An Analysis of

Francis Fukuyama’s
The End of History
and the Last Man

Ian Jackson
with
Jason Xidias

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 CONTENTS

WAYS IN TO THE TEXT

Who Is Francis Fukuyama? 9
What Does The End of History and the Last Man Say? 10
Why Does The End of History and the Last Man Matter? 12

SECTION 1: INFLUENCES
Module 1:The Author and the Historical Context 15
Module 2: Academic Context 20
Module 3:The Problem 24
Module 4:The Author’s Contribution 28

SECTION 2: IDEAS
Module 5: Main Ideas 33
Module 6: Secondary Ideas 37
Module 7: Achievement 42
Module 8: Place in the Author’s Work 46

SECTION 3: IMPACT
Module 9:The First Responses 51
Module 10:The Evolving Debate 55
Module 11: Impact and Influence Today 60
Module 12:Where Next? 65

Glossary of Terms 70
People Mentioned in the Text 78
Works Cited 86

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 CRITICAL THINKING AND THE END OF HISTORY AND
THE LAST MAN
Primary critical thinking skill: CREATIVE THINKING
Secondary critical thinking skill: REASONING

Francis Fukuyama’s controversial 1992 book The End of History and the Last
Man demonstrates an important aspect of creative thinking: the ability to
generate hypotheses and create novel explanations for evidence.

In the case of Fukuyama’s work, the central hypothesis and explanation he put
forward were not, in fact, new, but they were novel in the academic and
historical context of the time. Fukuyama’s central argument was that the end of
the Cold War was a symptom of, and a vital waypoint in, a teleological
progression of history.

Interpreting history as “teleological” is to say that it is headed towards a final

state, or end point: a state in which matters will reach an equilibrium in which
things are as good as they can get. For Fukuyama, this would mean the end of
“mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal
democracy as the final form of human government”.This grand theory, which
sought to explain the end of the Cold War through a single overarching
hypothesis, made the novel step of resurrecting the German philosopher G.W.F.
Hegel’s theory of history – which had long been ignored by practical historians
and political philosophers – and applying it to current events.

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL WORK
Francis Fukuyama is a professor of political science at Stanford
University in the United States and a former advisor to the US
government. He was born in Chicago in 1952 to second-generation
Japanese immigrants. Fukuyama is part of the intellectual movement that
believes the Cold War ended in 1991 with the victory of the West. His
controversial theory that Western-style democracy is the pinnacle of
human political achievement sparked a storm of public debate that
continues to this day.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF THE ANALYSIS

Ian Jackson is a PhD student in the Politics, Philosophy and Religion
department at Lancaster University. He is interested in the role new media
plays in the dissemination of ideas.

Dr Jason Xidias holds a PhD in European Politics from King’s College

London, where he completed a comparative dissertation on immigration
and citizenship in Britain and France. He was also a Visiting Fellow in
European Politics at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is
Lecturer in Political Science at New York University.

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 WAYS IN TO THE TEXT
KEY POINTS
• Francis Fukuyama is an academic with a background
in political philosophy who worked as an analyst at the
think tank RAND Corporation* and on the staff of the US
government.
• The End of History and the Last Man was a response to the
collapse of the Soviet Union* in 1991. Fukuyama saw this
as the triumph of capitalism* and liberal democracy* and
called it the endpoint of history that would replace human
conflict with universal peace.
• The text influenced Western foreign policy but has been
undermined by world events since publication. It remains
under fire from critics who want Fukuyama to update his
theory to take into account political changes since 1992.

Who Is Francis Fukuyama?

Francis Fukuyama was born in 1952 to a family of leading academics.
His father was a doctor of sociology while his Japanese grandmother
founded the economics department of Kyoto University and was the
first president of Osaka City University.
Fukuyama followed in their footsteps, studying classics for his
Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University and political science
for his Ph.D. from Harvard. He was taught by influential political

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

thinkers such as Allan Bloom,* Jacques Derrida,* and Samuel

Huntington* (who became the fiercest critic of The End of History).
Fukuyama went on to spark worldwide debate with his controversial
theory that political systems shape human history, and that every
society moves towards the sole destination of liberal democracy—a
political system that emphasizes human and civil rights, free elections
between competing political parties and adherence to the rule of law.
Before becoming a career academic, Fukuyama worked as a
political analyst at RAND Corporation (Research ANd
Development), an American think tank that aims to influence policy
through research and analysis. He also worked as deputy director of
the Policy Planning Staff at the US Department of State, where he
specialized in European and Middle Eastern affairs.
Fukuyama has taught at some of America’s leading universities,
including Johns Hopkins, George Mason and Stanford, and has
worked as a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace and the Center for Global Development. He also sits on several
powerful academic and non-academic advisory boards, including at
the RAND Corporation and the National Endowment for
Democracy.
Fukuyama has published a string of important books but his most
bold and controversial remains 1992’s The End of History and the Last Man.

What Does The End of History And The Last Man Say?
Francis Fukuyama’s grand theory for explaining the post-Cold War*
world is that history has a plot, and that its inevitable happy ending is
liberal democracy.* He argues that human history is divided up into
periods, with each one an improvement on the last. The ultimate
destination for everyone is Western-style democracy because that is
the best system for satisfying the human need for recognition and
equality. When all nations become capitalist democracies, he says, it
will mark the end of history.

10

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 Ways In to the Text

Fukuyama wrote his landmark book in the immediate aftermath

of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. The End of
History was published in 1992, the same year that the Berlin Wall*—
the most potent symbol of the East-West divide—was finally
demolished. It was also the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
which ended the global standoff between the two superpowers that
had lasted since World War II.
Fukuyama argues that the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991
proves that liberal democracy and capitalism—an economic system
that emphasizes the private ownership of goods—are the best political
and economic systems, with the fewest flaws. In The End of History he
claims that this “triumph of Western liberalism”*—the political
philosophy that emphasizes freedom, equality and regularly contested
elections—represents a historical endpoint, a final stage that will
replace war with lasting, universal peace.
He is not specific about the timeframe for this process. He also
acknowledges that some countries face serious obstacles in changing
how they operate. But Fukuyama’s fundamental argument is that all
human societies evolve in the same way, and that human history
everywhere leads to liberal democracy.
Fukuyama draws heavily on the ideas of political philosophers of
the past in order to build his vision of the future. He revives and
develops the famous dialogue between influential nineteenth-
century German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel* and
Karl Marx.* Both thinkers agreed that a historical endpoint would
come, but disagreed on what it would be. Hegel’s view was that
history is a continuing fusion of ideas that lead to refinements in the
way society is arranged.This evolution of ideas means that good ideas
survive and are, in turn, fine-tuned as people improve society by
degrees. Even contradictions, once discovered, lead to further tweaks
until spiritual enlightenment is reached. Marx* rejected this idealism

11

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

and favored a more robust approach to the periodization* of

history—one in which revolution brings about meaningful change.
Fukuyama’s bold prophesy of the triumph of Western liberalism
draws on a wider body of political thought, beyond Hegel and Marx.
He is particularly keen on borrowing the concept of thymos* from the
ancient Greek philosopher Plato.* This refers to a part of the human
psyche (or soul) that drives people to aim for a fairer, more equal way
of life. Plato stated that humans, unlike other animals, require
recognition and continually struggle to achieve it. According to
Fukuyama, only liberal democracy can satisfy this human need.
Another major influence on Fukuyama’s writing was Russian-born
philosopher Alexandre Kojève,* who offered a twentieth-century
interpretation of Hegel and believed that liberalism* was the
ultimate—and increasingly universal—stage in world history.

Why Does The End of History and the Last Man Matter?
Fukuyama’s controversial argument was made at a time of huge
uncertainty around the world over the future of international relations.
The decades-long Cold War between the United States and the Soviet
Union had ended in 1991.The break-up of the Soviet Union left the
United States as the last superpower standing, and seemingly the most
dominant nation on the planet. Scholars such as Fukuyama and his
contemporaries in American universities were attempting to come to
terms with this immense change in the balance of world power—and
to make difficult predictions about its implications for the future.
From the outset, The End of History met with substantial criticism.
Fukuyama drew reactions from all parts of the political spectrum and
was challenged immediately by equally bold, contrasting viewpoints.
The most notable came in The Clash of Civilizations written by
Fukuyama’s former teacher at Harvard, the American political
philosopher Samuel Huntington.* For Huntington, the deciding
factor in world politics would increasingly boil down to cultural

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 Ways In to the Text

differences. Fukuyama and Huntington were often presented by the

media as heading rival “camps,” each offering a very different vision of
what the future held in store for America and the world.
The End of History and the Last Man remains an important reference
point because it had an impact on American and European foreign
policy. It is generally agreed that key events since publication
undermine the book’s core argument (especially the rise of China,
which is opposed to liberalism, and the 2008 global financial crisis*).
But Fukuyama’s outlook remains an inspiration for many politicians.
Critics would welcome an updated grand theory in which Fukuyama
explains how the reality of the last two decades—including the relative
decline of American power, enduring human conflict, and the inability
or refusal of some states to implement democratic reforms—fits into
humankind’s journey to the end of history.

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 SECTION 1
INFLUENCES

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 MODULE 1
THE AUTHOR AND THE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
KEY POINTS
• Fukuyama argues that the world is moving towards
capitalism* and liberal democracy,* and that this is the
final stage of history, in which universal peace will replace
human conflict.
• He was profoundly influenced by his studies of philosophy
as an undergraduate and brought those ideas—along
with his experiences working for the think tank RAND
Corporation* and the US government—to his predictions
for the post-Cold War* world.
• The text was written in the wake of the collapse of the
Soviet Union* and at a time when Fukuyama was allied
with the neoconservatives*—a branch of American
politics devoted to the aggressive imposition of democracy
and free-market economics on the rest of the world.

Why Read This Text?

In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama sets out to
explain America’s victory in the Cold War* and what it could mean
for the future of relations between states.
According to Fukuyama, capitalism* and liberal democracy,* with
their emphasis on civil rights, free elections, and private ownership,
will dominate the post-Cold War era. Other systems of government
will be abandoned because they do not satisfy the basic human need
for recognition and equality.This inevitable spread of liberal democracy
is, he says, the endpoint of history and will see human conflict replaced
by a commitment to universal human rights.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

“theThe year 1989—the two hundredth anniversary of

French Revolution and of the ratification of the
US Constitution—marked the decisive collapse of
communism as a factor in world history … The Soviet
Union and PRC [People’s Republic of China] turned
out not to be the atomized, dependent, authority-
craving children that earlier Western theories projected
them to be.They proved instead to be adults who could
tell truth from falsehood, right from wrong, and who
sought, like other adults in the old age of mankind,
recognition of their adulthood and autonomy.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
”
Fukuyama’s ideas reached beyond traditional academic circles to
become part of a wider debate in society and the media. The
publication of The End of History and the debate that followed have
brought the author global fame.
There is an almost undeniable link between the theories
Fukuyama sets out in his text, and events in the real world. As John
Gray,* a philosopher and critic of Fukuyama, pointed out,“In a span
of six years [Tony] Blair* took Britain into war five times,”1 and
[George W.] Bush’s* invasion of Iraq* and Afghanistan has cost the
United States $1.4 trillion.2 All of this was done in the name of
expanding Western liberal democracy.*
Fukuyama’s theory has been debated by academics, politicians
and policy-makers and continues to be an important reference point
in the study of international relations*—the branch of political
science that studies the interactions between states, primarily in
terms of their foreign policies.

