The Ends of History: Introduction

Abstract

It has been more than twenty years since Francis Fukuyama announced, in The End of History and the Last Man, that the fall of soviet communism meant that “History” had effectively come to a close. Fukuyama did not mean that history would cease to pass— whether in the form of births and deaths, changes in fashion or technology, or even momentous events like wars or revolutions. He simply meant that such particular events were of no consequence to the universal History that, in the era of neoliberalism, had reached its endpoint in determining that “liberal democracy and free markets constitute the best” way possible “of organizing human societies” (“reflections” 29). regions and peoples as yet beyond the pale of economic modernization might perhaps linger in this netherworld for quite some time. But their actions would have no impact on History. This is not the place to detail the many challenges to Fukuyama’s thesis, from its Hegelian conceit of a single-directional History to its isolation of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy from racism, sexism, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, fascism, and, of course, socialism. Yet, all of these presumably finite historical currents emerged from the same crucible that gave us the secular and rationalist versions of market capitalism and liberal democracy that Fukuyama pinpoints as history’s end, and none of them appears to be exiting the world stage any time soon. Inequality becomes just another petit recit in Fukuyama’s account, even though its rise under neoliberalism coincides with such small-bore historical affairs as the rolling back of the welfare state, the deregulation of industry and finance, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This eternalization of neoliberal norms proffers postmodern thought in conservative form: in upholding a present whose future horizon is determined, it makes the past ever more irrelevant, inviting the end to historicity more than history per se. On the other hand, the end-of-history narrative has