D.C. Abuzz Over Theory That the End Is Near

The school year just started, but already we’ve come to our last history lesson. You see, class, history is history.

At least that’s the theory that’s been dominating Washington rap sessions and cutting a swath of reaction through magazinedom.

The intellectual agitation began when a conservative think journal, the National Interest, published an essay titled “The End of History?” along with several responses in its summer issue.

Not since David Stockman spilled the beans about trickle-down economics in the Atlantic Monthly has a magazine article drawn so much inside-the-beltway attention to a relatively obscure official.

Suddenly Francis Fukuyama, the 36-year-old State Department policy planner who wrote the essay, has been besieged with dinner invitations, public speaking requests and calls from television and newspaper reporters.

In the past few weeks, Time, Newsweek, the New Republic, National Review and newspapers in the United States and around the world have grappled with Fukuyama’s thesis. And with two more essays on the subject just released in National Interest’s fall issue and Fukuyama’s response to the uproar arriving in the winter issue, the debate is unlikely to soon fade into history--if there is still such a thing.

“Frankly, I wasn’t expecting this kind of reaction,” Fukuyama said from the State Department. “I wanted the thing to be quite speculative and thought provoking. I guess I succeeded beyond my expectations.”

The theory that stirred up the fuss is relatively simple. Fukuyama, a Sovietologist with a Harvard Ph.D. and a former analyst at the RAND Corp., accepts the prediction of the late 18th-Century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel that mankind’s progression from the Stone Age was destined to end when “a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.”

Until Fukuyama came along, Hegel’s loudest cheerleader was Karl Marx, who (misinterpreting Hegel, Fukuyama contends) figured the victory signifying history’s end would go to communism.

But everything that has happened under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev proves that Marx was betting on the wrong ideology, Fukuyama wrote.

Fukuyama predicts, rather, that the 20th Century will end with “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism,” and the “exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives.”

“What we may be witnessing,” he wrote, “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 in mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Two Great Threats

The two great threats to Western liberalism, Fukuyama argues, were Fascism and Marxism. Fascism was blown to smithereens materially and ideologically, he asserts, with the dismantling of the Third Reich and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Marxism, unraveling for years, burst at the seams under Gorbachev. And because the criticisms Gorbachev encouraged within the U.S.S.R. have been so “thorough and devastating,” there’s little hope that the communist state as such will be knit back together.

But, aren’t there other ideologies that might rush in to fill the void and rise to challenge Western liberalism?

Not likely, in Fukuyama’s estimate.

Religious fundamentalism and nationalism pose the threats of greatest potential. But nationalism rarely expresses itself as a coherent ideology. And most religious movements are fairly well accommodated within liberalism. Islam, the powerful exception, will never have broad appeal, Fukuyama contends.

In the decades ahead there will still be conflicts, but as the “common marketization” of the world spreads, only the rapidly diminishing number of states still stuck in history will find differences worth fighting about.

Critiques of Fukuyama’s essay have come from all quarters and taken imaginative twists. The Sept. 18 and 25 issue of the New Republic, for instance, lists various forms the post-historical geopolitical order may take, ranging from chaos to the sort of left wing or right wing “unipolarity” that appeals to one-world theorists.

In one of the responses in the Fall National Interest, Harvard University professor Samuel P. Huntington puts Fukuyama’s thinking at the extreme of a trend he terms “endism.” The biggest flaws in endism are its overemphasis on the predictability of history, and that it “tends to ignore the weakness and irrationality of human nature.”

Or, as syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in a similar critique, man is evil: “Hence conflict, hence history.”

This, Fukuyama conceded, is the argument that has given him most pause so far. “Is human nature just evil? I admit fully that that’s possible.”

Fukuyama downplays the significance of his essay. “Some are reading it as blueprint of the Bush Administration,” he said. “It’s not. I wrote it well before I got there, and I’m not senior enough to have that kind of influence anyway.

“The purpose of my article was to describe the world as I saw it, but also to raise larger philosophical questions, such as: Supposing liberalism has conquered history. How happy should we be with that?”

A ‘Bold’ Thesis

Those responding to the essay, in National Interest and elsewhere--pro, con, and in between--are surprisingly uniform in their flattery, calling Fukuyama’s thesis “bold,” “important,” “stimulating.” Several apply the same word to the effort: “brilliant.”

Only Strobe Talbott, writing in the Sept. 11 issue of Time, broke ranks rhetorically, labeling Fukuyama’s thinking “pernicious nonsense.”

“It will be particularly embarrassing when ‘post-history’ produces its first ugly spectacular, whether it is a nuclear war between two backward and strange-thinking countries that never cared much for Karl Marx or Adam Smith, or an ecological disaster that is beyond the micromanagement of the technocrats Fukuyama predicts will inherit the Earth.”

(It’s interesting to note that in the furor over Fukuyama’s relatively upbeat millenarian vision, another endist tract has gone relatively unnoticed: Bill McKibben’s sobering “The End of Nature” essay in the Sept. 11 New Yorker, in which he argues that the natural world as such is about to become a historical memory.)

Fukuyama’s main concern is that with history behind us, we’ll simply become bored.

“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, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.

“Perhaps,” he concludes, “this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”