POLS 446A

Francis Fukuyama (1992)

The End of History and the Last Man

By Way of an Introduction

The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled

“The End of History”“ which I wrote for the journal /The National

Interest/ in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable

consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of

government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as

it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and

most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal

democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind”s ideological

evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such

constituted the “end of history.” That is, while earlier forms of

government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that

led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from

such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that

today”s stable democracies, like the United States, France, or

Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But

these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin

principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded,

rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. While some

present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy,

and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule

like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy

could not be improved on.

The original article excited an extraordinary amount of commentary and

controversy, first in the United States, and then in a series of

countries as different as England, France, Italy, the Soviet Union,

Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and South Korea. Criticism took every

conceivable form, some of it based on simple misunderstanding of my

original intent, and others penetrating more perceptively to the core of

my argument. Many people were confused in the first instance by my use

of the word “history.” Understanding history in a conventional sense as

the occurrence of events, people pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall,

the Chinese communist crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Iraqi

invasion of Kuwait as evidence that “history was continuing,” and that I

was //ipso facto// proven wrong.

And yet what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of

events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history

understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into

account the experience of all peoples in all times. This understanding

of History was most closely associated with the great German philosopher

G. W. F. Hegel. It was made part of our daily intellectual atmosphere by

Karl Marx, who borrowed this concept of History from Hegel, and is

implicit in our use of words like “primitive” or “advanced,”

“traditional” or “modern,” when referring to different types of human

societies. For both of these thinkers, there was a coherent development

of human societies from simple tribal ones based on slavery and

subsistence agriculture, through various theocracies, monarchies, and

feudal aristocracies, up through modern liberal democracy and

technologically driven capitalism. This evolutionary process was neither

random nor unintelligible, even if it did not proceed in a straight

line, and even if it was possible to question whether man was happier or

better off as a result of historical “progress.”

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human 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.

The present book is not a restatement of my original article, nor is it

an effort to continue the discussion with that article”s many critics

and commentators. Least of all is it an account of the end of the Cold

War, or any other pressing topic in contemporary politics. While this

book is informed by recent world events, its subject returns to a very

old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes

sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History

of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to

liberal democracy” The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate

reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other has to do with what

is termed the “struggle for recognition.”

It is of course not sufficient to appeal to the authority of Hegel,

Marx, or any of their contemporary followers to establish the validity

of a directional History. In the century and a half since they wrote,

their intellectual legacy has been relentlessly assaulted from all

directions. The most profound thinkers of the twentieth century have

directly attacked the idea that history is a coherent or intelligible

process; indeed, they have denied the possibility that any aspect of

human life is philosophically intelligible. We in the West have become

thoroughly pessimistic with regard to the possibility of overall

progress in democratic institutions. This profound pessimism is not

accidental, but born of the truly terrible political events of the first

half of the twentieth century “ two destructive world wars, the rise of

totalitarian ideologies, and the turning of science against man in the

form of nuclear weapons and environmental damage. The life experiences

of the victims of this past century”s political violence “ from the

survivors of Hitlerism and Stalinism to the victims of Pol Pot “ would

deny that there has been such a thing as historical progress. Indeed, we

have become so accustomed by now to expect that the future will contain

bad news with respect to the health and security of decent, liberal,

democratic political practices that we have problems recognising good

news when it comes.

And yet, good news has come. The most remarkable development of the last

quarter of the twentieth century has been the revelation of enormous

weaknesses at the core of the world”s seemingly strong dictatorships,

whether they be of the military-authoritarian Right, or the

communist-totalitarian Left. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, from

the Soviet Union to the Middle East and Asia, strong governments have

been failing over the last two decades. And while they have not given

way in all cases to stable liberal democracies, liberal democracy

remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different

regions and cultures around the globe. In addition, liberal principles

in economics “ the “free market” “ have spread, and have succeeded in

producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in

industrially developed countries and in countries that had been, at the

close of World War II, part of the impoverished Third World. A liberal

revolution in economic thinking has sometimes preceded, sometimes

followed, the move toward political freedom around the globe.

All of these developments, so much at odds with the terrible history of

the first half of the century when totalitarian governments of the Right

and Left were on the march, suggest the need to look again at the

question of whether there is some deeper connecting thread underlying

them, or whether they are merely accidental instances of good luck. By

raising once again the question of whether there is such a thing as a

Universal History of mankind, I am resuming a discussion that was begun

in the early nineteenth century, but more or less abandoned in our time

because of the enormity of events that mankind has experienced since

then. While drawing on the ideas of philosophers like Kant and Hegel who

have addressed this question before, I hope that the arguments presented

here will stand on their own.