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context

Author’s Life
Francis Fukuyama was born in Chicago in 1952, the only child of
second-generation Japanese immigrants. He grew up in New York
City then studied for his Bachelor of Arts degree in classics at Cornell
University.
At Cornell he studied political philosophy under the noted
American thinker Allan Bloom*—the first of a series of scholars who
would have a profound effect on his later work. It was Bloom who
first introduced him to the ideas of ancient and modern political
philosophers, including Plato,* whose ideas became central to
Fukuyama’s own scholarship.
After Cornell, Fukuyama moved on to graduate studies in
comparative literature at Yale University. He spent six months in
France, studying poststructuralism*—the idea that language and
meaning are shifting and unstable—under influential philosopher
and author Jacques Derrida.* But Fukuyama quickly became
disillusioned with these studies. He later explained, “Perhaps when
you’re young you think that something must be profound just
because it is difficult and you don’t have the self-confidence to say
this is just nonsense.”3
Fukuyama switched to political science, earning a PhD at Harvard
University. He studied under Samuel Huntington,* an eminent
theorist on post-Cold War politics who later presented the direct
counterargument to The End of History.
After his PhD, Fukuyama worked for the American economic and
foreign policy think tank RAND Corporation* (from 1979–80,
1983–9, 1995–6). He also worked for the policy planning staff of the
US Department of State (1981–2, 1989) as well as teaching at the
leading American universities Johns Hopkins, George Mason and
Stanford. These high-profile roles led to his ideas becoming well-
known in politics and the mainstream media.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

Author’s Background
Fukuyama’s background with the US government and the RAND
Corporation led to him being considered a neoconservative.* This is a
school of thought that promotes the global spread of democracy and
free-market economics through a combination of soft power (such as
international organizations) and military force.
Fukuyama had worked twice in government with neoconservative
politician and academic Paul Wolfowitz;* when Wolfowitz was Dean
of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, he
brought Fukuyama in as a professor.This relationship added weight to
the suggestion that Fukuyama shared Wolfowitz’s political outlook. In
2003, however, he distanced himself from the neoconservative cause
by criticizing the administration of US President George W. Bush*
and the Iraq War.*
When he wrote The End of History, Fukuyama was still working as
a consultant for RAND. He was preoccupied with the events of the
times: the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union* and
the United States’ rise to a position of dominance in international
relations. These developments followed nearly half a century of
simmering tensions between the capitalist* United States and the
communist* Soviet Union. Fukuyama drew on a long line of ancient
and political philosophy to place the current state of affairs in a
historical context, and then make predictions about the future.
The collapse of the Soviet Union largely discredited communism—a
political ideology that relies on state ownership, collective labor and the
abolition of social class. It led to the view that whatever the merits of
Marxist* ideas, they had spectacularly failed in practice. The
revolutionary socialist philosopher Karl Marx* had stated that the
endpoint of history would arrive when a stateless and classless society
finally overthrew capitalism. This would result in a workers’ utopia*
characterized by absolute freedom.This was never actually achieved by
any of the communist states, including the Soviet Union.

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context

Fukuyama identifies a world in which both the communist left

and the authoritarian* right revealed “a bankruptcy of serious ideas
capable of sustaining the internal cohesion of strong government.”4
According to Fukuyama, every system for organizing society contains
fundamental contradictions—except liberal democracy. While still
flawed, it does not contain fundamental contradictions—in this sense,
at least, it is perfect.

NOTES
1 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New
York: Penguin, 2007), 97.
2 This figure is probably too low. It does not take into account any interest
payable on the money the United States needed to borrow to fund the
war. Various opinions place the true cost at somewhere between $2.4
trillion and $3 trillion. Congressional Budget Office, “Iraq and Afghanistan,”
accessed March 18, 2013, http://www.cbo.gov/topics/national-security/iraq-
and-afghanistan/cost-estimates.
3 Cited in Nicholas Wroe, “History’s Pallbearer,” Guardian, May 11, 2002,
accessed March 19, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/
may/11/academicexperts.artsandhumanities.
4 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
2012), 39.

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 MODULE 2
ACADEMIC CONTEXT
KEY POINTS
• The end of the Cold War* led Fukuyama to argue that
Marxism* was utterly defeated and that the spread of
capitalist liberal democracy* to all parts of the world was
inevitable.
• The End of History employs the thoughts of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel* to approach modern politics. The key
notion is that human history moves forward through the
evolution of ideas.
• Fukuyama also used Plato’s* concept of thymos*—the
struggle for human recognition—to explain political
development.

The Work in its Context

The purpose of international relations* has always been to understand
and predict state action, and also to have a practical impact on policy.
The aim of The End of History and the Last Man was to provide a
theoretical framework to explain the events unfolding at the time of
writing, and to predict the future of global affairs.
In the book, Francis Fukuyama sets out his ideas as to why the
Cold War had ended and what would happen next. For him, this was
the dawn of an era in which human society would finally settle on one
political system—democracy and free market capitalism.*
Fukuyama argues that Marxism—the philosophy of Karl Marx*
that had led to communism*—had failed in both China and the Soviet
Union.* While a few pockets of communism still remained around the
world, on the whole it had vanished as a credible threat to capitalism, the
economic system favored by Western liberal democracies.

20

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 2: Academic Context

“human
Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of
societies was not open-ended, but would end
when mankind had achieved a form of society that
satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings.
Both thinkers thus posited an ‘end of history:’ for
Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a
communist society.This did not mean that the natural
cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important
events would no longer happen, or that newspapers
reporting them would cease to be published. It meant,
rather, that there would be no further progress in the
development of underlying principles and institutions,
because all of the really big questions had been settled.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
”
Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy*—a political system with
an emphasis on human rights, regular and free elections and adherence
to the rule of law— is the final stage in the evolution of human history,
and that it guarantees the triumph of peace over war. Events will still
occur, but there will be no progression from liberal democracy to an
alternative system because all other systems have been exhausted; they
have been tried, and found wanting.As he put it in a 1989 article entitled
“The End of History?”*: “What we may be witnessing is not just the
end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war
history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s
ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal
democracy as the final form of government.”1

Overview of the Field

The End of History stood out in the immediate post-Cold War debate
among international relations experts because Fukuyama drew his big
ideas from classical philosophy.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

Most arguments of the 1990s were between the neorealists* and

the neoliberals.* Neorealists believed that all state action springs
from the balance of power between states. Neoliberals,* on the other
hand, thought that state action is governed by agreed rules of
economic cooperation. Fukuyama challenged both these schools of
thought by introducing arguments based on classical political
philosophy.
Fukuyama’s idea of a universal history has its origins in the works
of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,* who was
writing in the early 1800s. Hegel believed that history moves through
various periods. Each is an improvement on prior eras, so the world
moves toward a state of perfection. Marx was greatly influenced by
Hegel, and although they predicted different endpoints, they agreed
that one would occur.
For Hegel, history is a continuing blend of ideas that leads to
refinements in the way society is arranged. Even contradictions
prompt changes, until spiritual enlightenment is eventually reached.
By contrast, Marx favored revolution as the trigger for meaningful
change. He believed revolution would overthrow the oppression and
inequality of capitalism and replace it with a stateless and classless
society in which workers are free.
Fukuyama also turns to the ideas of Plato, borrowing the ancient
Greek philosopher’s term thymos to describe the engine that drives
history.
Thymos describes the part of us that separates us from all other
animals (sometimes described as our soul, sometimes as our psyche),
identifying it as the desire to be recognized.
For Fukuyama, history is not about understanding a series of events
but a series of refinements in the way people organize society.A society
must satisfy the needs of its people if it is to survive. Basic needs such as
food and shelter must be satisfied, but so must the demands of the
thymos. Catering for an elusive aspect of the human soul is difficult,

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 2: Academic Context

argues Fukuyama, so the thymos is likely to remain unfulfilled.This will

force humanity to strive for perfect political systems.

Academic Influences
The End of History draws on the ideas of Hegel,* Marx, and Alexandre
Kojève,* the Russian-born politician and philosopher who coined
the phrase “end of history.”These thinkers claimed that human history
is a long process of social improvements, and that it has an endpoint.To
explain constant change, Fukuyama also weaves in Plato’s concept of
the human pursuit of recognition and equality. Political systems have
ranged from aristocratic rule* to fascism* to communism,* says
Fukuyama, but only liberal democracy has been able to satisfy the
powerful human need and desire dubbed thymos.
Once the Cold War had ended, debates over American supremacy
and the future of international relations became a feature in numerous
publications. Perhaps the most prominent were Foreign Affairs—a
journal for academics and others involved in international relations;
International Security—an important outlet for realist* scholars (who
believe that states provide for their own security and share the goal of
survival) published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in the United States; and International Organization—a platform
for liberals produced in Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Fukuyama, however, published the essay that would form the blueprint
for The End of History in The National Interest, a relatively new journal
founded in 1985. The National Interest was specifically devoted to the
question of how America should act on the world stage and promote
its own interests abroad. It was less rarefied and more open to
Fukuyama’s unorthodox ideas than its better-known rivals.

NOTES
1 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (summer
1989): 4.

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 MODULE 3
THE PROBLEM
KEY POINTS
• The End of History addresses the big question of why liberal
democracy* was proving so successful, and whether it
could be the final form of human government.
• Fukuyama’s ideas were borrowed from leading
philosophers of the past, and were applied to how world
events might unfold in the aftermath of the Cold War.*
• The terms “the end of history” and “the last man” were
taken from philosopher Alexandre Kojève,* who predicted
the ultimate triumph of capitalism* and liberal democracy.

Core Question
In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama asks why
liberal democracy was so successful in the late twentieth century—and
whether it marked the end of mankind’s ideological evolution by
being the final form of human government.
The spread of democracy across the world was a hot topic in the
study of international relations during the 1990s, for two reasons:
• The number of liberal democracies hit an all-time high of 61 by
1990.1
• The Soviet bloc* collapsed following the end of the Soviet
Union* in 1991, with most former Soviet states and all of its
satellite states switching to a democratic system.

This created a problem in the field of international relations,* as

long-cherished theories had to be hastily rewritten or at least
reappraised. For most of the 1970s the theory of détente* (or

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 3: The Problem

“in the
Of the different types of regimes that have emerged
course of human history, from monarchies and
aristocracies, to religious theocracies, to the fascist and
communist dictatorships of this century, the only form
of government that has survived intact to the end of the
twentieth century has been liberal democracy.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
”
“thaw”) was an attempt to relax tensions between the United States
and the Soviet Union.This was described by Raymond Garthoff* of
American think tank the Brookings Institution as a “phase of the
Cold War, not an alternative.”2 In the US of the 1980s, under
President Ronald Reagan,* détente had been replaced by more
open opposition to the Soviet system, but this too had now gone.
The world had become unipolar*—only one superpower existed
and that was the United States. As America struggled to understand
the world it had inherited, a new theory was needed to make sense
of this unexpected turn of events.
Fukuyama addresses the big question as to why liberal democracy
was winning out in more and more countries by examining it from
two angles. First he discusses the economic success of liberal
democracies. Then, having concluded that economic factors alone
could not explain their rise, he uses a philosophical argument.
Fukuyama says that history has an endpoint, and that progress
towards this point is driven by the human struggle for recognition—
Plato’s notion of thymos.*

The Participants
Fukuyama’s use of philosophy to understand the end of the Cold
War was a radically new approach, and his theory should be

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

understood as reintroducing the terms of a much older debate.

Other major thinkers tackling the subject, such as Samuel
Huntington* and John Mearsheimer,* reacted to his ideas as part of
their own attempts to make sense of the emerging new world order.
Fukuyama himself, however, looked to the past rather than to his
contemporaries for answers.
The end of the Cold War, said historian John Lewis Gaddis, went
largely unpredicted by international relations theorists. “Surprise,”
he said,“is still very much with us,” and,“although there was nothing
inherently implausible about these events … the fact that they arose
so unexpectedly suggests that international relations may need a new
approach.”3
Fukuyama looks to build on earlier theories in order to explain
the overall direction of modern-day world politics.The advantage of
the free market* (an economy ruled by supply and demand) over a
planned economy* (where the government makes all economic
decisions) had been evident for some time. Economists such as the
Austrian Ludwig von Mises* concluded that the latter system was
simply “unworkable” as early as 1935.4
Meanwhile, liberal democracies have always considered
themselves to be the most evolved way to run a country. Fukuyama’s
belief that liberal democracy is the culmination of the human quest
to find the perfect system of government was also informed by
Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s writings from
the 1940s on.
Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s* “endpoint of history” had a
particularly strong influence on Fukuyama’s work. It is from Kojève
that Fukuyama borrows the term “the end of history,” as well as the
concept of “the last man.” Kojève believed that capitalism and liberal
democracy were the final stage in the development of humanity, and
that they would result in the equal recognition of all individuals, and
the triumph of peace over human conflict.

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 3: The Problem

The Contemporary Debate

Shortly after World War II,* Kojève argued that the United States was the
economic model for a “post-historical world”—in other words, a world
where all countries would become liberal democracies. He believed that
capitalism had overcome its contradictions and that the post-war
economic boom in Europe meant the working class could look forward
to prosperity.This was in contrast to Marx,* who argued that capitalism
would be killed by its contradictions and replaced with communism.*
Long before Fukuyama wrote The End of History, Kojève*
predicted that the Cold War would lead to the triumph of Western
liberalism. This would, he said, produce a historical endpoint that
would result in all people being recognized as equals.
This in turn would end the need for war and struggle. Conflict
would make way for enduring peace based on a classless, new world
order. People would recognize and affirm each other’s freedom, and
equality would be backed by an elaborate system of law.
Kojève said, though, that the final stage of history would also spell
the end of humankind. At the moment of their triumph and the
establishment of equality, humans would lose all reason to continue
struggling for recognition. This made Kojève’s predictions both
optimistic and pessimistic. Fukuyama borrows all these ideas and
applies them to the post-Cold War era.

