The End of History and the Last Man

Francis Fukuyama’s book is over 30 years old, but the argument he makes has never been more relevant.

Let me embarrass myself, until this month I’d never read this book, and got my opinion of it second hand. Wasn’t Fukuyama a neoliberal shill, high on the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the USSR? Didn’t he say that history had stopped happening? in 1992?! Ridiculous!

It was me who was ridiculous. Like so many others, I couldn’t even base my misinterpretation of the book on the whole title, fixating merely on “the End of History” part.

I finished actually reading the book last night and I have to tell you about it¹. The Future may depend on it.

* *

First, The End of History.

Fukuyama’s book might have been less misunderstood if he had called it “The Ends of History” or “The Direction of History”. The “End” in the title is meant is the sense of destination, purpose or goal - telos.

To ask this question you have to define history in some sense more than just a record of events. Events will always keep happening, but Fukuyama is interested in the history of how societies are organised. The book is an enquiry into whether society is evolving, into whether this evolution has a direction, or if it is just randomly changing, as prone to revert as advance, or perhaps locked into endless cycles. As such, it is a broad sweep intellectual and sociological account of civilisations, broadly construed, which should interest anyone who enjoys Big History of the style popularised by Jared Diamond (who I’ve read) or Yuval Harari (who I haven’t).

The weakest version of Fukuyama’s claim is that, yes, history has a direction. We make innovations that we are not going to un-invent - everything from fire to computers. These innovations create possibilities, lock in certain ways of organising society, and there is no going back.

The strong version of Fukuyama’s claim is that both capitalism and democracy are stable organisational forms which naturally emerge when the contradictions of other organisational forms, such as monarchy, become too much. The contradictions of a society are not mere irrationalities or problems, but tensions which will eventually force change on the wider level. Fukuyama notes that critics strawman his thesis by listing problems with capitalist democracies (drugs, crime, etc), but none of these problems make the system untenable. They don’t qualify as the kind of contradictions he is talking about.

Fukuyama’s argues that organisational logic requires societies to organise around individual economic freedom and markets. The efficiency gains are too great for non-market forms to out-compete and replace market orientated societies.

States copy each other, accelerating the rationalisation of economic life. Labour organisation (specialisation, bureaucracy) and technological innovation are both ratchets - once they have been adopted it is hard to go back. This is not just because of the wealth they generate, but also because they, in their turn, create additional needs for specialist knowledge, for freedom for individual innovators, for market complexity. This complexity defeats central planning, at least in the realm of the market.

This is the case for Capitalism made by Fukuyama, but he is clear that these logics don’t require Democracy for their success. States which are market orientated modernisers but also authoritarian do better economically than Liberal Democracies. “If anything, democratic politics is a drag on economic efficiency”, he says (p205). So if Democracy cannot be explained solely in economic terms, something else is needed. For this Fukuyama develops an argument based on the philosophy of Hegel.

Woah, Hegel

Economic man is defined by reason and desires, says Fukuyama, and uses one to satisfy the other. This account is good enough for the theories of economics, but desperately impoverished when it comes to an account of what makes man human, it isn’t enough - says Fukuyama - to understand History.

The missing part is thymos, a key to Hegel’s philosophy. In Plato, thymos is usually translated as ‘spiritedness’ or ‘passion’ (and written ‘thumos’), but Fukuyama reads it as ‘pride’, ‘prestige’ or ‘self worth’². It is “that part of man which feels the need to place value on things - himself in the first instance” (p163). Desire is the drive to want things, thymos is the drive to have yourself, and your wants, respected by others. Thymos is fundamentally social, it is the desire to be recognised equally, or above, others. It is also fundamentally moral, since it evaluates the self and others.

Democracy, in Fukuyama’s view, is compelling because it more successfully solves the “struggle for recognition” which is part of what it means to be human, for all humans. Non-democracies do not just deny power to the majority, they deny recognition and so self-worth, creating an irresolvable tension which must eventually create revolution.

Democracy solves the problem of the universal desire for recognition. It allows all to be respected, via the mechanism of state power which recognises the rights of each individual, as an individual. This satisfies what Fukuyama calls isothymia - the drive to be recognised as an equal. For megalothymia - the drive to be recognsied as better than others - liberal democracy provides business, politics and arts as channels which provide temporary satisfaction.

