Taking On Fukuyama

If ever a writer was the victim of his own success, it is Francis Fukuyama. In 1989, with Soviet power on the retreat in Eastern Europe and democratic activists filling Tiananmen Square, Mr. Fukuyama published an essay in The National Interest titled “The End of History?” In it, he proposed that the collapse of communism had left liberal democracy as the only viable form of government in the world. If History, with a philosophical capital H, was the story of mankind’s progress towards a final state of freedom and happiness, then that progress was finished. All that remained was for the rest of the world to catch up to the end-point the West had happily reached. Three years later, when Mr. Fukuyama expanded his essay into a book, the tentative question mark was dropped: now he wrote of “The End of History and the Last Man.” There is “a coherent and directional History of mankind,” he insisted, “that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy.”