NOTES
1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
2012), 50.
2 Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations
from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1994).
3 John Lewis Gaddis, “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold
War,” International Security 17, no. 3 (1992–3): 5.
4 Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, eds., Collectivist Economic Planning
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935; reprint, Clifton, N. J.: Augustus M.
Kelley, 1975), 7.

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 MODULE 4
THE AUTHOR’S CONTRIBUTION
KEY POINTS
• The End of History takes up concepts laid out by earlier
philosophers and uses them to create an original theory
in a post-Cold War* context.
• The “grand theory” of the work is the shift in attention
from victory in war to the triumph of Western
liberalism*—it presents a recipe for peace.
• Fukuyama’s writings encouraged a reexamination of the
influential German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel.*

Author’s Aims
In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama provides an
accessible route to understanding political philosophy. He works
through ideas in a logical way, explaining both their philosophical
background and their political reality. Fukuyama does not assume his
readers have any prior understanding and introduces the historical
context of ideas before discussing them. He also gives brief biographies
of philosophical thinkers and summaries of their work.
The core ideas in the book do not in themselves represent original
thought. As French philosopher Jacques Derrida* pointed out in his
book Specters of Marx (1994): “Eschatological* themes of the end of
History, the end of Marxism* … were in the 50s, that is 40 years ago,
our daily bread.”1 On the face of it, Fukuyama’s theories are entirely
borrowed. The concept of an end of history features prominently in
Marx* and has its origins in Hegel, while the term itself is closely
associated with Alexandre Kojève.*

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 4: The Author’s Contribution

“whatWithhadonehitherto
now-famous essay, Frank Fukuyama did
seemed almost impossible: he made
Washington think. His subject was, and in this far more
sweeping book is, the place of America, and the American
idea, in the stream of history. His conclusion is at once
exhilarating and sobering.We have won the struggle for
the heart of humanity. However, that will not necessarily
be good for humanity’s soul.
”
George Will, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and political commen-
tator, quoted on the cover of The End of History and the Last Man

However, Fukuyama has the insight to draw on the work of earlier

thinkers to analyze current events in a meaningful way. He uses
established ideas to explain the unexpected collapse of the Soviet
Union* and to make sense of a worldwide political landscape that had
simply not been envisaged. The impact of such a move was both
universal and divisive; that is to say, The End of History was widely
discussed, but not always in a positive way. Although the work held
weight among certain political elites who shared its outlook, of greater
significance was the debate it provoked.

Approach
Fukuyama produces a persuasive argument as to why liberal
democracies seem to be so much more successful than other forms of
government. He also provides a theoretical framework to explain why
the Soviet Union had collapsed—one that goes beyond the economic
reasons, which Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises* had correctly
predicted six decades earlier.2 For this reason Fukuyama’s ideas have
been very useful for both students and academics studying post-Cold
War* politics. The End of History is an up-to-date theory that competes

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

directly with Marxist thinking.* Fukuyama also lays out a believable

explanation for the global political realities of the day.
Fukuyama’s approach challenged the way in which the Cold War
was discussed—that is, mainly in terms of geopolitical and economic
competition between the United States and Soviet Union. His grand
theory was designed to shift the focus of international relations* away
from having won the Cold War, and towards the peaceful but decisive
triumph of Western liberalism over all competing systems.

Contribution in Context
The end of history had been discussed at great length by Hegel and Marx,
and revived by scholars such as Alexandre Kojève and American
sociologist Daniel Bell* in the early stages of the Cold War. But by the
time Fukuyama was writing The End of History, Hegel’s ideas had become
quite unfashionable in academic circles. By using them as a foundation
for his grand theory about where the post-Cold War world was heading,
Fukuyama brought them back into the contemporary debate.
The book had its roots in Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of
History?”* In this, he observed that analyses of the end of the Cold War
lacked “any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between
what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history,
and are predictably superficial.”3 The essay triggered heated debate, but
it was the subsequent book—written largely in response to the furore
over the essay—that fleshed out the theory and secured Fukuyama’s
reputation as a leading thinker in international relations.4
The book proved even more divisive than the essay that inspired it.
Martin Griffiths* of Flinders University in Australia noted,“[Cambridge
professor] John Dunn described it as a ‘puerile volume’ and [compared]
it to ‘the worst sort of American undergraduate term-paper.’”5 In stark
contrast, Wayne Cristaudo* of Charles Darwin University judged it to
be “the most important defense of liberal democracy since John
Rawls’s* A Theory of Justice.”6

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 4: The Author’s Contribution

Whatever waves the book caused at the time, the West did seem to
be in the ascendancy in geopolitical terms. Derrida, who was critical of
the book’s generally positive reception by the Western media, argued
that it was “sought out by those who celebrate the triumph of liberal
capitalism* … only in order to hide … the fact that this triumph has
never been so critical, fragile, threatened, even in certain regards
catastrophic.”7

NOTES
1 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 14.
2 Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, eds., Collectivist Economic Planning
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935; reprint, Clifton, N. J.: Augustus
M. Kelley, 1975), 18–22. Mises believed that the mathematics required
to predict the needs of the consumer correctly were far too complex to
allow for a workable command economy (the sort of planned economy that
exists in communist states). Without the law of supply and demand, central
governments would be unable to regulate the economy. His theories were
validated within the Soviet Union, which encountered all the problems that
he had predicted.
3 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest 16 (Summer
1989): 3–18.
4 Jenefer Curtis, review of After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics, ed.
Timothy Burns, Canadian Journal of Political Science 28, no. 3 (1995): 591.
5 Martin Griffiths et al., Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, second ed.
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 81.
6 Griffiths et al., Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, 82–83.
7 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994),15.

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 SECTION 2
IDEAS

0003 Fukuyama BOOK.indb 32 09/06/2017 14:53

 MODULE 5
MAIN IDEAS
KEY POINTS
• Fukuyama believes that history is an evolutionary process
of human refinement and has an endpoint.
• Capitalism* and liberal democracy* are that endpoint
of history. They have won the “clash of ideologies,” as
all other systems have proved incapable of meeting the
human need for recognition and equality.
• In time, every part of the world will reach the same
ideological endpoint and become a liberal democracy.

Key Themes
In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama focuses on
three main themes within one primary idea—the logic of history,
which he borrows from Hegel.* In his introduction to the book, he
writes that history should be “understood as a single coherent
evolutionary process … taking into account the experience of all
peoples in all times.”1
For Hegel and everyone influenced by him (including Karl Marx,*
Alexandre Kojève,* and Fukuyama himself), history is not simply a
sequence of events. History is a grand story with a plot—it has a
beginning, a middle, and an end. It is the process that drives human
societies from where they are to a position that is objectively better.
Hegel and his followers defined “better” in terms of freedom. “The
history of the world,” Hegel wrote in The Philosophy of History, “is
none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”2
Fukuyama’s grand theory for understanding world politics after
the Cold War* has three main themes. First, he stresses that human

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

“recognized
Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be
as greater than others with a rational desire
to be recognized as equal. A world made up of liberal
democracies, then, should have much less incentive for
war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one
another’s legitimacy.
”
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

society evolves over time, with each stage usually attaining greater
freedom than the last. This is based on Plato’s* concept of thymos,*
which sets people apart from animals on the basis of their desire for
recognition and equality.
Second, Fukuyama argues that the driving force behind this
evolution can only be satisfied by a liberal democratic state, because its
emphasis on civil and human rights encourages humans to struggle
for recognition, and eventually to recognize each other’s freedoms and
respect one another’s equality. Fukuyama concludes that all other
systems, including Marxism,* had failed to achieve this.
Third, he argues that liberal democracy marks the end of history
for human society and political ideas, with the “last man” being the
triumphant citizen of this system.

Exploring the Ideas

Political scientist Peter Singer* provides an excellent model for
understanding the Hegelian view of history that Francis Fukuyama
relies on in The End of History. In ancient Egypt, Singer writes, only
the pharaoh was free and all others subordinated themselves to his will.
In the ancient Greek city-states, the citizens were free, and recognized
one another as free and equal.3 This made ancient Greece superior, in
that era, to ancient Egypt in terms of social and cultural evolution.
While there were still pharaohs in Egypt right up until Roman times,

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 5: Main Ideas

Hegel would see the Greeks and Romans as having possessed greater
freedom, and therefore further along the path of history.This is where
thymos comes into play. It is the driving force behind this human desire
to be recognized as free, equal and worthy of consideration.
The notion that history is propelled by thymos feeds Fukuyama’s
second main idea: that liberal democracies represent the final stage of
political development. “As mankind approaches the millennium,”
Fukuyama writes, “the twin crises of authoritarianism* and socialist
central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as
an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the
doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty.”4 Liberal
democracy, in other words, is the ideology that most perfectly expresses
thymos, because it is based on the idea that all people—not just one
person or a certain group—are recognized as free and equal.
The end of history does not mean a freezing of time; Fukuyama
acknowledges that events will continue to take place once this
endpoint is reached. But in his view, these will not add up to “history.”
Since no alternative form of government satisfies thymos as well as
liberal democracy, none can hope to replace it.
Fukuyama sees liberal democracy, based on the twin pillars of
liberty and equality, as the final form of government to which all
others will have to adapt. He does not offer a timetable for these final
days of history and even acknowledges that setbacks will occur. He
simply believes that democracy will inevitably be established across
the world.

Language and Expression

Although Fukuyama does not make precise predictions in his book, he
does claim to have identified a measurable trend towards what he
called the “liberal revolution.”This represents “a common evolutionary
pattern for all human societies—in short, something like a universal
history of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.”5

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

Fukuyama also strikes a cautionary note, acknowledging

undeniable “peaks and troughs in this development.”6 He means that
any failure of a liberal democratic state, or even “entire region,” should
not be seen as “evidence of democracy’s overall weakness.”7 These
warnings are an important rebuttal to the charge that Fukuyama
overstates his theory. Put simply, he concedes that the end of history
can be reversed, but insists that setbacks will prove to be temporary.
Liberal democracy remains the ultimate destination for all states.
His choice of language in portraying liberal democracy as the end
of history is highly optimistic.This lack of caution, coupled with more
recent events that have undermined his thesis, have resulted in serious
criticisms of his work.

NOTES
1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
2012), xii.
2 G. W. F. Hegel, quoted in Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), e-book.
3 Singer, Hegel, e-book.
4 Fukuyama, The End of History, 42.
5 Fukuyama, The End of History, 48.
6 Fukuyama, The End of History, 48.
7 Fukuyama, The End of History, 50.

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 MODULE 6
SECONDARY IDEAS
KEY POINTS
• Fukuyama argues that technology is an engine of historical
change, leading to the disappearance of human conflict
and the triumph of universal peace.
• The “last man” is a citizen in a liberal democracy* where
equality is the norm.
• The End of History provides an overview of democratic
peace theory*—the idea that democracies share values
and don’t declare war on each other.

Other Themes
In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama explores
three themes that are subordinate to his main argument.The first is the
power of science and technology to move human history forward.
Technology brings the possibility of limitless economic growth, which
Fukuyama says will be welcomed by every nation. And, since having a
technologically advanced military means having a comparative
advantage in international relations, all nations will seek to improve
their defense capabilities. Regardless of a country’s history or cultural
makeup, science will guarantee that all societies become more alike.
Fukuyama’s second theme is that all nations will openly support
capitalism* and liberal democracy, removing any reason for going to
war.This will result in universal peace.Third, with the defeat of Soviet
communism,* “the last man” will be stripped of purpose and ambition.
These themes are linked to one another, and to the main argument.
Fukuyama insists that history progresses from societies with less
freedom to societies with greater freedom. He explores how free

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

“‘lastTheman’typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a

who, schooled by the founders of modern
liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own
superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation.
Liberal democracy produces ‘men without chests,’
composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos,*
clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of wants
through the calculation of long-term self-interest.The
last man had no desire to be recognized as greater
than others, and without such desire no excellence or
achievement was possible. Content with his happiness
and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable
to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be
human.
”
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

societies assert and maintain their dominance, and ponders what the
future will look like once their dominance is achieved. Fukuyama’s
vision of the future is pessimistic, because he is certain that the absence
of an enemy (Soviet communism) will deprive people of their sense of
moral superiority. This will result in a deep sense of emptiness and
frustration. In the end, the West’s Cold War* victory will prove to be
its moral defeat, because values will have been replaced by material
ambitions for wealth, security, and comfort.

