Washington, D.C. -- In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared that history had come to an end.
In an essay in The National Interest, he argued that history, in the philosophical sense of an evolutionary process that culminates in a worldwide ideological consensus, was over; with the impending collapse of communism, liberal democracy was triumphant.
Mr. Fukuyama, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, says that developments since then -- the disintegration of the Soviet Union being a prime example -- have borne out his argument.
It’s a good thing for Mr. Fukuyama that events seem to be conspiring in his favor. He is about to come out with an expanded version of his thesis, a book called The End of History and the Last Man, to be published this month by the Free Press.
If the book provokes anything like the reaction the essay did -- more than two years later, scholars are still reacting to it in print -- Mr. Fukuyama will once again find himself in the center of widespread attention and controversy.
Critics on the right said of his essay that he was premature in declaring the collapse of the enemies of democracy and presumptuous in trying to predict the course of history. Critics on the left maintained that, with all the 20th century’s social and political ills, democratic governments could hardly be considered a model for the rest of the world.
Mr. Fukuyama, who was working at the State Department when he wrote his initial essay, did not at first intend to turn his ideas into a book. But among the avalanche of responses to the article were more than a few book offers; there will be a total of 14 foreign editions, besides the American one.
It took him a while to decide to leave his State Department job -- he was a deputy director of policy planning in the areas of Europe and the Soviet Union, not a bad place to be in 1989 -- but he was finally persuaded. He spent a year on the book, working in an office provided by RAND and living off the advance from his publisher.
“It’s always possible to be a bureaucrat at one point or another,” he said in an interview at his RAND office here. “But this opportunity to write a book that would be read by people in that many countries is not going to come up all that often.”
In the book, Mr. Fukuyama does not depart from his contention that the historical process appears to have reached its ideological culmination in liberal democracy. But he shifts much of the weight of his argument to the prior question of whether or not there can be such a thing as a “directional” history that has an end toward which it is moving.
Mr. Fukuyama offers two arguments for the existence of a directional history. The first is his contention that modern scientific and technological development appears to dictate an evolution of society toward capitalism. In the late 20th century, it is a fact that the world’s leading stable democracies are also capitalist nations. That suggests a strong connection between capitalism and democracy, but it doesn’t prove that one leads to the other.
So Mr. Fukuyama turns to his second argument, one that gets only the barest mention in his essay. He maintains, with the early 19th-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, that history is driven by what Hegel called a “struggle for recognition” -- the intense desire of human beings to have their inherent worth acknowledged and respected. It is that struggle, Mr. Fukuyama argues, that causes competition among states and propels the world’s evolution toward liberal democracy, the political system that best provides its citizens with equal and reciprocal recognition.
Mr. Fukuyama devotes the final section of his book to an examination of two critiques of the idea that democracy could be the end point of history.
The left, on one hand, charges that the promise of democracy remains unfulfilled in light of the obvious economic inequality of its citizens. But this Mr. Fukuyama regards as the weaker of the two criticisms, since economic inequality is simply an incomplete realization of democracy’s goal of equal recognition.
He finds much more powerful the attack from the right on the goal itself. The principle of equal recognition of people who are inherently unequal, the argument goes, could never entirely satisfy everyone. In outlining this train of thought, Mr. Fukuyama borrows from Friedrich Nietzsche the concept of the “last man,” a complacent citizen who has given up any struggle for recognition. The dissatisfaction of those not content to be “last men,” Mr. Fukuyama argues, could eventually lead to further competition and conflict and could pose a serious threat to democracy as the culmination of history.
Despite such misgivings, Mr. Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy, with its checks on and outlets for the strivings of people who want more than mere equality, does the best job of satisfying humanity’s cravings for respect.
“Democracy is not wholly free from contradiction,” he said in the interview, “but it rests on a certain bedrock of stability that is fairly impressive.”
Whether Mr. Fukuyama’s expanded argument will satisfy all the critics that his essay provoked is an open question.
Ken Jowitt, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, has not read Mr. Fukuyama’s new book but is about to publish a book himself -- New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, from the University of California Press -- that he described as the “antithesis” of Mr. Fukuyama’s ideas.
“Liberal capitalist democracy will never become the dominant form in the world,” he said. While he acknowledged that democracy is probably the best form of government devised so far, he called it a “historical mutation.”
“The thought that the rest of the world is waiting for us, the mutation, to provide them with a way of life is arrogant,” he said.
Others who are less critical of Mr. Fukuyama’s thesis nevertheless have some questions as well. Marc F. Plattner, editor of the Journal of Democracy, which is published by the National Endowment for Democracy, reviewed portions of Mr. Fukuyama’s manuscript.
“The point on which he’s absolutely right -- and it’s not something others said, but something he stated first and most dramatically -- is the exhaustion of all serious alternatives to democracy and the market economy,” Mr. Plattner said. “The critical question becomes whether this is a temporary phenomenon or is, in fact, the end of history, as he puts it.”
Mr. Fukuyama does acknowledge the possibility that unforeseen events could seriously weaken his thesis. He admits, for example, to “mixed emotions” during the attempted coup in the Soviet Union last August, and still seems a bit nervous about developments there. “Another coup is still possible,” he said. “The book’s going to be out on January 21st; it could happen on January 20th.”
But he is confident that, given the world as it now stands, he is right.
When the leaders of the failed Soviet coup held their first press conference, Mr. Fukuyama recalled, “a friend of mine called me up and said, `Your thesis is still safe, because they didn’t utter a word about restoring socialism.”’
“It confirmed the view,” he said, “that even in the Soviet Union, even among the most Neanderthal, conservative Communist bureaucrats, they still need to pay lip service to these democratic ideals.”
In many respects, Mr. Fukuyama’s book suggests a working out of a new conservative philosophy for an era that no longer has to struggle against the communist threat. But he denies that he had any such agenda in mind.
“I’m de facto right of center in the American political debate,” Mr. Fukuyama said. “But I don’t regard myself as a conservative. I never started out with a premise that we conservatives have to figure out what our position is in light of the decline of the cold war.
“It seems to me there are issues that really transcend the American categories of liberal and conservative that are much more interesting and important, such as the fate of liberalism itself -- liberalism in the big-L sense, as a major philosophical idea.”
Irving Kristol, editor of the journal The Public Interest and publisher of The National Interest, said he also did not see in Mr. Fukuyama’s book, which he reviewed in manuscript, a new conservative platform. For one thing, he argued, Mr. Fukuyama could have, and probably would have, made the same argument before the cold war was so definitively concluded.
“He’s very Hegelian about where history is going,” Mr. Kristol said. “I myself am very skeptical of predictions about where history is headed.”