Frank Fukuyama was right all along

ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images

Whenever a new conflict breaks out somewhere in the world, commentators like to trot their old favorite whipping boy: Francis Fukuyama’s much-misunderstood essay-turned-book, The End of History and the Last Man.

“See! History hasn’t ended,” they say, pointing to the September 11 attacks or Russia’s war with Georgia or the latest dire situation in Somalia.

Of course, many of these commentators have probably never actually read Fukuyama’s argument, which uses the word “history’ in a very particular way — it’s History with a capital “H,” as in the process of dialectical change, the grand sweep of big ideas and economic trends that Marx talked about. In Marx’s estimation, communism was the logical ideological end point of this process, but Fukuyama saw “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” in the long run. He never believed that everything would be all gum drops and lollipops.

As Fukuyama told FP in an “epiphanies” interview in the current issue:

THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD THING [about my idea, the “end of history”] was the word ‘history.’ People thought I was saying that nothing was going to happen after the Cold War.

And if you haven’t read it already, check out Fukuyama’s very smart essay in this Sunday’s Washington Post — a nice counterpoint to all the hysteria about whether we are entering a new age of autocracy. “While bullies can still throw their weight around, democracy and capitalism still have no real competitors,” he writes. I see no reason to believe he is wrong.