Exploring the Ideas

Francis Fukuyama argued that the universality of science “provides
the basis for the global unification of mankind,”1 but that it is achieved
through military competition.The best way to think of this is in terms
of weapons technology. Science makes sure that history moves
forward, because it “confers a decisive military advantage on those

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 6: Secondary Ideas

societies that can develop, produce and deploy technology the most
efficiently.”2 Fukuyama thought that this would also make sure that
non-democratic societies could not keep pace with liberal ones,
because they would have no market incentives to keep technology at
the cutting edge.
Fukuyama points to the end of the Cold War,* when “one of the
chief reasons [for Soviet surrender] was their realization that an
unreformed Soviet Union was going to have serious problems
remaining competitive, economically and militarily.”3 In other
words, when US president Ronald Reagan used computer
technology to make a generation of Soviet missiles obsolete, he
“shifted the superpower competition into areas like microelectronics
and other innovative technologies where the Soviet Union had
serious disadvantages.”4 Fukuyama calls this “defensive
modernization.” The Soviet Union had no choice but to introduce
more freedoms, because it was outstripped in technological
development by the United States.
For Fukuyama, the post-history world of wall-to-wall liberal
democracies is inevitably still some way off, owing to what is known
as the development continuum gap.* This is the difference in
economic status, and with it levels of industrialization and political
maturity, between the world’s richest and poorest nations. As states
develop and become more democratic, according to Fukuyama, the
chief exchanges will become economic. The old rules of power
politics, with their focus on conflict, will become irrelevant. “The
civil peace,” Fukuyama writes, “brought about by liberalism* should
logically have its counterpoint in relations between states.”5 He goes
on, noting “the fundamentally un-warlike character of liberal
societies is evident in the extraordinarily peaceful relations they
maintain among one another,” in part because they share an ideology
that recognizes one another as legitimate, and in part because they
compete on a more friendly, economic basis.6

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

The “last man,” then, is a fundamentally peaceful creature who

has emerged from the periodization*—developmental steps—of
history into a post-historical world. He or she is a citizen of a
capitalist* democracy where equality is the norm. However, this
person is not ideal, being almost too satisfied and content. For
Fukuyama, “those earnest young people trooping off to law and
business school” may represent this “last man.”7 He worries that “for
them, the liberal project of filling one’s life with material acquisitions
and safe, sanctioned ambitions appears to have worked all too well. It
is hard to detect great, unfulfilled longings or irrational passions,” the
kind that move history and inspire greatness, “lurking just beneath
the surface of the average first year law associate.”8 In other words,
people in post-historical society have no great struggle and no great
project. Instead they face an empty lifetime of accumulating money
and possessions.

Overlooked
None of these strands in Fukuyama’s larger theory constitute original
thinking, although he certainly fleshes out some established ideas.The
notion that science influences history’s direction has its origins in the
work of Hegel* and Marx.* The origins of democratic peace theory*
can be traced back to eighteenth-century thinkers Immanuel Kant*
and Thomas Paine.* As for the last man, such ideas had been debated
for quite some time. Hegel, Marx, German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche* and others had even argued about whether the last man
was a desirable concept. Nietzsche, in particular, lamented the coming
of the last men as the arrival of “men without chests.”
The ideas in The End of History are useful to scholars because they
explain why Fukuyama believes that liberal dominance is inevitable.
The book provides a snapshot of world politics at the time of writing,
and also describes what the last man might look like.This allows us to
search for evidence of his existence in parts of the world that are

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 6: Secondary Ideas

approaching or have achieved post-history. By including democratic

peace theory in his work, Fukuyama provides an ongoing test of his
own theories. This gives students and academics the opportunity to
debate his view of the world.

NOTES
1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
2012), 73.
2 Fukuyama, The End of History, 73.
3 Fukuyama, The End of History, 75.
4 Fukuyama, The End of History, 76.
5 Fukuyama The End of History, 260.
6 Fukuyama, The End of History, 263.
7 Fukuyama, The End of History, 336.
8 Fukuyama, The End of History, 336.

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 MODULE 7
ACHIEVEMENT
KEY POINTS
• Fukuyama argues that liberal democracies* are
intrinsically stable, and that non-liberal states are a fluke of
history.
• Current events, such as continued conflict in the Middle
East, Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and the crisis over
Ukraine continue to invite criticism of Fukuyama’s thesis.
• The economic success of non-liberal China coupled with
the fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis challenge
the idea that liberal democracy is perfect and inevitable.

Assessing the Argument

Francis Fukuyama’s main purpose in The End of History and the Last
Man is to show the supremacy of a specific political and economic
system—that of liberal democracy and a free market economy.* He
argues that the move for nations to adopt this system is a permanent
upward trend across the globe, ending the “traditional left and right
hemisphere[s]” of politics.
Fukuyama sets out to explain why liberal democracy appeared to
have won the ideological struggle that had raged throughout the
twentieth century. He sees fundamental contradictions in every other
political system, mainly that they do not recognize people as equal. For
him, it is logical that society should—and inevitably would—organize
itself along democratic lines.
Fukuyama provides no actual plan for prompting states to adopt
liberal and free market principles. Instead he points to the essential
stability of liberal states. Since “few totalitarian* regimes could

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 7: Achievement

“History?’
Francis Fukuyama’s influential essay ‘The End of
announced the triumph of liberal democracy
and the arrival of a post-ideological world. But was it
just a right-wing argument in disguise? And has the
demise of utopianism* ushered in a ‘sad time’?
Eliane Glaser in the Guardian.1
”
replicate themselves through one or more succession crises,”2
authoritarianism* itself is a “fluke.”3 It stands to reason, he argues, that
non-liberal states are an accident of modern history; they are doomed,
because they are at the mercy of any event that proves too much for
their inbuilt inflexibility. Such states either fall or reinvent themselves
as democracies, and existing democracies will endure. A simple
mathematical equation reveals the eventual rise of Western ideology.
Even democratic governments voted out of office during times of
crisis leave behind a constitutional framework.

Achievement in Context
Understanding Fukuyama’s achievement requires an understanding of
the time and place in which The End of History was written. At the
beginning of the 1990s, free market economics, combined with liberal
democracies, had provided stability and growth where other systems
seemed to have failed. Fukuyama was convinced that this trend would
continue. He argued that in order to compete with the West, other
countries would have to become more like it; and in growing more
alike, they would be more peaceful. Fukuyama acknowledged that a
few states would oppose this arrangement, such as North Korea, but
sooner or later they would see no alternative but to join in.
The problem is that actual world events did not turn out that way.
American president George W. Bush* proclaimed a long-term war

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against terrorism following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United

States. Competition intensified between Japan and China, and conflict
continued in the Middle East. Iran sought nuclear weapons, while
Russia and the European Union struggled over Ukraine.
Another issue is that Fukuyama’s theories are firmly rooted in
Western liberal philosophy. Even though he explains the concepts, he
assumes his readers will be familiar with this tradition. Readers must,
therefore, have an understanding of this Western bias in order to fully
appreciate his work.

Limitations
Fukuyama wrote The End of History as a compelling argument as to
why liberal democracies were doing so well compared with other
ways of running economic and political life. It succeeds in this, but
where it failed was in predicting that democracy would continue to
dominate the world stage.
The shortcomings of Fukuyama’s analysis became even more
glaring with the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis,* which
shook the foundations of democracies everywhere and exposed their
weaknesses. Rising Asian countries such as Japan received a good deal
of attention in the book, yet since The End of History was published
they have been overshadowed by the rise of non-liberal states. China,
the biggest, has adopted a blend of state capitalism* and
authoritarianism,* and the Chinese Communist Party* regularly
condemns Western democratic and legal conditions.
It could be argued, then, that China is championing an alternative
model to the West. The introduction of democracy has also failed in
troubled places such as Iraq and Syria. This suggests that democracy
and the market cannot flourish without a stable state apparatus and the
willingness of most people to adopt the “Western system.”
Fukuyama has responded to critiques by arguing that, despite these
important developments, the world has still made great progress

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 7: Achievement

towards liberal democracy,* and holds to his belief that it will continue
to be the dominant political structure.4

NOTES
1 Eliane Glaser, “Bring Back Ideology: Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ 25 Years
On,” Guardian, March 21, 2014, accessed March 19, 2015, http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/bring-back-ideology-fukuyama-end-
history-25-years-on.
2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
2012), 40.
3 Fukuyama, The End of History, 47.
4 Winston Shi, “Francis Fukuyama: End of History Still in Sight Despite China’s
Rise,” Huffington Post, July 9, 2014, accessed March 19, 2015,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/winston-shi/francis-fukuyama-end-of-history-
_b_5569581.html.

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 MODULE 8
PLACE IN THE AUTHOR’S WORK
KEY POINTS
• The End of History and the Last Man is an extension of
Fukuyama’s 1989 article where he first sets out his idea
that world politics are heading in one direction.
• Fukuyama aimed to plug the gap he perceived in the West’s
understanding of exactly what had just happened with the
collapse of the Soviet Union.*
• Since publication, Fukuyama has distanced himself from
the neoconservative* branch of American politics, which
he once supported.

Positioning
While Francis Fukuyama found fame as the author of The End of
History and the Last Man, his academic career did not begin in
international relations.* His first degree was in classics, and he went
on to study comparative literature before eventually turning to
politics. In each field, Fukuyama was most fascinated by philosophy.
As a graduate student at Yale University he spent six months in
Paris studying poststructuralism under the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida.* Poststructuralism is the name given to ideas
stemming from continental Europe during the 1960s and 1970s.
Structuralism claimed that human beings could be understood by
means of various structures or models. Poststructuralism argued that
people are complex, making these structures unstable and therefore
unreliable.
Fukuyama became disillusioned with complicated postmodern*
criticism and chose to transfer from Yale in order to study political

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 8: Place in the Author’s Work

“notWhat we need, then, and what The End of History did

supply, is a theory of political development that is
independent of economics. State formation and state-
building, how this happened historically, the role of
violence, military competition, religion, and ideas more
broadly, the effects of physical geography and resource
endowments, why it happened first in some parts of the
world and not in others—these are all components of a
larger theory that has yet to be elaborated.
”
Francis Fukuyama, afterword to The End of History and the Last Man

science at Harvard. At Harvard he studied for a Ph.D. and in 1981

completed a doctoral dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the
Middle East.1
In the eight years between receiving his doctorate and publishing
his initial essay, “The End of History?”*, Fukuyama worked for the
influential American policy think tank, RAND Corporation, as a
policy analyst specializing in the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.
It was during this time that his ideas about the end of history
crystallized.
Fukuyama’s milestone essay drew on his early experiences of
studying across three disciplines, and can be seen as a blueprint for his
later thinking. It lays out all the key arguments he would use to build
the book published three years later.

Integration
In his 1989 article, published in the journal The National Interest,2
Fukuyama argues that a fundamental change in world history had
just occurred. He says that while many scholars wanted to understand
why international relations seemed to be heading down a more
peaceful path, studies about the end of the Cold War* lacked “any

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is

essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and
are predictably superficial.”3
The book The End of History was published in 1992 as a grand
theory that could identify and explain the forces of history responsible
for the march of democracy around the world. It was also Fukuyama’s
response to the intense debate stirred up by his original essay. The
book proved, if anything, even more divisive.4 In it, he goes beyond the
conclusions reached in the essay by establishing a theoretical
framework that emphasizes the triumph of capitalism* and liberal
democracy* over every other kind of government.

Significance
The End of History is Fukuyama’s most important publication, and
made him a well-known figure in international relations.* It has been
heavily criticized since it appeared in 1992, and has become more
vulnerable over time as major events have failed to tally with his world
view. Realities such as the rise of non-liberal China and the 2008
global financial crisis* seem at odds with his predictions.
Fukuyama now acknowledges that the reality of current events
and the fact that some states show no indication of being on a liberal,
democratic path has weakened the case of The End of History.
In his later work, especially State-Building: Governance and World
Order in the 21st Century, Fukuyama has not wavered from his
conviction that all states should aspire to a competent, accountable and
democratic government. Such governments should promote a strong
civil society based on equal rights, and aim to maximize prosperity. He
has, however, acknowledged that for weak or failed states, the path
towards this goal is sometimes unclear. Major setbacks have meant that
liberal democracy has not yet become universal, and peace has not yet
triumphed over human conflict.

