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During the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama published the now famous essay “The End of History?” in the conservative journal The National Interest. He argued that, with the end of the cold war, ideology had outlived its usefulness. Liberalism and capitalism had been victorious not only over the ideology of communism, but over ideology itself, and the phrase “the end of history” soon became part of the political lexicon. Fukuyama followed up with a book, The End of History and the Last Man, which contained a lengthy philosophical and historical expansion of his argument; as of the early twenty-first century, it had been translated into twenty languages.

The Significance Of Ideology

The term ideology arose during the French Revolution (1789– 1799), and ideologies became central to European political life in the course of the nineteenth century. Ideologies incorporated the mobilized masses of urban industrial workers into the social fabric. They offered their adherents both a rational explanation of how the world works and an emotional psychological sense of identity and meaning. The political and economic contradictions of liberalism gave birth to three rival ideologies—Soviet Communism on liberalism’s left and Italian Fascism and German Nazism on its right. World War II (1939–1945) eliminated institutionalized Fascism, but Soviet Communism continued to battle liberalism for the next half century in what came to be known as the cold war.

During the postwar decades, representative democracy and the market economy found a solution in the developed countries of the West (including Japan) to the problem of social cohesion that had dogged them over the previous century, in the form of the welfare state. In 1960, Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, which made the case for the shift from ideology to pragmatism with regard to domestic politics in the United States. Political parties were no longer motivated by grand principles, and they had become shifting coalitions of interests. Shortly after the publication of Bell’s book, there was the explosion of social mobilization and political idealism in the 1960s, including the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, feminism, environmentalism, and gay rights. Bell’s argument was discredited before the ink was dry.

At the same time Bell was declaring the death of ideology within the United States, the country was engaged in a struggle with Soviet communism. Even though democratic capitalism had sunk firm roots in the West, it was not clear that it would succeed in the newly independent former colonies of Africa and Asia. The Soviet model seemed to have worked in Russia, raising that country to the first rank of the world’s industrial and military powers in less than a century. However, Soviet rule was deeply unpopular in the occupied countries of Eastern Europe. For example, as part of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980, industrial workers rose up against Communist rule. The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 discredited the Soviet Union in the eyes of the third world. Within the Soviet Union itself, the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary in 1985 and his campaign of media openness, or glasnost, revealed that economic inefficiency, corruption, and ideological decay had undermined the foundations of Soviet power.

Fukuyama’s “End Of History”

Writing in the spring of 1989, Fukuyama read these events as showing that the end of communism was nigh. In his article he wrote about the “end of history,” meaning the end of “History” in the Hegelian sense—as an integrated, rationally intelligible process with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the United States, this translates into a familiar narrative of the founding of the Republic, the onward march of progress, and the American dream. For Marxists, it meant dialectical conflict and struggle, with the working classes ultimately persevering over the bourgeoisie, and culminating in the victory of communism—and the end of history.

In his conclusion, Fukuyama makes clear that the end of history “does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. . . . There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence. . . .” While this implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda, Fukuyama also contended that “the end of history will be a very sad time.” He wrote, “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” (18).

Critics Of Fukuyama’s Thesis

Fukuyama’s work attracted worldwide attention at the time of publication but does have its detractors. In 1993 Fukuyama’s former professor, Samuel Huntington, published “Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs, in which he argued that far from disappearing, history seemed to be returning with a vengeance. Religious divides from the premodernera were fueling new violent social movements. Robert Kaplan, in the 2000 book The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post–Cold War, made similar arguments.

However, Fukuyama’s analysis does seem to fit developments in Europe and most post socialist societies, including China. In this context, ideology really does seem to have come to an end. In Eastern Europe, Communist parties have renamed themselves, shelved their millenarian rhetoric, and donned business suits. Nationalist parties have been established but rarely poll more than 10 percent of the vote—roughly what they get in Austria, France, or Italy. Elsewhere in the world, only a small number of rulers in the early twenty-first century directly challenged the idea that the market is the most efficient generator of wealth or that democracy is the best form of rule.

Bibliography:

Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960.
Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History.” The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989).
The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
“The ‘End Of History’ Twenty Years Later.” New Perspectives Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2010): 7–10.
Huntington, Samuel. “Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49.
“The Clash of Civilizations Revisited.” New Perspectives Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2007): 53–59.
Kaplan, Robert. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post–Cold War. New York:Vintage, 2000.