The End of History

Abstract

The theory of the end of history suggests that radical social and political change has reached its dialectical conclusion in the globalization of neo-liberal capitalism and that reformism is now key to the modification of problematic social relations. Given that the critique of global economy remains more or less absent from the reformists’ account, it is unlikely that this strategy will ever produce social justice. In the first section of the article I use Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge and non-knowledge to show how contemporary reformism misrecognizes the essential relationship between economy and social and political inequality. This discussion leads to the conclusion that the problem with the contemporary politics of reformism resides in their realism and consequent lack of imagination and raises the question of the revolutionary potential of a politics of idiocy. Finally the notion of Socratic ignorance is employed to think about a new form of political hope to oppose the contemporary hegemony of the politics of reformism that shield neoliberalism from revolutionary critique.