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 8: Place in the Author’s Work

Fukuyama says troubled countries such as Somalia, Haiti, and the

Congo need state-building help in order to secure a liberal, democratic
world order. By state-building he means that rich nations, international
organizations, and non-governmental organizations should encourage
better government. This would reduce threats to democracy such as
human rights abuses, humanitarian disasters, and terrorism.
In recent years, Fukuyama has often been associated with
neoconservatism,* a school of thought that emphasizes the importance
of free-market economics* and the aggressive promotion of democracy
through military force.This is largely down to his involvement with The
Project for New Democracy, a neo-conservative think tank.* Many
people from the project joined the US Administration under George W.
Bush.* This involvement did not last long, however, and in his eyes the
group distorted the message of The End of History. By 2003 he had
distanced himself from the Bush administration, deciding that
“neoconservatism as both a political symbol and a body of thought [had]
evolved into something that [I] could no longer support,” in particular
the way it was used to “justify an American foreign policy that
overemphasized the use of force and led logically to the Iraq War.”*5

NOTES
1 Martin Griffiths et al., Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, second
ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 81.
2 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest 16
(Summer 1989): 3–18.
3 Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, 3–18.
4 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 15.
5 Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the
Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, C. T.: Yale University Press, 2006).
The Iraq War began in 2003 when a coalition led by the United States and
Britain invaded Iraq with the aim of overthrowing the existing regime led by
Saddam Hussein.

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 SECTION 3
IMPACT

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 MODULE 9
THE FIRST RESPONSES
KEY POINTS
• The End of History sparked criticism from the political left
and right; Samuel Huntington* supplied an alternative
theory called The Clash of Civilizations.
• Fukuyama claimed his theory had been misunderstood,
arguing that Huntington underestimated the power of
economic development and technology to make all nations
more liberal.*
• Fukuyama was accused of failing to recognize or
understand why human conflict has endured, or why some
states are still not liberal democracies.

Criticism
Fellow academics, leading politicians, and media commentators were
quick to respond to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last
Man. His theory of liberal democracy* as the end of history drew
criticism from across the ideological spectrum. Fukuyama noted
contributions “from Margaret Thatcher,* William F. Buckley,* and the
Wall Street Journal* on the right and The Nation,* André Fontaine*,
Marion Dönhoff* … on the left.”1
The most important objections to The End of History came from
scholars in the field of international relations.* Harvard professor
Samuel Huntington concluded that the world was not progressing as
his former student had claimed it would. In his rival post-Cold War
theory, The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington argued that Fukuyama
lacked a proper understanding of the workings of world politics.

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“former
I have been contrasted by many observers to my
teacher Samuel Huntington … I agree with
him in his view that culture remains an irreducible
component of human societies … But there is a
fundamental issue that separates us. It is the question of
whether the values and institutions developed during
the Western Enlightenment are potentially universal, or
bounded within a cultural horizon.
”
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

Huntington warned against fuelling overconfidence in American

statesmen, providing them with a false sense of security that ignored
the decline of Western dominance in relation to its rivals. “In the
emerging [post-Cold War] world,” Huntington wrote,“Western belief
in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false;
it is immoral; and it is dangerous.”2
Huntington stressed that other cultures had other forms of
government that had grown out of their particular histories. Rather
than seeing the promotion of liberal democracy around the world as
liberating, non-Westerners might see its promotion in their home
countries as aggressive and arrogant.3

Author’s Response
Francis Fukuyama responded to the furore created by the first airing
of his theory in the 1989 essay “The End of History?” with another
article a few months later entitled “A Reply to My Critics,” again in
the journal The National Interest. In this, he observed that his “real
accomplishment [had] been to produce a uniquely universal consensus,
not on the current status of liberalism,* but on the fact that I was
wrong and that history has not in fact ended.”4 He went on in the
same dismissive vein, stating that “none of the objections that have

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 Section 3: Impact; Module 9: The First Responses

been raised to my thesis strike me as decisive, and the ones that might
have been decisive were never raised.”
At this point it appears that Fukuyama simply did not accept what
his critics were saying. His main objection was that he had been
misunderstood. He also suspected many people of not reading the
entire 16-page article. Rather than retracting his thesis, he expanded it
in 1992 with the publication of The End of History and the Last Man.
In 1999 Fukuyama penned a direct reply to Huntington, his
former teacher and most formidable critic, in the form of an article in
The National Interest entitled “Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a
Bottle.” Fukuyama believes that Huntington underestimates the power
of “economic development and technological change” to “blur the
boundaries between civilizations” and to promote a universal
consensus of political values among advanced countries. He also
believes that Huntington is wrong to deny that it is possible “to have
economic development without a certain degree of value change in a
Western”—that is, liberal capitalist—“direction.”5
Fukuyama’s main concern in this article, however, is that the
infinite, forward development of natural science will not lead to the
end of history, but will “abolish” human nature through bioengineering
and pharmacology (genetic modification and drugs).6 The article is
subtitled “The Last Man in a Bottle” because he worries that
antidepressants will allow people to forget their thymos* (the urge to
win recognition and equality) and become “last men” without actually
finding freedom.

Conflict and Consensus

Fukuyama’s critics insisted that current events had undermined his
grand end-of-history theory. While some states may appear to be
heading down a path of liberal reform, the reality is that many—such
as Somalia—are still far from liberal democracy. Somalia’s civil war left
the country without a working central government and legal system;

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

the government is unable to control parts of its territory or meet the

basic human needs of its people, such as sufficient food, clean water,
education, and health services.
In other countries, such as Sudan, human conflict on ethnic,
national, and religious lines is still occurring. This is despite attempts
by the United States and the West in general to push through reforms
using international institutions. Governments in Iraq and Syria have
to a significant extent lost their monopoly on the use of legitimate
force within their territories. Meanwhile terrorist groups have moved
to fill vacuums left by failed or failing states, and now exercise
considerable power.
Huntington accused Fukuyama of failing to understand the
profound differences between states. How, for example, did Fukuyama
account for the breakdown of state borders drawn during the colonial
era in Africa? Furthermore, Huntington feared that America’s
overconfidence in international affairs could have serious
consequences for the future of the West.

NOTES
1 Francis Fukuyama, “A Reply to My Critics,” The National Interest 18 (Winter
1989/90): 21–28.
2 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (London: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 310.
3 Huntington, Clash, 66.
4 Fukuyama, “A Reply to My Critics,” 21–28.
5 Francis Fukuyama, “Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle,” The
National Interest 56 (Summer 1999): 5.
6 Fukuyama, “Second Thoughts,” 1.

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 MODULE 10
THE EVOLVING DEBATE
KEY POINTS
• The End of History affected the way Western academics
and politicians thought about spreading democracy and
capitalism to other countries.
• No school of thought emerged around Fukuyama’s theory
because the idea of liberal democracy* as the goal of
human society has been discussed for centuries.
• Fukuyama has not introduced any completely new thinking
to international relations,* as academics in other fields
have arrived at the same conclusions independently.

Uses and Problems

Away from academia, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the
Last Man was an important reference point for Western leaders and
policy makers who shared his view that democracy was desirable and
inevitable everywhere.When Bill Clinton was president of the United
States, from 1993 to 2001, the US and the United Kingdom tried to
spread free market* values to nations with very different political
systems and histories. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)* sent
agents “to post-communist* lands carrying the same draft constitution
in their briefcases. No matter how discrepant the countries they …
tried to impose the same model on them all.”2
These efforts had limited success, however. The increase in the
number of liberal states had apparently stalled by the end of the
twentieth century. When George W. Bush* became president of the
United States in 2001, he set a neoconservative* course that employed
less peaceful ways of imposing top-down regime change—specifically

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“western
Francis Fukuyama’s defence of the universalism of
values and institutions is challenged by modern
global political realities.
”
Professor Talal Asad, “A Single History?” in Open Democracy.1

the Iraq War* of 2003.This called into question Fukuyama’s vision of

universal peace. Subsequently President Barack Obama* took office
in 2009 and faced challenges to the idea of the relentless spread of
democracy from countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North
Korea.
The main problem with The End of History is that history itself has
not unfolded in the way Fukuyama expected. World events since the
book’s publication seem to have undermined his theory of a global
march towards Western-style democracy. His ideas were old ones
brought forward to fit the world of 1992 and were quickly overtaken
by events, a fact recognized by many of his fellow academics.

Schools of Thought
The End of History caused a storm of debate when it was published.
Pierre Hassner* of the French political research institute Fondation
Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris agreed that “the current
wave of decline in inter-state conflicts and in revolutionary ideologies,
particularly in the developed world, is more than an illusion or a
temporary fluke.”3
Samuel Huntington argued that a third wave of democratization
had taken place from 1974, sweeping through Latin America and
Eastern Europe and including the end of the Soviet Union. But the
process was not as irreversible as Fukuyama had thought, said
Huntington, because there could also be “reverse waves.”4
Meanwhile, Marc F. Plattner* of the National Endowment for
Democracy saw The End of History as “a carefully structured

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 Section 3: Impact; Module 10: The Evolving Debate

elaboration … on the problems and prospects of liberal democracy”

that drew on “the classics of political philosophy and the works of
modern political and social science.”5 This is an important and unifying
point. As Hassner noted, fundamental questions about the meaning of
war and peace and legitimacy call for “more than a purely political,
military, or economic analysis.”6
Fukuyama’s seminal text covers overlapping fields involving several
schools of thought—liberalism,* democratic peace theory,* post-
humanism* (the belief that technology can permanently alter the
nature of humanity) and realism* (the international relations theory
that assumes states are self-governing and answer to no higher body,
that they all share the same goal of survival and that they provide for
their own security). By building on ideas of democracy proposed by
the German political scientist Dankwart Rustow,* and drawing on
philosophy, Fukuyama positioned himself alongside a number of
thinkers such as Michael W. Doyle,* Robert O. Keohane,* Stanley
Hoffmann,* and Richard N. Rosecrance.* They all accepted
liberalism as a step forward in human evolution (though not all agreed
on Fukuyama’s concept of an endpoint).
As early as 1970, Rustow was noting the connection between
democracies and “certain economic and social background conditions
such as high per capita income, widespread literacy and prevalent
urban residence.”7 The neorealist* scholar Kenneth Waltz* also spoke
of a “new optimism, strikingly similar to the old,” where
“interdependence was again associated with peace and increasingly
with democracy,”8 indicating that Fukuyama’s influence continued to
be felt even within a field from which he had distanced himself.
No single school of thought has formed around The End of
History itself, though it is most closely related to the study of
liberalism. Many liberal thinkers agree with the text’s central
philosophical arguments, and scholars such as Michael Doyle
emphasize the essentially progressive nature of history at a

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geopolitical* level—that is, the combination of geographic and

political factors that influence nations.9
While Fukuyama’s ideas still hold some weight in certain circles,
they have not provided a jumping-off point for new thinking. There
are two main reasons for this. The text is essentially revisionist in
nature; people who hold with its central ideas already held those views
when the book was written. Also, the more instinctive elements of
Fukuyama’s thinking—such as those adopted by the
neoconservatives*—have become either unpalatable to recent
governments or impossible in the current geopolitical climate.

In Current Scholarship
The End of History and the Last Man proposes two credible theses: that
history is an evolutionary process and that the free market represents
the most rational form of economic activity. It can, however, be argued
that it has not been responsible for any fundamental new thinking
outside the field of international relations.
This is because academics in other fields have arrived
independently at ideas that mirror Fukuyama’s. The Nobel Prize-
winning free market economist Milton Friedman* argued that,
“Everyone, everywhere, now understands that the road to success
for underdeveloped countries is freer markets and globalization.”*10
Similarly, democratic peace theorists such as the American
sociologist Dean Babst* shared many of Fukuyama’s views on liberal
peace.11 International relations scholar Michael Doyle went so far as
to state that, “unusually for international relations,” liberalism “can
generate law-like hypotheses … that can in principle be
disconfirmed.”12 Each of these schools also draws inspiration from
thinkers who were around long before Fukuyama. Democratic
peace theory, for example, traces its roots back three centuries to the
philosopher Immanuel Kant.*

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 Section 3: Impact; Module 10: The Evolving Debate

NOTES
1 Talal Asad, “A Single History?”, Open Democracy, May 5, 2006, accessed
March 19, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-fukuyama/
single_history_3507.jsp
2 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New
York: Penguin, 2007), 83.
3 Pierre Hassner, “Responses to Fukuyama,” accessed March19, 2015,
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh_response.htm.
4 Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
5 Marc Plattner, “Exploring the End of History,” Journal of Democracy 3, no. 2
(1992): 118–21.
6 Hassner, “Responses to Fukuyama.”
7 Dankwart Rustow, “Transition to Democracy: Towards a Dynamic
Model,” Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (1970): 337.
8 Kenneth Waltz, “Globalization and American Power,” The National Interest
59 (Spring 2000): 46–56.
9 Michael W. Doyle, ‘”Michael W. Doyle on Markets and Institutions,” Theory
Talks, April 15, 2008, accessed March 19, 2015, http://www.theory-talks.
org/2008/04/theory-talk-1.html.
10 Nathan Gardels, “Naomi Klein, Read Milton Friedman’s Last Interview,”
Huffington Post, October 1, 2007, accessed March 19, 2015, http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/naomi-klein-read-milton-f_b_66591.
html?
11 Dean Babst, “Elective Governments – A Force for Peace,” Industrial
Research (April 1972): 55–58.
12 Michael Doyle, “Reflections on the Liberal Peace and Its Critics,” in
Debating the Democratic Peace, ed. Michael E Brown et al. (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1996), 358–63.