This volume immodestly presents not one but two separate efforts to

outline such a Universal History. After establishing in Part I why we

need to raise once again the possibility of Universal History, I propose

an initial answer in Part II by attempting to use modern natural science

as a regulator or mechanism to explain the directionality and coherence

of History. Modern natural science is a useful starting point because it

is the only important social activity that by common consensus is both

cumulative and directional, even if its ultimate impact on human

happiness is ambiguous. The progressive conquest of nature made possible

with the development of the scientific method in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries has proceeded according to certain definite rules

laid down not by man, but by nature and nature”s laws.

The unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all

societies that have experienced it, for two reasons. In the first place,

technology confers decisive military advantages on those countries that

possess it, and given the continuing possibility of war in the

international system of states, no state that values its independence

can ignore the need for defensive modernisation. Second, modern natural

science establishes a uniform horizon of economic production

possibilities. Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of

wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human

desires. This process guarantees an increasing homogenisation of all

human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural

inheritances. All countries undergoing economic modernisation must

increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the

basis of a centralised state, urbanise, replace traditional forms of

social organisation like tribe, sect, and family with economically

rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the

universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become

increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the

spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern

natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the

direction of capitalism. The experiences of the Soviet Union, China, and

other socialist countries indicate that while highly centralised

economies are sufficient to reach the level of industrialisation

represented by Europe in the 1950s, they are woefully inadequate in

creating what have been termed complex “post-industrial” economies in

which information and technological innovation play a much larger role.

But while the historical mechanism represented by modern natural science

is sufficient to explain a great deal about the character of historical

change and the growing uniformity of modern societies, it is not

sufficient to account for the phenomenon of democracy. There is no

question but that the world”s most developed countries are also its most

successful democracies. But while modern natural science guides us to

the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy, it does not deliver

us to the Promised Land itself, for there is no economically necessary

reason why advanced industrialisation should produce political liberty.

Stable democracy has at times emerged in pre-industrial societies, as it

did in the United States in 1776. On the other hand, there are many

historical and contemporary examples of technologically advanced

capitalism coexisting with political authoritarianism from Meiji Japan

and Bismarckian Germany to present-day Singapore and Thailand. In many

cases, authoritarian states are capable of producing rates of economic

growth unachievable in democratic societies.

Our first effort to establish the basis for a directional history is

thus only partly successful. What we have called the “logic of modern

natural science” is in effect an economic interpretation of historical

change, but one which (unlike its Marxist variant) leads to capitalism

rather than socialism as its final result. The logic of modern science

can explain a great deal about our world: why we residents of developed

democracies are office workers rather than peasants eking out a living

on the land, why we are members of labor unions or professional

organisations rather than tribes or clans, why we obey the authority of

a bureaucratic superior rather than a priest, why we are literate and

speak a common national language.

But economic interpretations of history are incomplete and unsatisfying,

because man is not simply an economic animal. In particular, such

interpretations cannot really explain why we are democrats, that is,

proponents of the principle of popular sovereignty and the guarantee of

basic rights under a rule of law. It is for this reason that the book

turns to a second, parallel account of the historical process in Part

III, an account that seeks to recover the whole of man and not just his

economic side. To do this, we return to Hegel and Hegel”s

non-materialist account of History, based on the “struggle for recognition.”

According to Hegel, human beings like animals have natural needs and

desires for objects outside themselves such as food, drink, shelter, and

above all the preservation of their own bodies. Man differs

fundamentally from the animals, however, because in addition he desires

the desire of other men, that is, he wants to be “recognised.” In

particular, he wants to be recognised as a human being, that is, as a

being with a certain worth or dignity. This worth in the first instance

is related to his willingness to risk his life in a struggle over pure

prestige. For only man is able to overcome his most basic animal

instincts “ chief among them his instinct for self-preservation “ for

the sake of higher, abstract principles and goals. According to Hegel,

the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to

seek to make the other “recognise” their humanness by staking their

lives in a mortal battle. When the natural fear of death leads one

combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born. The

stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food,

shelter, or security, but pure prestige. And precisely because the goal

of the battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first

glimmer of human freedom.

The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar

concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western political

philosophy, and constitutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human

personality. It was first described by Plato in the /Republic/, when he

noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a

reasoning part, and a part that he called /thymos/, or “spiritedness.”

Much of human behaviour can be explained as a combination of the first

two parts, desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things outside

themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get

them. But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth,

or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The

propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand

recognition for that value, is what in today”s popular language we would

call “self-esteem.” The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the

part of the soul called /thymos/. It is like an innate human sense of

justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other

people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they

experience the emotion of /anger/. Conversely, when people fail to live

up to their own sense of worth, they feel /shame/, and when they are

evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel /pride/. The

desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame,

and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political

life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.

By Hegel”s account, the desire to be recognised as a human being with

dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to

the death for prestige. The outcome of this battle was a division of

human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their

lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of

death. But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide

variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have

characterised the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to

satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves.

