The End of History—or of Liberalism?

It IS a truism that socialism is dead, and an irony that it survives most robustly as a doctrine not in Paris, where it has suffered a fate worse than falsification by becoming thoroughly unfashionable; nor in London, where the political hegemony and economic success of Thatcherite free-market conservatism have made it redundant, but in the universities of capitalist America, as the ideology of the Western academic nomenklatura. But socialism is most obviously, and most irreversibly, defunct as an ideology in the Communist bloc. There glasnost has surpassed the wildest hopes of Western anti-Communists in discrediting the institutions of central planning and brilliantly illuminating the intractable problems of the Soviet system.

But what does the collapse of socialism as a political faith portend for the future of political life and thought? In a provocative and well-received article, “The End of History” (National Interest, Summer 1989), Francis Fukuyama announces in a quietly apocalyptic voice that the failure of socialism means “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” and promises “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

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John Gray

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It IS a truism that socialism is dead, and an irony that it survives most robustly as a doctrine not in Paris, where it has suffered a fate worse than falsification by becoming thoroughly unfashionable; nor in London, where the political hegemony and economic success of Thatcherite free-market conservatism have made it redundant, but in the universities of capitalist America, as the ideology of the Western academic nomenklatura. But socialism is most obviously, and most irreversibly, defunct as an ideology in the Communist bloc. There glasnost has surpassed the wildest hopes of Western anti-Communists in discrediting the institutions of central planning and brilliantly illuminating the intractable problems of the Soviet system.

But what does the collapse of socialism as a political faith portend for the future of political life and thought? In a provocative and well-received article, “The End of History” (National Interest, Summer 1989), Francis Fukuyama announces in a quietly apocalyptic voice that the failure of socialism means “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” and promises “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”