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 MODULE 11
IMPACT AND INFLUENCE TODAY
KEY POINTS
• Fukuyama’s ideas treat history as an evolutionary process
that cannot be permanently blown off course by actual
events.
• His theory depended on a sustained increase in liberal
democracies around the world but it seems that in reality,
we are seeing a sustained decline.
• Critics have called for Fukuyama to address modern
political and economic developments in order for his theory
to be useful in today’s world.

Position
The End of History and the Last Man has influenced the political elite of
the West. When philosopher and Fukuyama critic John Gray* noted
that “universal democracy and the ‘War on Terror’* have proved to be
dangerous delusions,”1 he was highlighting an important link between
Francis Fukuyama’s theoretical framework and events in the real world.
Although Fukuyama distanced himself from the 2003 invasion of
Iraq,* two politicians in particular—US President George W. Bush*
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair*—seem to have been heavily
influenced by the book. Unlike Bush (a neoconservative* to the core
who surrounded himself with other neoconservatives), Blair was a
neoliberal* (pro free trade, privatization and deregulation to promote
economic liberation, but less of an advocate of the aggressive
imposition of democracy). Yet he shifted to the neoconservative
agenda after the 9/11 terrorist attack* on the United States.

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 Section 3: Impact; Module 11: Impact and Influence Today

“climax
Francis Fukuyama’s ascription to history of a plot and
is implausible, but the grain of his work is freshly
relevant to the post-9/11 world.*
”
Stephen Holmes, Professor of Political Science and Law, New York Univer-
sity, in “The Logic of a Blocked History,” Open Democracy

Blair held the “belief that only one economic system can deliver
prosperity in a late modern context,” according to Gray.2 He never
doubted that “globalization* … must eventually be complemented by
global democracy.”3 A war to plant democracy in infertile soil can be
seen as the most important political interpretation of Fukuyama’s
seminal text. War was no longer “a last resort against the worst evils,
but an instrument of human progress.”4
The End of History is deeply rooted in philosophical ideas that
many people find unfamiliar. The Cold War left those who lived
through it with only a passing understanding of Karl Marx’s* basic
ideas. Even fewer knew of Hegel* and fewer still had even heard of
Kojève.* While the text itself is well known, its meaning and
significance, it seems, are not well understood.
The main misunderstanding is often highlighted by Fukuyama
himself. The “fall of the Berlin Wall,* the Chinese government’s
crackdown in Tiananmen Square* and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait”*
were seen as “evidence that ‘history was continuing,’ and that [he] was
ipso facto proven wrong.”5 Such an analysis points to a fundamental
misunderstanding of Fukuyama’s concept of history as a single,
coherent evolutionary process that had little to do with actual events.

Interaction
In The End of History, Fukuyama makes bold claims about the nature
of history and its ultimate destination. On a very basic level, his
theory depends on the increasing, or at least sustained, dominance of
liberal democracies.*

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

Although Fukuyama expected setbacks, it seems that a sustained

reversal is actually in effect.6 Most geopolitical projections place the
United States third in terms of nominal Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) by 2050, behind China and India, and second in terms of
GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (considered a more
accurate measure), still behind China by a considerable margin. The
relevance of the text has been diluted by the simple truth that history
has not followed the path that Fukuyama prescribed.
Fukuyama has not ignored this observation, noting “growth in
per capita output does far more than put larger resources in the
hands of states. It stimulates a broad transformation of society and
mobilizes a host of new social forces that over time seek to become
political actors as well.”7 This idea is important and shows that his
ideas are still challenging wider political thinking.
According to Clyde Prestowitz,* founder of Washington think
tank The Economic Strategy Institute, China shows that a country
does not need to be liberal to be economically successful. Samuel
Huntington* felt the East would “increasingly have the desire, the
will and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways.”8
Both men have directly confronted the spirit of Fukuyama’s text and,
so far, this criticism has the upper hand. Huntington’s view appears
the most prophetic; China’s economy is set to grow for years to
come.
Although Fukuyama has reframed the debate to fit today’s
intellectual and geopolitical climate more effectively, it is hard to
avoid the conclusion that The End of History needs to take account of
events since its publication in 1992 if it is to remain relevant.

The Continuing Debate

Much has been said about the failure of The End of History to predict
developments on the world stage with any accuracy. But according
to Professor Olivier Roy of the European University Institute,

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 Section 3: Impact; Module 11: Impact and Influence Today

establishing a democracy “does not suppose that a society should go

through the same historical and cultural process that the West has
undergone.”9 The intellectual debate has shifted toward taking a
fresh look at the form a liberal society might one day take.
Fukuyama, after “repenting of [his] neoconservative hubris,”10
concluded that the events of the past two decades did in fact “not
mean the end of the end of history, but rather a temporary respite
from the end of history.”11 This shows that his position has not so
much changed as softened; his ideas are still opposed by the same
thinkers, institutions and schools of thought as before. So, without
being revised for the twenty-first century, Fukuyama’s theory will
continue to be undermined by current events and intellectual
critiques.

NOTES
1 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New
York: Penguin, 2007), 29.
2 Gray, Black Mass, 94.
3 Gray, Black Mass, 99.
4 Gray, Black Mass, 99.
5 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
2012), xii.
6 PwC, “World in 2050: The BRICs and Beyond: Prospects, Challenges and
Opportunities,” accessed March 19, 2015, http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/
world-2050/assets/pwc-world-in-2050-report-january-2013.pdf., last modified
2013, accessed March 10, 2013.
7 Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to
the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), 475.
8 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs 72
(1993): 26.
9 Olivier Roy, “The End of History and the Long March of Secularisation,”
Open Democracy, May 15, 2006, accessed March 19, 2015,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/node/3546.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

10 Charles S. Maier, “The Intoxications of History,” Open Democracy, May

17, 2006, accessed March 19, 2015, http://www.opendemocracy.net/
democracy-fukuyama/intoxication_3560.jsp.
11 Maier, “The Intoxications of History.”

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 MODULE 12
WHERE NEXT?
KEY POINTS
• Despite pressure for Fukuyama to update his theory, The
End of History remains an optimistic vision of the future
that many find inspiring.
• Scholars will still study Fukuyama’s work but many call for
him to update his theory to take account of factors such as
China, North Korea, Syria, terrorism and new wars around
the world.
• Fukuyama has softened his approach without abandoning
his theory, conceding that the end of history might take
longer and be a more difficult process than he first
imagined.

Potential
The End of History and the Last Man is an important text in which
Francis Fukuyama uses the ideas of leading political thinkers from
earlier eras to explain our own turbulent period of history. For that
reason alone the book will continue to be read. However, Fukuyama’s
ideas do not reflect the realities of our times and need updating in
order to tackle what actually happened after the Cold War.*
The end of history may eventually come, but it has certainly not
arrived yet. No universal political and economic system has been
established and different parts of the world are still torn by ethnic,
national, and religious conflict. Instead of seeing the progress of history
through such a wide lens, it may be better to understand each national
context as unique, and to address it as such—after all, the complexities
of nations such as Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, and Syria are very different.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

“in Asia,
One wonders how this ‘feel good’ thesis is viewed
Africa and Latin America, where liberal
democracies are often fragile at best and where basic
human needs are not being met. Even in Western
terms this provocative tract seems more attuned to the
self-congratulatory 1980s than the problematic years
ahead.
”
Andrew Pierre, review of The End of History and the Last Man, Foreign Affairs

Fukuyama’s optimistic belief is that human society is on a path of

continual improvement toward a more progressive, egalitarian and
peaceful future. The world he describes in The End of History has not
yet arrived and may never do so, but the work offers an important
point of scholarly reference and an inspiring vision that many will
fight long and hard to see realized.

Future Directions
The End of History will remain a reference point in the fields of
international relations* and politics. As an academic argument, it will
continue to be scrutinized as a thesis that does not reflect modern
realities—scholars are bound to point to the rise of non-liberal China,
the ideological challenges of countries such as Iran and North Korea,
the influence of factors such as terrorist groups (which often
undermine state power over territories) and ethnic, religious, and
sectarian struggles in countries such as Iraq and Syria. Such realities
contradict Fukuyama’s idea that humankind will adopt one method of
government; instead, they suggest that conflict will continue to
prevent universal peace.
It seems likely that Western politicians will continue to promote
capitalism* and liberal democracy* abroad. Despite different
approaches, this has been true of US presidents Clinton*, Bush Jr,*

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 Section 3: Impact; Module 12: Where Next?

and Obama.* It is equally likely that they will be met with resistance,
because not everyone shares their beliefs. Many see their doctrines
simply as an imperialist tool used by the West to expand its interests.

Summary
In 1992 Fukuyama made a very big prediction—that capitalism and
liberal democracy were the eventual destination for all the people of
the world. More than a decade later, the 2003 war in Iraq* saw a
United States government fail to plant democratic roots in unfertile
foreign soil. And yet another decade on from that, bloody conflict is
still a grim reality for many people.
The true test of The End of History, however, is whether the
economic prosperity seen in non-democratic states such as China is
sustainable. If China does not become more liberal, the central premise
of the book will become even less justifiable, though not necessarily to
a fatal degree.
It is possible that Fukuyama’s prediction will only come true over a
much longer period of time and that the world will indeed end up
locked forever in post-history. The problem with extending the time
frame is that it massively dilutes the central argument, since no one can
predict what the world will look like hundreds of years from now.
The End of History is a philosophical text at heart. Specifically it is a
complicated blend of the ideas of Plato* and Hegel.* From Plato,
Fukuyama took the concept of thymos,* the desire to be recognized as
equal to others. From Hegel, he borrowed the idea that history is
divided into periods, and eventually reaches an endpoint. By fusing the
two, Fukuyama argued that as liberal democracy satisfies thymos,
history as an evolutionary process of improvement will grind to a halt.
This complexity makes the work strong enough to be applied to
events other than the annus mirabilis (“year of wonders”) of 1989,
when, contrary to the expectations of almost all students of the Soviet
regime, change came to Eastern Europe by peaceful means. Just as

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

Fukuyama revived and extended the ideas of Plato and Hegel, it is

possible that other scholars will use his arguments in a new context.To
Fukuyama, “liberal democracy is one of the by-products of this
modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration
only in the course of historical time.”1 This “wait and see” policy is one
that affords a degree of longevity to the central text, but it is
nevertheless not infinite.
There is no denying that the changing geopolitical* reality of the
world has been a blow to Fukuyama and his supporters. More recently,
Fukuyama has argued that the end of history is not about a “universal
hunger for liberty in all people,” but rather “the desire to live in a
modern society, with its technology, high standards of living, health
care, and access to the wider world.”2
Here he is essentially repeating the complaints made by Soviet
citizens before the end of the Cold War.* The demands he alludes to
seem to chime with people’s clamors during the Arab Spring*—the
wave of pro-democracy protests between 2010 and 2012.
It is safe to assume that Fukuyama knows that his seminal text now
seems less relevant, hence the softening in his approach. The end of
history is still on the horizon, but he seems to acknowledge that
getting there will be a much more complex process than he first
thought.

NOTES
1 Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the
Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 54.
2 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 54.

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 GLOSSARY

0003 Fukuyama BOOK.indb 69 09/06/2017 14:53

 GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Arab Spring: the name given to the series of protests and wars that
began across the Arab world towards the end of 2010.

Aristocracy: a system of government in which power is held by the

nobility and continued through hereditary succession. Fukuyama
argued that aristocratic rule was one of the forms of government that
had been consigned to history.

Authoritarianism: a society that is best understood as involving

submission to authority and the exercise of authority by a government.

Berlin Wall: a wall that separated communist East and capitalist West
Berlin, built in 1961 and effectively taken down in 1989.

Capitalism: an economic system that emphasizes the private

ownership of goods.

Chinese Communist Party: the founding and ruling party of the

People’s Republic of China. It has often criticized Western ideas
regarding capitalism and liberal democracy.

Classical realism: a theory of international relations that emphasizes

the self-interest of states.Although Fukuyama probably would not
identify himself as a realist, many of the foreign policy decisions made
by the George W. Bush administration followed this pattern.

Cold War: defined as a military “tension” between the United States

and the Soviet Union; there are no exact dates, but the generally
accepted view is that it lasted from around 1945 to around 1991.

