The Theory That May Be History : THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, <i> By Francis Fukuyama (Free Press: $24.95; 339 pp.)</i>

“The End of History?” was the provocative title of an essay published in the summer, 1989, issue of the National Interest. It was written by Francis Fukuyama, then the deputy director of the State Department’s policy-planning staff. The article made the point that with the collapse of communism there were no worldwide ideological rivals to Western-style democracy as a form of government. History, said Fukuyama, following the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, is at bottom the story of ideological struggles between opposing ways of life. Feudalism, fascism and communism: They all had fought democracy and they all had lost. Democracy had now won its last battle with communism: Could we now say that history was finished?

Fukuyama’s essay ignited an international media firestorm as other intellectuals grappled with the issues he raised. Criticism from both the left and the right was harsh and often misplaced.

Fukuyama has now returned with “The End of History and the Last Man,” a fuller statement of his views.

So: Is history over? Fukuyama’s answer is anticlimactic. History might be over, he says, but then again maybe it isn’t. There’s no way we can know for sure. Or, as “Saturday Night Live’s” Emily Litella might have put it, “Never mind.”

“The End of History and the Last Man” turns out to be a kind of philosophical bait-and-switch. For more than 300 pages Fukuyama tells us about Universal History, about Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Nietzsche and a 20th-Century French lecturer on Hegel named Alexandre Kojeve. For most of the book he carefully lays the groundwork for a claim that history is over--only to back away at the end and admit that the framework he lays out can’t answer the question he poses.

A famous 19th-Century cartoon in Punch, the British magazine of satirical humor, once showed a very meek young curate (a low-ranking member of the Anglican clergy) eating breakfast at the home of a very intimidating bishop. “I’m afraid,” said the bishop, “that your egg is bad.”

“Oh, no, my Lord,” said the curate. “Parts of it are excellent.”

This is what we have here--a curate’s egg of a book. Parts of it are excellent, and parts of it are best pushed under the toast and out of sight. At his best, for example in his discussion of Nietzsche, Fukuyama shows himself to be a talented and thoughtful writer who is able to explain even the most recondite philosophical issues with grace and style.

But this is also an honest book. Lesser writers would have tried to make their conclusion sound more definite; Fukuyama doesn’t have a clue whether history is over, and he won’t, to please his publisher, pretend that he does.

Another point in Fukuyama’s favor, and one that some of his critics have missed: Fukuyama is no cheerleader for the status quo. He is happy to see the downfall of communism, but he does not go on, as so many do, to argue that if communism is bad, capitalism must therefore be perfect.

One must also admire Fukuyama’s intellectual ambition. There are few subjects in intellectual history as complicated as the relationship of Hegel, in particular and German philosophy, in general, to the Anglo-American philosophical tradition that runs from people like Locke and Hobbes to Adam Smith and James Madison. In fact, Karl Marx once said that his life’s work was to reconcile English political economy with German philosophy.

What Karl Marx tried--and failed--to do over a lifetime, Fukuyama tries to do in a few chapters. Fukuyama also fails, but American culture desperately needs people who will at least take on the big issues. We have plenty of professors who turn out narrow little monographs that are impeccably mediocre and of no importance whatever. Fukuyama is at least trying to engage important contemporary issues in the light of our intellectual heritage, and for this he deserves a sympathetic and attentive hearing.

Fukuyama’s real subject is not so much whether history is over as whether it has a plot. Is history going anywhere, or are we just sitting around? Cultural relativists say we are sitting around. Western civilization, they maintain, is different from but not necessarily better than other civilizations and cultures of the present and the past. Progress is an ethnocentric illusion.

Fukuyama, an ardent disciple of Allan Bloom, thinks this is a dangerous idea. He wants to take Hegel’s complex and supple philosophy of historical progress and human freedom and bring it into the field against the postmodernists and deconstructionists. He believes that these thinkers, in abandoning “metanarratives” and universal values, are undermining liberty and civilization itself.

This is a noble but difficult project; Fukuyama has philosophical enemies on all sides, and his struggles to fight them off provide all the drama and excitement to be found in his book. On one side he has the Marxists, whose historical philosophy begins with their own interpretation of Hegel. Fukuyama identifies with Hegel’s philosophical idealism against Marxist materialism, and argues that the original Hegelian concepts make more sense than Marx’s recasting of them.

On the other hand, Fukuyama stands with the Marxists against the postmodernists and the pure relativists in his belief that progress exists and that there are universal values that apply to all human beings. This, he believes, puts him on the opposite side of the fence not only from people like Lyotard, Baudrillard and Derrida, the three horsemen of postmodernist France, but also distinguishes him from the Anglo-American tradition rooted in the thought of Hobbes, Locke and Adam Smith. Anglo-American democratic thought, Fukuyama believes, is inherently vulnerable to relativism.

These are deep waters, and Fukuyama does not always keep his head in them. The few people who actually read Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”--as opposed to the many who bought it--will find that Fukuyama’s book is largely a remake of Bloom’s: Nietzsche’s challenge to the Enlightenment project of freedom; the inability of Anglo-American liberal/libertarianism to meet it; the need for an idealist philosophy to save society from the consequences of Nietzschean nihilism.

This is Bloom; it is also Fukuyama. It is also, in the opinion of this reader, dead wrong. It underrates both the Anglo-American tradition and the philosophical traditions represented today by anti-communist Marxists like Oxford’s David Harvey and critical philosophers like Jurgen Habermas.

Conservatives and neo-conservatives will like Fukuyama’s attacks on cultural relativism, but many will bridle at his wholesale dismissals of Christianity--”a slave ideology”--and of the conservative as well as the liberal roots of Anglo-American thought. Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson would hate this book as much as Jacques Derrida and Alexander Cockburn.

Neither will this book be popular among the politically correct. Fukuyama suffers from the neo-conservative urge to epater les proles --to get in a few sly digs against Afrocentrists, radical environmentalists and other lefties who drive him crazy. A predictable but pointless debate is likely to follow. Passionate voices from the cultural left will denounce Fukuyama as racist and all kinds of other nasty things. He and his neo-conservative allies will deny the charges with irritating calm. Fukuyama and his defenders will be right: He isn’t a racist. But baiting one’s opponents in this way is neither the wisest nor the most charitable course for an author bent on persuasion and hoping, if possible, to heal and renew an impoverished American intellectual climate.

“The End of History,” then, is a book of murkily vast ambitions and limited successes. It is more provocative in the questions it poses than it is interesting in the answers it suggests. Given the subject matter, it cannot always be a good read, but it is usually a clear one. Like the curate’s egg, and the optimist’s glass, it is partly excellent and half full.

For many readers, such is the sorry state of American intellectual life that it will be their introduction to a world of important philosophical and political reflection, and this is reason enough to congratulate Fukuyama on what he has accomplished with this book, and to wish him better success in his future endeavors.