“Desire for recognition, then, is the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics” (p206). Fukuyama contrasts his account with the traditional liberal philosophy of government, via Hobbes and Locke, in which rational and selfish actors agree to a social contract (including submission to government) to avoid the war of all against all (and the nasty and brutish solitary life this entails). The omission of the fundamental desire for recognition makes the traditional account a negative one, not just an incomplete and unsatisfying one. It offers a diminished account of human possibility in which are common life is defined by the wish to avoid violence, rather than anything more.

Instead, says Fukuyama, we must recognise the influence on history of peoples’ desire for recognition and self-respect, from 1789 through to the foiling of the Russian coup in 1991.

This, then, is the argument for liberal democracy. First, it is a claim about twin dynamics - about the organisation of economies, on the one hand, that favours capitalism, and about the soul of man, on the other, that favours democracy. Second, it is an account of where we are in history. The claim is that these dynamics create a direction in history - that they explain why world society has developed as it has, and provide some understanding of how it may develop in the future. The claim is not that history is over - this is explicitly rejected in the last paragraph of the book, as well as being implicit in the discussion of the remaining unresolved contradiction of liberal democracy. Contradictions which may yet, says Fukuyama, generate their own revolutions against liberal democracy.

The Last Man

Now, the neglected second part of the title … “And the Last Man”. The Last Man is the man created by the conditions of liberal democracy³. His material needs are satisfied by the efficient economies of capitalism; his need to be recognised as an equal is satisfied by his democratic rights.

The Last Man is the objective of Fukuyama’s account. If, he says, we believe that the struggle for recognition has driven the major historical phenomena of the last centuries - religion, nationalism, democracy - and liberal democracy solves the struggle for recognition, then we are at the end of history. This is the key question, and it is the same question as this: is the Last Man fully satisfied by the kind of recognition provided by liberal democracy? Or may there yet be contradictions which will keep the gears of history turning?

There are two poles of criticism of liberal democracy, says Fukuyama.

At one pole, Marx made the case that legal equality is insufficient when there is wealth inequality. What use the recognition of my rights when I must sleep in the streets beneath the lit windows of the rich? Yet forcing greater equality will necessarily trade-off against individual rights. Fukuyama doesn’t dismiss this tension, just claims that economic leftism has failed to the extent that it has been radical (i.e. Communism) and is no alternative to liberal democracy to the extent that it is not radical.

At the other pole is Nietzsche, and the case that the Last Man - although rich in materials terms and rich in individual rights - may still not be fully satisfied. Fukuyama is clear that it is this he regards as the more profound challenge:

A society that grants such recognition may be the starting point for the satisfaction of thymos, and is clearly better than one that denies everyone’s humanity. But does the granting of liberal rights by itself constitute the fulfillment of that great desire that led the aristocratic master to risk death? And even if many people were satisfied by this humble sort of recognition, would it be satisfying for the few who had infinitely more ambitious natures? If everyone was fully content merely by virtue of having rights in a democratic society, with no further aspirations beyond citizenship, would we not in fact find them worthy of contempt? And on the other hand, if thymos remained essentially unfulfilled by universal and reciprocal recognition, would not democratic societies then have exposed a critical weakness?

(p302)

To use his earlier terms, the challenge is whether isothymia is enough, or whether to be truly stable society must deal with megalothymia, the desire of some or all to be recognised as greater than others.

Fukuyama also uses the notion of the The Last Man to talk about how the individualism and relativism of liberal democracies, while core to their definition, are also corrosive to the senses of commitment and community which have to come from outside liberal democracy. Historically, liberal democracies are built on top of cultural values that have their origins outside of liberalism. It’s an open question, he says, if liberal democracy can provide the nourishment required to sustain people’s participation in the habits of democracy. So, to the degree it entails a collapse of absolute values, The End of History is a threat to progress, not a culmination.

By the end of “The End of History and the Last Man” you are not left with the impression you have been listening to a victory march for democracy and capitalism. Rather, Fukuyama presents an enquiry which is by equal measures satisfying and unresolved. It is satisfying in that it paints a big picture account which combines political philosophy and the historical evolution of societies. It is unresolved in that it leaves you with the clear feeling that the stability of liberal democracy is very much not guaranteed, and the twin challenges of wealth inequality and unsatisfied megalothymia may yet provide destabilising forces.