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 Glossary of Terms

Communism: a political ideology that relies on state ownership of

the means of production, the collectivization of labor, and the
abolition of social class. It was the ideology of the Soviet Union
(1917–89), and stood in contrast to free market capitalism during the
Cold War.

Cyclical history: in this world-view, events repeat themselves, history

has no endpoint and thus there can be no last man.

Democratic peace theory: a theory that believes liberal

democracies, for reasons of shared values and interdependence, do not
wage war on one another.

Détente: an attempt to relax tensions between the two superpowers

of the United States and the Soviet Union, which lasted from 1971
until around 1980, when Ronald Reagan* took office as US
president.

Development continuum gap: the North/South divide,

sometimes referred to as the Brandt line.This is not a strictly
geographic line;Australia and New Zealand are, for example, both
considered to be global North states, despite being in the southern
hemisphere. Essentially, the line splits the world into wealthy and poor
nations. Since the poor nations came late to industrialization and
nationalism, so too will they come late to post-history.

“The End of History?”: an article that Fukuyama wrote for the

journal The National Interest in 1989, which can be viewed as a
blueprint for the later book.

Eschatology: the study of the end of things, including death,

judgment, heaven and hell.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

Fascism: a right-wing system of government that came to

prominence in the twentieth century. It is characterized by
authoritarianism (usually dictator-led) and intolerance of difference.
Fukuyama argued that fascism was one of the forms of government
that had been consigned to history.

Feudalism: the political and economic system of Europe between

approximately the ninth and fifteenth centuries, in which people
worked and fought for nobles in exchange for protection and the
use of land.

Free market economy: an economy that allows the distribution of

goods to follow the laws of supply and demand, without interference
from government. Under this system the means of production are in
private hands.

Geopolitics: government policy based on how political relations

between states are influenced by the geographical features of the
countries, such as size, location, natural resources, or borders.

Globalization: the process whereby the world becomes more

interconnected. Such interconnectedness takes many forms, including
economic, political and cultural.

The Gulf War (1990–1991): a military operation against Iraq that

was carried out by the United States, with the help of allies. Given that
it was a reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, it is also known as the
Iraq–Kuwait War. It was sanctioned by the UN.

Ideological contamination: this occurs when ideas from one

culture gain traction in another.Technology remains the most efficient
way of achieving this, and consequently, such ideological
contamination is accelerated by the use of new media technology.

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 Glossary of Terms

Imperialism: the subverting of another country’s sovereignty

through military power.

International Monetary Fund (IMF): the IMF was set up in 1944

and currently contains 188 nation members, all of which contribute
to, and can borrow from, a collective pool.

International relations: the study of the relationships between states,

including the study of supranational organizations such as the World
Bank and other non-government organizations (NGOs).

Iraq War: a conflict that began in 2003 when a coalition led by the
United States and Britain invaded Iraq.The aim was to overthrow the
existing regime led by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist party, which was
achieved that same year.

Islam: a religion that bases itself on the word of the Qur’an and the
teachings of the prophet Mohammed.

Liberal democracy: a political system that emphasizes human and

civil rights, regular and free elections between competing political
parties, and adherence to the rule of law.

Liberalism: a political philosophy that emphasizes freedom, equality

and regularly contested elections.

Marxism: the name ascribed to the political system advocated by Karl

Marx.* It emphasized an end to capitalism by taking control of the
means of production out of the hands of individuals and placing it
firmly into those of central government. Marxism falls into two main
camps, structural and humanistic Marxism.Although both follow the
teachings of Karl Marx, the former emphasizes that Marxism is a

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

scientific study of objective structures. Humanistic Marxism, as the

name suggests, focuses on the human aspects of his theories, which
were laid out in his earlier writings.

Nation,The: a weekly American magazine with leftish leanings.

Neoconservatism: a branch of American conservatism that

emphasizes the importance of free-market economics and the
aggressive promotion of democracy via military force.
Neoconservatives are also, generally speaking, neoliberals.Their views
can be seen as an offshoot of American conservatism; in relation to
The End of History, their principal characteristic is that they advocate
the imposition of democracy on other states.

Neoliberalism: seen as a generally right-wing stance that was used in

relation to politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan,
it emphasizes free trade, privatization, deregulation and other moves
towards economic liberalization.

Neorealism: while realism sees all states as responsible for their own
actions, and interested in their own survival, neorealism stresses that
structural constraints limit their actions and motivations.

9/11: terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC by militant

Islamist group Al Qaeda, which killed around 3,000 people.The
prevalence of terrorism in the world today undermines Fukuyama’s
thesis. He argued that all nations would become liberal democracies
and that universal peace would replace human conflict.

Periodization: an attempt to create a coherent, inclusive account of

history using definable periods of time. For both Marx* and Hegel,*
this process was finite and had an ultimate endpoint.Although it

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 Glossary of Terms

remains mostly uncontroversial (everyone is used to thinking of

history in terms of periods), thinkers such as Hegel and Marx took the
idea and used it to predict the future. Marx predicted that the last
period would be communism, while Fukuyama claimed it would be
liberal democracy.

Planned economy: under this system, a government agency

manages economic production and distribution.This existed in the
Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991.The Soviet Union’s transition
from communism and central planning towards capitalism and liberal
democracy was the guiding force behind Fukuyama’s end-of-history
thesis.

Post-humanism: a belief that technology has the capacity to alter the

nature of humanity permanently. It is important to understand that
although traces of post-humanism can be found in The End of History,
Fukuyama himself is opposed to it, seeing it as a threat to liberal
democracy.

Postmodernism: begins with an assumption that the values, norms

and economic conditions to which people are subjected determine
each other, rather than having intrinsic properties that can be
understood in isolation. It tends to criticize traditional hierarchies of
knowledge, meaning, authority, and interpretation.

RAND Corporation: A powerful think tank in the United States

that provides research and analysis to the US military. Fukuyama was
an analyst at RAND prior to becoming an academic.

Realism: a school of international relations theory that assumes: (1)

states represent the highest form of global responsibility (as opposed to
any other organizational body), and all states are responsible for

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

themselves; (2) states all share the goal of survival; (3) states provide for
their own security.

Realpolitik: the practical,“doable” aspect of politics that exists outside

of desirable or popular movements. For example, although a national
poll might indicate that the majority of people want substantial cuts in
income tax, Realpolitik would prevent this happening if, according to
government advisers, it would lead to economic ruin.

Religious wars: the religious wars in Europe took place between the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Several wars were fought during
this period, and by the time they had ended secular political
institutions were firmly in control.

Socialism: a political and economic theory that advocates a system of

social organization in which the means of production and distribution
are collectively owned.

Soviet Union: A federal republic officially known as the Union of

Soviet Socialist Republics that existed between 1917 and 1991.
Fukuyama published The End of History in response to its
disintegration in 1991, which ended the Cold War.

Soviet bloc: This term refers to the communist states of Eastern

Europe, including the Balkans, which shared a common ideology
during the Cold War. Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis was based
around the transition made by these countries from communism to
liberal democracy following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Thymos: for Plato, thymos was the aspect of humanity that separates us
from all other animals. It can best be understood as the part of the
psyche that desires recognition as a human being. Fukuyama argues

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 Glossary of Terms

that human beings require recognition and that liberal democracy

alone satisfies that desire.

Tiananmen Square: student protests in China’s Tiananmen Square

were put down by military force in 1989.

Totalitarianism: a political system in which the state exercises

absolute or near-absolute control over society.

2008 global financial crisis: The financial crisis of 2007–8 is

considered by many to have been the worst economic downturn since
the Great Depression of the 1930s.This instability of the capitalist
system and the criticisms the crisis provoked further highlighted the
limits of Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis.

Unipolar world: a world in which one power dominates all others.

Wall Street Journal: an American daily newspaper with an emphasis on

economic issues.

War on Terror: declared by George W. Bush as a response to the 9/11

terrorist attack in 2001.What began as an attack on Afghanistan was
extended to an attack on Iraq in 2003.

World War II (1939–45): a global war between the vast majority of

states, including all great powers of the time.

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 PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THE TEXT

Louis Althusser (1918–90) was a French Marxist and professor of

philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Talal Asad (b. 1932) is distinguished professor of anthropology at

City University of New York. His research interests are religion and
secularism, Islamic tradition, political theories, and the Middle East.

Dean Voris Babst (1921–2006) was an influential American

sociologist.

Benjamin R. Barber (b. 1939) is an American political theorist and

author, who wrote the highly successful Jihad vs. McWorld in 1996.

Daniel Bell (1919–2011) was an American sociologist and emeritus

professor at Harvard University, who made important contributions to
the field of post-industrialism.

Tony Blair (b. 1953) was the prime minister of the United Kingdom
1997–2007.

Allan Bloom (1930–92) was an American philosopher. He taught at

Cornell University,Yale University and the University of Chicago. He
studied under Alexandre Kojève.

William Buckley (1925–2008) was an American conservative and

founder of the influential magazine The National Review.

George W. Bush (b. 1946) was the president of the United States
2001–9.

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 People Mentioned in the Text

Bill Clinton (b. 1946) was president of the United States 1993–2001.

Wayne Cristaudo (b. 1954) is a professor of political science at

Charles Darwin University.

Jacques Derrida (1930–2005) was a French philosopher associated

with the school of thought known as poststructuralism, which
emphasizes the inherent complexity of human beings and thus the
instability of social sciences.

Marion Dönhoff (1909–2002) was part of the German wartime

resistance to Hitler and later became a journalist.

Michael W. Doyle (b. 1948) is an international relations scholar best

known for his work on liberal, democratic peace.

John Dunn (b. 1940) is emeritus professor of political theory at

King’s College, Cambridge.

André Fontaine (1921–2013) was a French historian and journalist.

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was an American economist and

Nobel Prize winner who taught at the University of Chicago.

John Lewis Gaddis (b. 1941) is professor of military and naval

history at Yale University. He is a well-known expert on the Cold War,
and suggested that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new
framework was needed to understand international relations.

Raymond L. “Ray” Garthoff is a senior fellow at the Brookings

Institution, an American think tank based in Washington, DC.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

John Gray (b. 1948) is an English philosopher who was formerly

professor of European thought at the London School of Economics
and Political Science. He remains one of Fukuyama’s fiercest critics, and
tends to think that Fukuyama was wrong in every conceivable way.

Martin Griffiths is Dean of the School of International Studies at

Flinders University,Australia.

Pierre Hassner (b. 1933) is research director at the Fondation

Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris. His theoretical work centers
on war and totalitarianism.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a German

philosopher whose theories heavily influenced Karl Marx. His school
of thought, known as German idealism, was in part a reaction to
Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason. Hegel’s ideas on history were
set out in the 1807 book The Phenomenology of the Spirit and later
expanded in a series of lectures given in Berlin in 1821, 1824, 1827,
and 1831.

Stanley Hoffmann (b. 1928) is an American scholar whose 2002

book World Disorders:A Troubled Peace in the Post-Cold War Era charted
the redefinition of the role of military intervention in the twenty-first
century.

Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) was an American political

philosopher who is best remembered for his vision of a post-Cold War
world. Many of his ideas are in direct opposition to Fukuyama’s.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a Prussian philosopher. His 1795

essay “Perpetual Peace” can be seen as a starting point for
contemporary liberal thought.

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 People Mentioned in the Text

Robert O. Keohane (b. 1941) is an American scholar who in his

2002 book Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World drew on
ideas surrounding Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which were similar to
Fukuyama’s.

Alexandre Kojève (1902–68), though Russian-born, is best

remembered as a French politician and philosopher whose
interpretation of Hegel has been extremely influential in the field of
continental philosophy. It is from Kojève that Fukuyama took the
phrase “end of history.”

Karl Marx (1818–83) was one of the most influential philosophers of

all time and gives his name to the political philosophy Marxism. Marx
rejected notions of liberal freedoms, insisting that the only true
freedom was equality.With this in mind, an important stage of Marxist
history involved a dictatorship wherein the workers would be forcibly
reorganized into a system that would ultimately lead to a classless,
stateless society.

John Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is professor of political science at the

University of Chicago. He argued, in contrast to Fukuyama, that
geopolitics among great powers would continue to play an important
role following the Cold War.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher

whose seminal works included Beyond Good and Evil and Human,All
Too Human. His ideas have a unique place in Fukuyama’s work, since
he alone saw the suppression of thymos as undesirable.

Barack Obama (b. 1961) is the 44th president of the United States.
He assumed office in 2009. His foreign policy has championed the
spread of liberal democracy.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) influenced the American War of

Independence. Like Kant, he claimed that republics are peaceful, and
do not “go to war out of pride.”

Plato (fourth century b.c.e.) was an ancient Greek philosopher.

Founder of the Academy in Athens, the first university in the Western
world, Plato, along with his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle,
laid the foundations of philosophy and science.

