Has History Come to an End?

By John Elson

The final days of the '80s, to many commentators, represent a kind of farewell to arms. The cold war appears all but over; peace seems to be breaking out in many parts of the world. Even Moscow, the international capital of Marxism, has openly succumbed to the lures of creeping capitalism. To Francis Fukuyama, 36, deputy director of the State Department's policy- planning staff, all these events point to something of far broader significance than the reform policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. "What we may be witnessing," he writes, "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."

Fukuyama's provocative thesis, spelled out in the summer issue of the National Interest, has stirred up a heated debate in neoconservative circles both in the U.S. and abroad. Around Harvard Square in Cambridge, reports Owen Harries, co-editor of the quarterly, the issue is sold out and copies have even been filched from subscribers' desks. Anthony Hartley, editor of Britain's prestigious monthly Encounter, adds his voice to the debate in the September issue. Translations of Fukuyama's article, titled "The End of History?," will soon appear in Japanese, Italian and Dutch journals. The French quarterly Commentaire will also publish a translation, along with critiques by leading intellectuals such as Jean-Francois Revel. The National Interest, which accompanied Fukuyama's article with responses by such pundits as Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) and New York's Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, will print two more lengthy reactions in its autumn issue.

The best-known propagator of the theory that history has an "end," meaning its fulfillment in an ideal political system, was Karl Marx. He believed the contradictions of all previous societies would be resolved by the emergence of a Communist utopia. Marx borrowed his concept from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued that history would culminate, as Fukuyama puts it, at a moment "in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious."

For Hegel, history "ended," in this sense, with Napoleon's triumph over the Prussian forces at Jena in 1806. That battle, to Hegel, marked the vindication by arms of the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution. True, Napoleon was eventually defeated and authoritarian monarchy restored. But Fukuyama approvingly cites the argument of a little-known French-Russian philosopher, Alexandre Kojeve, that Hegel was essentially correct. The reason: it was at Jena that the "vanguard" of humanity implemented the French Revolution's goals.

Fukuyama, who considers Hegel an unjustly neglected thinker, argues that those ideals, as embodied in liberal democracy, have outlasted two principal 20th century competitors for the hearts and minds of Western men. "Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II," Fukuyama writes. As for Marxism-Leninism, he notes that "while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang or Cambridge," no large state that espouses it as an ideology even pretends to be in the vanguard of history. Witness, as evidence, the glasnost-inspired admissions of economic failure and bureaucratic bungling that emanate almost daily from Gorbachev's Moscow.

Fukuyama has no illusions that the end of history represents the beginning of secular paradise. In fact, he sees it as a "sad time," when ideological struggles that called for "daring, courage, imagination" will be replaced by the "endless solving of technical problems." He worries about the cultural banality that pervades liberal societies obsessed with consumerism, and notes that nationalism and religious fundamentalism continue to appeal to many Third World peoples. While it is impossible to rule out the emergence of new ideologies, or indeed of entirely new political systems, Fukuyama argues that for the foreseeable future it will become ever more widely perceived that liberal democracy is the most equitable form of government that man has ever devised. Thus the ideal state should be "liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man's universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed."

Irving Kristol, founding publisher of the National Interest, says Fukuyama's article serves to "welcome G.W.F. Hegel to Washington." To Harries, the . piece "de-parochializes the debate over Gorbachev's policy and removes it from a cold war context." But Fukuyama also has plenty of critics. In general, conservatives, like historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, argue that he is excessively optimistic in predicting that Marxism's demise as an ideology means that the era of superpower conflict is over. Liberals like Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic charge that he is too complacent in proclaiming the triumph of democracies that have done too little to resolve such social contradictions as poverty and racism.

Fukuyama, a Sovietologist with a Harvard Ph.D. who previously worked for the Rand Corp., is pondering the criticism and will respond in the winter issue of the National Interest. And if he can take time from readying position papers for his new bosses at State, he hopes to explore his thesis at greater length. Unlike history as he sees it, the debate sparked by Fukuyama may be just beginning.