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The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama (Free Press, 418 pp., $24.95)

IN HIS brilliant, ingenious, but nevertheless deeply unhistorical and ultimately absurd book, Francis Fukuyama argues that History— understood, in Hegelian-Marxist terms, to mean ideology—is over. With the collapse of Communism, there remains no legitimate alternative to liberal democracy, which is therefore the final form of human government. Wars and revolutions, tyrannies and dictatorships, may yet come and go, so that history understood as the events historians study will doubtless drag on; but History as the contestation over economic and political systems has come to an end. Only liberal democracy can satisfy the universal human need for self-recognition, or thymos—the Platonic virtue of spiritedness. Fukuyama acknowledges fundamentalism and nationalism to be powerful forces currently at large in the world; but he interprets them as reactive phenomena, responses to oppression or to over-rapid modernization, with little power of their own. We need not fear another century of global wars, as we creep nervously into the new millennium. We have more to fear, according to Fukuyama—following Nietzsche and perhaps Weber—from the boredom that flows from the rationalization of the world. It is Nietzsche’s Last Men, not his blond beasts, that herald the mild and gentle Apocalypse to come.

JG

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John Gray

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The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama (Free Press, 418 pp., $24.95)

IN HIS brilliant, ingenious, but nevertheless deeply unhistorical and ultimately absurd book, Francis Fukuyama argues that History— understood, in Hegelian-Marxist terms, to mean ideology—is over. With the collapse of Communism, there remains no legitimate alternative to liberal democracy, which is therefore the final form of human government. Wars and revolutions, tyrannies and dictatorships, may yet come and go, so that history understood as the events historians study will doubtless drag on; but History as the contestation over economic and political systems has come to an end. Only liberal democracy can satisfy the universal human need for self-recognition, or thymos—the Platonic virtue of spiritedness. Fukuyama acknowledges fundamentalism and nationalism to be powerful forces currently at large in the world; but he interprets them as reactive phenomena, responses to oppression or to over-rapid modernization, with little power of their own. We need not fear another century of global wars, as we creep nervously into the new millennium. We have more to fear, according to Fukuyama—following Nietzsche and perhaps Weber—from the boredom that flows from the rationalization of the world. It is Nietzsche’s Last Men, not his blond beasts, that herald the mild and gentle Apocalypse to come.