'The End of History and the Last Man Review' - Francis Fukuyama - Review
In the summer of 1989, the American magazine the National Interest published an essay with the bold title ‘The End of History?’. Its author, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, announced that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. With anti-communist protests sweeping across the former Soviet Union, the essay seemed apt to the status quo. On the back of this success and popular acclaim, he published this volume three years later. Fukuyama ignores the complex events and details of history and applies a philosophical approach to his work. The author states that only liberal democracy and the market economy have satisfactorily provided what Plato claimed to be necessary for contentment: the appetitive, the reasoning, and the inherent desire for recognition. Hegel’s concept of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is used to explain the course of history, with liberal democracy as the final synthesis accordi