The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way

whatsoever. But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as

well, because he was not recognised by other masters, but slaves whose

humanity was as yet incomplete. Dissatisfaction with the flawed

recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a

“contradiction” that engendered further stages of history.

Hegel believed that the “contradiction” inherent in the relationship of

lordship and bondage was finally overcome as a result of the French and,

one would have to add, American revolutions. These democratic

revolutions abolished the distinction between master and slave by making

the former slaves their own masters and by establishing the principles

of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The inherently unequal

recognition of masters and slaves is replaced by universal and

reciprocal recognition, where every citizen recognises the dignity and

humanity of every other citizen, and where that dignity is recognised in

turn by the state through the granting of /rights/.

This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of contemporary liberal

democracy differs in a significant way from the Anglo-Saxon

understanding that was the theoretical basis of liberalism in countries

like Britain and the United States. In that tradition, the prideful

quest for recognition was to be subordinated to enlightened

self-interest “ desire combined with reason “ and particularly the

desire for self-preservation of the body. While Hobbes, Locke, and the

American Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison believed that

rights to a large extent existed as a means of preserving a private

sphere where men can enrich themselves and satisfy the desiring parts of

their souls, Hegel saw rights as ends in themselves, because what truly

satisfies human beings is not so much material prosperity as recognition

of their status and dignity. With the American and French revolutions,

Hegel asserted that history comes to an end because the longing that had

driven the historical process “ the struggle for recognition “ has now

been satisfied in a society characterised by universal and reciprocal

recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better

able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive

historical change is possible.

The desire for recognition, then, can provide the missing link between

liberal economics and liberal politics that was missing from the

economic account of History in Part II. Desire and reason are together

sufficient to explain the process of industrialisation, and a large part

of economic life more generally. But they cannot explain the striving

for liberal democracy, which ultimately arises out of /thymos/, the part

of the soul that demands recognition. The social changes that accompany

advanced industrialisation, in particular universal education, appear to

liberate a certain demand for recognition that did not exist among

poorer and less educated people. As standards of living increase, as

populations become more cosmopolitan and better educated, and as society

as a whole achieves a greater equality of condition, people begin to

demand not simply more wealth but recognition of their status. If people

were nothing more than desire and reason, they would be content to live

in market-oriented authoritarian states like Franco”s Spain, or a South

Korea or Brazil under military rule. But they also have a thymotic pride

in their own self-worth, and this leads them to demand democratic

governments that treat them like adults rather than children,

recognising their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being

superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realisation

that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition.

An understanding of the importance of the desire for recognition as the

motor of history allows us to reinterpret many phenomena that are

otherwise seemingly familiar to us, such as culture, religion, work,

nationalism, and war. Part IV is an attempt to do precisely this, and to

project into the future some of the different ways that the desire for

recognition will be manifest. A religious believer, for example, seeks

recognition for his particular gods or sacred practices, while a

nationalist demands recognition for his particular linguistic, cultural,

or ethnic group. Both of these forms of recognition are less rational

than the universal recognition of the liberal state, because they are

based on arbitrary distinctions between sacred and profane, or between

human social groups. For this reason, religion, nationalism, and a

people”s complex of ethical habits and customs (more broadly “culture”)

have traditionally been interpreted as obstacles to the establishment of

successful democratic political institutions and free-market economies.

But the truth is considerably more complicated, for the success of

liberal politics and liberal economics frequently rests on irrational

forms of recognition that liberalism was supposed to overcome. For

democracy to work, citizens need to develop an irrational pride in their

own democratic institutions, and must also develop what Tocqueville

called the “art of associating,” which rests on prideful attachment to

small communities. These communities are frequently based on religion,

ethnicity, or other forms of recognition that fall short of the

universal recognition on which the liberal state is based. The same is

true for liberal economics. Labor has traditionally been understood in

the Western liberal economic tradition as an essentially unpleasant

activity undertaken for the sake of the satisfaction of human desires

and the relief of human pain. But in certain cultures with a strong work

ethic, such as that of the Protestant entrepreneurs who created European

capitalism, or of the elites who modernised Japan after the Meiji

restoration, work was also undertaken for the sake of recognition. To

this day, the work ethic in many Asian countries is sustained not so

much by material incentives, as by the recognition provided for work by

overlapping social groups, from the family to the nation, on which these

societies are based. This suggests that liberal economics succeeds not

simply on the basis of liberal principles, but requires irrational forms

of /thymos/ as well.

The struggle for recognition provides us with insight into the nature of

international politics. The desire for recognition that led to the

original bloody battle for prestige between two individual combatants

leads logically to imperialism and world empire. The relationship of

lordship and bondage on a domestic level is naturally replicated on the

level of states, where nations as a whole seek recognition and enter

into bloody battles for supremacy. Nationalism, a modern yet

not-fully-rational form of recognition, has been the vehicle for the

struggle for recognition over the past hundred years, and the source of

this century”s most intense conflicts. This is the world of “power

politics,” described by such foreign policy “realists” as Henry Kissinger.

