Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ Was Misunderstood by Critics

‘What we may be witnessing,” wrote Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest 30 years ago this summer, “is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

This sentence made Fukuyama famous. It also made him famously misunderstood. He qualified his thesis immediately: “This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.”