Marc F. Plattner is the vice-president for research and studies at the

National Endowment for Democracy, co-director of the International
Forum for Democratic Studies, and co-editor of the Journal of
Democracy.

Clyde Prestowitz (b. 1941) is the founder and president of the

Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington-based think tank and
lobbying group.

Jacques Rancière (b. 1940) is professor of philosophy at the

European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and emeritus
professor of philosophy at the University of Paris.

John Rawls (1921–2002) was an American philosopher whose most

famous text, A Theory of Justice, was published in 1971 to critical
acclaim.

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) was president of the United States

1981–9. He is widely credited in the United States for bringing an end
to the Cold War. He was a proponent of spreading capitalism and
liberal democracy around the globe.

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 People Mentioned in the Text

Richard N. Rosecrance (b. 1930) is an American economist who,

in The New Great Power Coalition (2001), argued that the United States
must use incentives to bring rising nations such as China and Russia
into a coalition or risk them adopting “recalcitrant and antagonistic
attitudes toward world affairs.”

Olivier Roy (b. 1949) is a professor at the European University

Institute in Florence, best known for his book The Failure of Political
Islam.

Dankwart Alexander Rustow (1924–96) is best known for his

work in democratization studies.

Peter Singer (b. 1946) is a moral philosopher and professor of

bioethics at Princeton University. Singer’s work on Hegel helps
explain how Hegel envisioned the end of history as a process of
continual refinement.

Gáspár Miklós Tamás (b. 1948) is a Hungarian philosopher and

one-time member of the Hungarian parliament.

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) was prime minister of the United

Kingdom 1979–90. She was a proponent of spreading capitalism and
liberal democracy around the globe.

Ludwig von Mises (1883–1973) was an influential Austrian

economist and founder of what is known as the Austrian school of
economics, which tends to focus on the actions of individuals within
the wider economic system, regardless of what form that system takes.

Kenneth Waltz (1924–2013) was an American scholar and one of

the most influential thinkers in the field of international relations.

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 Macat Analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man

George Will (b. 1941) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American

journalist known for his conservative comments on politics.

Paul Wolfowitz (b. 1943) is a neoconservative politician and

academic. Formerly Dean of the School of International Relations at
John Hopkins University, he has also acted as president of the World
Bank and US deputy secretary of defense.

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 WORKS CITED

0003 Fukuyama BOOK.indb 85 09/06/2017 14:53

 WORKS CITED

Acemoğlu, Daron, and James Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power,
Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown, 2012.
Asad, Talal. “A Single History?” Open Democracy, May 4, 2006. Accessed
March 19, 2015. https://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-fukuyama/single_
history_3507.jsp.
Babst, Dean. “Elective Governments – A Force for Peace.” Industrial Research
(April 1972): 55–58.
Barber, Benjamin. Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy. New York: W.
W. Norton, 2003.
Congressional Budget Office. “Iraq and Afghanistan.” Accessed March 18,
2013. http://www.cbo.gov/topics/national-security/iraq-and-afghanistan/cost-
estimates.
Curtis, Jenefer. Review of After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics,
edited by Timothy Burns. Canadian Journal of Political Science 28, no. 3 (1995):
591–92.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Doyle, Michael W. “Michael W. Doyle on Markets and Institutions.” Theory
Talks, April 15, 2008. Accessed March 19, 2015. http://www.theory-talks.
org/2008/04/theory-talk-1.html.
“Reflections on the Liberal Peace and Its Critics.” Debating the Democratic
Peace, edited by Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller,
358–63. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Drury, Shadia B. Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics. New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1994.
“Which Fukuyama?” Open Democracy, June 7, 2006. Accessed March 19,
2015. https://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-fukuyama/which_3623.jsp.
Elliott, Abrams. “Letter to President Clinton.” Project for the New American
Century, January 26, 1998. Accessed February 19, 2013. http://www.
newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm.
Fukuyama, Francis. America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the
Neoconservative Legacy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
“The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18.

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The End of History and the Last Man. Twentieth anniversary edition. London:
Penguin, 2012.
“The History at the End of History.” Guardian, April 3, 2007. Accessed
March 19, 2015. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/03/
thehistoryattheendofhist. 
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011.
“A Reply to My Critics.” The National Interest 18 (Winter 1989/90): 21–28.
“Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle.” The National Interest (Summer
1999): 16–33.
Gardels, Nathan. “Naomi Klein, Read Milton Friedman’s Last Interview.”
Huffington Post, May 15, 2011. Accessed March 19, 2015. http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/naomi-klein-read-milton-f_b_66591.html?
Garthoff, Raymond. Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from
Nixon to Reagan. Revised edition. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution,
1994.
Gray, John. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. New York:
Penguin, 2007.
Griffiths, Martin, Steven C Roach, and M Scott Solomon. Fifty Key Thinkers in
International Relations. Second edition. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.
Hassner, Pierre. “Responses to Fukuyama.” Accessed March 19, 2015. http://
www.wesjones.com/eoh_response.htm.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “Responses to Fukuyama.” Accessed March 19, 2015.
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh_response.htm.
Holmes, Stephen. “The Logic of a Blocked History.” Open Democracy, May 22,
2006. Accessed March 19, 2015. https://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-
fukuyama/history_blocked_3573.jsp.
Houwelingen, Pepijn van. “(Classical) Realism in the 21st Century.” Paper
presented at Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Edinburgh, March
29, 2010.
Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3
(1993): 22–49.
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London: Simon and
Schuster, 2002.
The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

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Maier, Charles S. “The Intoxications of History.” Open Democracy, May 17,

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fukuyama/intoxication_3560.jsp.
Mises, Ludwig von, and F. A. Hayek, eds. Collectivist Economic Planning.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935; reprint, Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M.
Kelley, 1975.
Plattner, Marc. “Exploring the End of History.” Journal of Democracy 3, no. 2
(1992): 118–21.
PwC. “World in 2050: The BRICs and Beyond: Prospects, Challenges and
Opportunities.” Accessed March 19, 2015. http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/
world-2050/assets/pwc-world-in-2050-report-january-2013.pdf.
Roy, Olivier. “The End of History and the Long March of Secularisation.”
Open Democracy, May 15, 2006. Accessed March 19, 2015. http://www.
opendemocracy.net/node/3546.
Rustow, Dankwart. “Transition to Democracy: Towards a Dynamic Model.”
Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (1970): 337–63.
Sestanovich, Stephen. “Responses to Fukuyama.” Accessed March 19, 2015.
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh_response.htm.
Shi, Winston. “Francis Fukuyama: End of History Still in Sight Despite China’s
Rise.” Huffington Post July 9, 2014. Accessed March 19, 2015. http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/winston-shi/francis-fukuyama-end-of-history-_b_5569581.
html.
Sim, Stuart. Derrida and the End of History. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999.
Tamás, G. M. “Socialism, Capitalism, and Modernity.” Journal of Democracy 3,
no. 3 (1992): 60–74.
Tziarras, Zenonas. “The Sociology of the Arab Spring: A Revolt or a Revolution.”
The Globalized World Post, August 13, 2011.
Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2005.
Waltz, Kenneth. “Globalization and American Power.” The National Interest 59
(Spring 2000): 46–56.
Wroe, Nicholas. “History’s Pallbearer.” Guardian, May 11, 2002. Accessed
March 19, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/11/
academicexperts.artsandhumanities.

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 THE MACAT LIBRARY
BY DISCIPLINE

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

AFRICANA STUDIES
Chinua Achebe’s An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
Zora Neale Huston’s Characteristics of Negro Expression
Martin Luther King Jr’s Why We Can’t Wait
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination

ANTHROPOLOGY
Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation
Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood
Franz Boas’s Race, Language and Culture
Kim Chan & Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel: the Fate of Human Societies
Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine
Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures
David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years
Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
Geert Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutes and
Organizations across Nations
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology
Jay Macleod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Marcel Mauss’s The Gift

BUSINESS
Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger’s Situated Learning
Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia
Burton G. Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise
Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
John Kotter’s Leading Change
C. K. Prahalad & Gary Hamel’s The Core Competence of the Corporation

CRIMINOLOGY
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michael R. Gottfredson & Travis Hirschi’s A General Theory of Crime
Richard Herrnstein & Charles A. Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life
Elizabeth Loftus’s Eyewitness Testimony
Jay Macleod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect

ECONOMICS
Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony
Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder
David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
Milton Friedman’s The Role of Monetary Policy
Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom
David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Charles P. Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes
Robert Lucas’s Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?
Burton G. Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population
Karl Marx’s Capital
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Amos Tversky’s & Daniel Kahneman’s Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Mahbub Ul Haq’s Reflections on Human Development
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

FEMINISM AND GENDER STUDIES

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

GEOGRAPHY
The Brundtland Report’s Our Common Future
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine
Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities
James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom
Mathis Wackernagel & William Rees’s Our Ecological Footprint

HISTORY
Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Classes And The Revolutionary Movements Of Iraq
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago And The Great West
Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange
Hamid Dabashi’s Iran: A People Interrupted
David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
Nathalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel: the Fate of Human Societies
Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine
John W Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race And Power In The Pacific War
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
Richard J. Evans’s In Defence of History
Lucien Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism
Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
Carlo Ginzburg’s The Night Battles
Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners
Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
Antonio Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay & James Madison’s The Federalist Papers
Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down
Carole Hillenbrand’s The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age Of Revolution
John A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study
Albert Hourani’s History of the Arab Peoples
Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins
Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
Ian Kershaw’s The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich
John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Charles P. Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes
Martin Luther King Jr’s Why We Can’t Wait
Henry Kissinger’s World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution
John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population
Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa And The Legacy Of Late
Colonialism
Karl Marx’s Capital
Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man
Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth
Century
Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract
Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History
Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic
Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War
Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions And The Making Of Our Times

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

LITERATURE
Chinua Achebe’s An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Roland Barthes’s Mythologies
Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
Ferdinand De Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics
T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
Zora Neale Huston’s Characteristics of Negro Expression
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
Edward Said’s Orientalism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

PHILOSOPHY
Elizabeth Anscombe’s Modern Moral Philosophy
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Edmund Gettier’s Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
David Hume’s The Enquiry for Human Understanding
Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death
Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
Plato’s Republic
Plato’s Symposium
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract
Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind
Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

POLITICS
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
Aristotle’s Politics
Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
John C. Calhoun’s A Disquisition on Government
Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder
Hamid Dabashi’s Iran: A People Interrupted
Hamid Dabashi’s Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution
in Iran
Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics
Robert Dahl’s Who Governs?
David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine
Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism
Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism
David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years
Antonio Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay & James Madison’s The Federalist Papers
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
John A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study
Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
David C. Kang’s China Rising: Peace, Power and Order in East Asia
Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Why We Can’t Wait
Henry Kissinger’s World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History
John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population
Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa And The Legacy Of
Late Colonialism
Karl Marx’s Capital
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism
Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Robert D. Putman’s Bowling Alone
John Rawls’s Theory of Justice
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract
Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience
Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War
Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics
Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation
Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions And The Making Of Our Times

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
Roland Barthes’s Mythologies
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation
Edward Said’s Orientalism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

PSYCHOLOGY
Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice
Alan Baddeley & Graham Hitch’s Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis
Albert Bandura’s Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis
Leon Festinger’s A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
Michael R. Gottfredson & Travis Hirschi’s A General Theory of Crime
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
William James’s Principles of Psychology
Elizabeth Loftus’s Eyewitness Testimony
A. H. Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation
Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority
Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature
Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and
Happiness
Amos Tversky’s Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect

SCIENCE
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago And The Great West
Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth
Century
Mathis Wackernagel & William Rees’s Our Ecological Footprint

SOCIOLOGY
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice
Albert Bandura’s Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis
Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Classes And The Revolutionary Movements Of Iraq
Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
Émile Durkheim’s On Suicide
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
Antonio Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks
Richard Herrnstein & Charles A Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Robert Lucas’s Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?
Jay Macleod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low Income Neighborhood
Elaine May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise
C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Robert D. Putman’s Bowling Alone
David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
Edward Said’s Orientalism
Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History
Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

THEOLOGY
Augustine’s Confessions
Benedict’s Rule of St Benedict
Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation
Carole Hillenbrand’s The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death
C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics
Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic

COMING SOON
Chris Argyris’s The Individual and the Organisation
Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others
Walter Benjamin’s The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice
Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger
Roland Dworkin’s Taking Rights Seriously
James G. March’s Exploration and Exploitation in Organisational Learning
Ikujiro Nonaka’s A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation
Griselda Pollock’s Vision and Difference
Amartya Sen’s Inequality Re-Examined
Susan Sontag’s On Photography
Yasser Tabbaa’s The Transformation of Islamic Art
Ludwig von Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit

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