The End of History and the Last Man
|
In The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which was completed at the conclusion of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached
not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
There are those who, even when Fukuyama published his tract in 1992, thought it was perhaps a bit early to call time on the idea of political disagreement. As we roll past the book’s thirtieth anniversary and there is still no real sign of anyone in the actual world having got the message that there’s not anything to be arguing about any more, the motley band of Professor Fukuyama’s skeptics continues to doggedly fight on, and even grow. There are about seven-and-a-half-billion of them, give or take, now.