“to the extent that liberal democracy is successful at purging megalothymia from life and substituting for it rational consumption, we will become last men. But human beings will rebel at this thought. That is, they will rebel at the idea of being undifferentiated members of a universal and homogeneous state, each the same as the other no matter where on the globe one goes. They will want to be citizens rather than bourgeois, finding the life of masterless slavery—the life of rational consumption—in the end, boring. They will want to have ideals by which to live and die, even if the largest ideals have been substantively realized here on earth, and they will want to risk their lives even if the international state system has succeeded in abolishing the possibility of war. This is the “contradiction” that liberal democracy has not yet solved.” (p314).

* *

In 2025

So, that, then is my brief and partial summary of the book. I hope I’ve made it clear why the standard criticism of it - criticism which I assumed, in an uncommitted kind of way, were correct until I read the book - is wrong. You can agree or disagree with his diagnosis that the serious ideological competitors to liberal democracy have failed. You can agree or disagree that the need for recognition is a fundamental driver of history. But don’t say that Fukuyama claimed history was over, or that liberal democracy couldn’t be bettered or existed without contradictions.

And please, please, don’t say that his book published in 1992 has been superseded, disproved or otherwise rendered irrelevant by the trends of recent decades. When I tally up Fukuyama’s pronouncements they look more accurate than not: the ongoing relevance of the nation state, the conflicts subliminated into cultural and economic differences; the prioritisation of identity. These all seem as strong, more strong even in 2025. The Fukuyama of 1992 talks directly to the desperate urgency of sentiment which has fuelled recent clashes over identity politics (whether on progressive or popularist) in the 2020s.

Even his unsettling description of the popular clamour for war in 1914, fed - in Fukuyama’s telling - by a desire for a unifying challenge which would shake off the stultifying comforts of peace doesn’t now seem so implausible (despite us all knowing how that story ended).

His description of the attraction of megalothymia seems to fit the worldview of the contemporary manosphere, as well as the behaviour of celebrity billionaires (liberal democracy must be friendly to business activities, says Fukuyama, precisely to channel the megalothymia of ambitious individuals and distract them from achieving political power).

The End of History and the Last Man is mostly a book of ideas, so few individuals are mentioned who aren’t philosophers. A few US presidents, some European monarchs. So it jumps out when one 1990s US celebrity is mentioned by name, Donald Trump. Fukuyama invokes him twice in his discussion of how business may only partially satisfy the drive to be esteemed above others, megalothymia. And from 2025 Fukuyama’s warning that the most ambitious individuals may move from business to politics and so destablise democracy looks as relevant as ever:

“ Thus, despite the apparent absence of systematic alternatives to liberal democracy at present, some new authoritarian alternatives, perhaps never before seen in history may assert themselves in the future. These alternatives, if they come about, will be created by two distinct groups of people: those who for cultural reasons experience persistent economic failure, despite an effort to make economic liberalism work, and those who are inordinately successful at the capitalist game.” (p235)

Coda

Thanks to H. who put this book in my hand (back in October).

Full text via archive.org: The End of History and the Last Man

Catch up

Normal service - news and views about the psychology of persuasion, argument and reason - will resume next time. In case you missed it, recent newsletters include:

This trilogy about Community Notes

The algorithmic heart of Community Notes: RP #58 What we know about the Fact Checking system Meta is adopting from Musk's X

Unhinged, unfortunate, unproven, inadequate, misdirected. RP#59 The bigger picture around Meta's announcement on fact-checking

The Making of Community Notes. RP#60 A third (and final?) comment on the Community Notes system recently picked up by Meta, following a great article about the original team which designed it.

This piece on a new report from me

Belief in the reasonableness of others: Reasonable People #57: Developing a measure of our faith in reason, new work from me

And this

Legibility and Legitimacy: Reasonable People #56: On recognising the limits of reasoned decision making.

And finally

Wacky 90s Fads

(Fukuyama doesn’t mention the internet, for what it is worth)

Credit: SMBC https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fads

END

Comments? Feedback? Alternatives to liberal democracy? I am tom@idiolect.org.uk and on Mastodon at @tomstafford@mastodon.online

1. This was true when I wrote the first half of this post, but I seem to have let 3 months go by before picking this up again and finishing writing up my thoughts.

2. I have also just learnt that Thumos is “is the name of an American progressive doom/post-metal band whose music is based on the works of Plato”. Yet another occasion when honest research on Wikipedia has led me astray.

3. Fukuyama, throughout his discussion of human nature, not just when referring to the Last Man, does refer to Man / He / His. Since my purpose it to address the common misreading of his explicit claim about The End of History, not to compensate or do apologetics for Fukuyama’s lacuna around gender. I have opted to preserve this convention here.