But if war is fundamentally driven by the desire for recognition, it

stands to reason that the liberal revolution which abolishes the

relationship of lordship and bondage by making former slaves their own

masters should have a similar effect on the relationship between states.

Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be recognised as

greater than others with a rational desire to be recognised as equal. A

world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less

incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognise one

another”s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical

evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies

do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are

perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies

and do not share their fundamental values. Nationalism is currently on

the rise in regions like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union where

peoples have long been denied their national identities, and yet within

the world”s oldest and most secure nationalities, nationalism is

undergoing a process of change. The demand for national recognition in

Western Europe has been domesticated and made compatible with universal

recognition, much like religion three or four centuries before.

The fifth and final part of this book addresses the question of the “end

of history,” and the creature who emerges at the end, the “last man.” In

the course of the original debate over the /National Interest/ article,

many people assumed that the possibility of the end of history revolved

around the question of whether there were viable alternatives to liberal

democracy visible in the world today. There was a great deal of

controversy over such questions as whether communism was truly dead,

whether religion or ultranationalism might make a comeback, and the

like. But the deeper and more profound question concerns the goodness of

Liberal democracy itself, and not only whether it will succeed against

its present-day rivals. Assuming that liberal democracy is, for the

moment, safe from external enemies, could we assume that successful

democratic societies could remain that way indefinitely” Or is liberal

democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so

serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system”

There is no doubt that contemporary democracies face any number of

serious problems, from drugs, homelessness and crime to environmental

damage and the frivolity of consumerism. But these problems are not

obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles, nor so serious

that they would necessarily lead to the collapse of society as a whole,

as communism collapsed in the 1980s.

Writing in the twentieth century, Hegel”s great interpreter, Alexandre

Kojève, asserted intransigently that history had ended because what he

called the “universal and homogeneous state” “ what we can understand as

liberal democracy “ definitely solved the question of recognition by

replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and

equal recognition. What man had been seeking throughout the course of

history “ what had driven the prior “stages of history” “ was

recognition. In the modern world, he finally found it, and was

“completely satisfied.” This claim was made seriously by Kojève, and it

deserves to be taken seriously by us. For it is possible to understand

the problem of politics over the millennia of human history as the

effort to solve the problem of recognition. Recognition is the central

problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism,

and the desire to dominate. But while it has a dark side, it cannot

simply be abolished from political life, because it is simultaneously

the psychological ground for political virtues like courage,

public-spiritedness, and justice. All political communities must make

use of the desire for recognition, while at the same time protecting

themselves from its destructive effects. If contemporary constitutional

government has indeed found a formula whereby all are recognised in a

way that nonetheless avoids the emergence of tyranny, then it would

indeed have a special claim to stability and longevity among the regimes

that have emerged on earth.

But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal

democracies “completely satisfying”“ The long-term future of liberal

democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend

above all on the answer to this question. In Part V we sketch two broad

responses, from the Left and the Right, respectively. The Left would say

that universal recognition in liberal democracy is necessarily

incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a

division of labor that /ipso facto/ implies unequal recognition. In this

respect, a nation”s absolute level of prosperity provides no solution,

because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and

therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal

democracy, in other words, continues to recognise equal people unequally.

The second, and in my view more powerful, criticism of universal

recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the

leveling effects of the French Revolution”s commitment to human

equality. This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the

philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects

anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de

Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not

the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the

slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal

democracy was a “last man” who, schooled by the founders of modern

liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in

favour of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced “men

without chests,” composed of desire and reason but lacking /thymos/,

clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the

calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be

recognised 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.

Following Nietzsche”s line of thought, we are compelled to ask the

following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by

nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a

full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a “last man” with

neither striving nor aspiration” Is there not a side of the human

personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and

daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the “peace and

prosperity” of contemporary liberal democracy” Does not the satisfaction

of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently

unequal” Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition constitute

the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies,

but also in modern liberal democracies” Will not their future survival

depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be

recognised not just as equal, but as superior to others” And might not

the fear of becoming contemptible “last men” not lead men to assert

themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming

once again bestial “first men” engaged in bloody prestige battles, this

time with modern weapons”

This books seeks to address these questions. They arise naturally once

we ask whether there is such a thing as progress, and whether we can

construct a coherent and directional Universal History of mankind.

Totalitarianisms of the Right and Left have kept us too busy to consider

the latter question seriously for the better part of this century. But

the fading of these totalitarianisms, as the century comes to an end,

invites us to raise this old question one more time.

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