studied phenomenology. I’m thinking of a scene in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, in which the protagonist quotes Heidegger, and it’s painfully obvious he has no idea what he is saying or what it meant.
Many philosophers after Hegel took up the theme of the end of history, and with several philosophers each giving their two cents’ worth on the meaning of the end of history, they of course had different approaches and interpretations. John Zammito in “Philosophy of History: The German Tradition from Herder to Marx” wrote of Marx:
“In Marx we see a philosophy of history that draws on both the Enlightenment and idealism for its premises. The driving interest in his thought derives from idealism: it is the aspiration to an ethical totality to be realized in the end of history, providing meaning to the entire sweep of history, with all its toil and trouble.”
Reinhold Niebuhr said, “The realm of fulfillment is at the end of history,” and that, “The end of history is not a point in history.” Josef Pieper, a Thomist, in his book The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History wrote:
“For the man who is spiritually existent, who is directed upon the whole of reality, in other words, for the man who philosophizes, this question of the end of history is, quite naturally, more pressing than the question of ‘what actually happened’.”
Ludwig Landgrebe wrote a paper “das Problem der Ende der Geschicht,” in which he wrote:
“…where does the end of history occur if its conception — and this remains the case — does not correspond to any objective reality, because both the end and infinity are not objects of possible experience? To this it must be said: Just as history does not have its own continuity and unity, because history only exists through the actions of people, and because its continuity is always re-established where actions combine the past with what is to be realized in the future relates, the end as meaning and goal of the event can only be decided in the event of the action.”
Perhaps best known use of the idea of the end of history before Fukuyama was Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, in which Kojève said:
“The disappearance of Man at the end of History… is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And therefore, it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-called — that is, Action negating the given, and Error, or in general the Subject opposed to the Object. In point of fact, the end of human Time or History — that is, the definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called or of the free and historical Individual — means quite simply the cessation of Action in the full sense of the term. Practically, this means: the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And also the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man himself no longer changes essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his understanding of the World and of himself.”
Kojève made a big impression on French philosophers, and I’ve mentioned him in my episodes on Leszek Kołakowski, Raymond Aron, and Isaiah Berlin. But it was Fukuyama who brought the end of history to a mass audience. The final paragraph of Fukuyama’s 1989 nicely sums up much of the essay, while also looking ahead:
“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
Needless to say, the extensive comment provoked by the essay included any number of people who said that history wasn’t ending, it was only getting started, or that it was returning. Robert Kagan wrote The Return of History and the End of Dreams, but writing a book like Kagan’s pretty much acknowledges that it was Fukuyama who set the agenda, and it was for others to debate that agenda. And this is what they did.
Having heralded the end of history, Fukuyama himself had second thoughts. In the Preface to his later book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, which grew out of a ten-year retrospective of his “end of history” essay, Fukuyama considered the many arguments made against his thesis and found only one of them to be substantive:
“In the course of thinking through the many critiques of that original piece that had been put forward, it seemed to me that the only one that was not possible to refute was the argument that there could be no end of history unless there was an end of science. As I had described the mechanism of a progressive universal history in my subsequent book The End of History and the Last Man, the unfolding of modern natural science and the technology that it spawns emerges as one of its chief drivers. Much of late-twentieth-century technology, like the so-called Information Revolution, was quite conducive to the spread of liberal democracy. But we are nowhere near the end of science, and indeed seem to be in the midst of a monumental period of advance in the life sciences.”
Fukuyama wasn’t the only one to give to science a decisive role in history. In my episode on Karl Popper I mentioned Popper’s argument for indeterminism, which was based on the unpredictability of what we will learn from science. Both Fukuyama and Popper in their different ways are arguing that science is so powerful a force that it drives history forward into novel outcomes. For Popper, it’s the unpredictable nature of the knowledge that science reveals that can re-direct history onto unprecedented paths. For Fukuyama, who previously identified the end of history with the development of political history and the convergence on a single political model, the ongoing development of science intersects with what he calls progressive universal history to produce further outcomes. This implies that, for Fukuyama, future scientific discoveries may alter the possibilities for viable social models, perhaps introducing new social models, so that the apparent convergence of political systems in our time has been misleading.
In Our Posthuman Future Fukuyama makes particular reference to Huxley’s Brave New World, which presents us with a human society not unlike the Last Men of which Nietzsche warned us and which Fukuyama discussed in The End of the History and the Last Man. In Huxley’s Brave New World, scientific technique has been used to turn human beings into willing and happy slaves. And Nietzsche, who had warned us in Thus Spake Zarathustra of the Last Man, which I discussed in my episode on Nietzsche, in his On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche repeatedly asks the reader to reflect on how the ascetic ideal, which once had inspired religion and herd morality, was now being expressed through science.
Here we’re faced with something worse than the end of history, as Fukuyama imagined it, and that is a range of dystopian outcomes in which the ideals of the Enlightenment intersect with the ascetic ideals of science and produce something unprecedented and monstrous, and our previous history gives us no protection against these unprecedented dystopian possibilities. Fukuyama has a particular technological danger in mind, and that is the application of biotechnology to human beings. In Our Posthuman Future he wrote:
“…the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history. This is important, I will argue, because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is, conjointly with religion, what defines our most basic values. Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal democracy and the nature of politics itself.”
Human nature has had a mixed history among philosophers since the twentieth century. Some took human nature for granted, Fukuyama seemingly among them. Others, like Sartre, denied that there was any such thing as human nature. The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne identified the uniformity of human nature over time as a fundamental postulate of history:
“All historical construction — which amounts to saying all historical narrative — rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today.”
Pirenne added that the failure of this postulate means the incomprehensibility of history:
“Past societies would remain unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from ours.”
By the same token, future societies would be unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from those of our familiar society. This is what worries Fukuyama. If the application of biotechnology to human beings changes human nature, then a qualitatively distinct human nature, or even a transhuman nature or a posthuman nature will set the stage for new political models that are responsive to these new forces in history.
Fukuyama is worried about dystopia, and this has become one of the great themes of our time. Whereas science fiction once featured rollicking tales of space heroism, the science fiction of the present time seems to consist of little more than one dystopian warning after another. It appears that we live in the Age of Chicken Little. I won’t say that Fukuyama belongs to the long and distinguished tradition of chicken littles who have seen the sky falling, but, like Nietzsche, who foresaw nihilism and tried to bear witness, Fukayama has foreseen the end of history, or a dystopia worse than the end of history. If this were a forced choice for humanity, it would be an interesting one, but I don’t think it is a forced choice. That we today focus on the dystopian alternatives probably says more about us than it says about the future. While we could see the beginning of an age worse than the contemptible Last Man that Nietzsche presents, we could also see new forces in history that suggest utopias beyond our imagination.
