The Wrong Side of History, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Accept a Decline into Liberal Totalitarianism: Ideology, the Super-ego and the National Psyche. (original) (raw)

RETHINKING THE END OF THE COLD WAR AND FRANCIS FUKUYAMA'S "END OF HISTORY" HYPOTHESIS

International Studies, 2011

The year 1991 marked a turning point in the world history - one of the two superpowers (the Soviet Union - USSR) collapsed, putting an end to the bipolar system and nearly half a century of the intense confrontation between the United States (US) & the USSR in their global Cold War. Two decades have passed since that day but scholars keep debating about its end, perhaps no less heated as they did about its origins. The fact that no single international relations theory managed to predict such an end and even had difficulties explaining it makes the end of the Cold War more attractive and controversial for both historians and theorists. Coming out right after this very end, Francis Fukuyama's book “The end of history and the last man” furthered the debate as it provoked the idea that the end of the Cold War would be the end of all kinds of IR theory and mankind's history toward a long-lasting peace and stability dominated by liberalism and Western values. How can we explain the end of the Cold War? Did it really end? Why did IR theory fail to predict such an end? Is the end of the Cold War an end to theory and history? These questions have been and are still shaping a great debate between international historians and IR theorists. The year of 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the Cold War's end - a perfect time for revisiting these issues. With the hope to contribute to the clarification of the aforesaid puzzles, this paper will review the debate and give its own assessment.

F. Fukuyama End of History and the world after the end of Cold War.pdf

The objective set in the present work is to know and analyze the main arguments put forward by Francis Fukuyama defending his idea of the "End of History", stressing the importance of end of the Cold War and the democratic process that broke with the collapse and fall of the USSR. Other aspects that highlight the Fukuyama postulates refer to the possibilities for starting the task of a Universal History, the historical evolution of modern science and its relationship with economic work can be considered as engines to move history towards progress, which should undeniably be identified with democracy. CONTENTS

The History Continues: Reflections about the Theory of the End of History from Francis Fukuyama

Asian Political Science Review

Fukuyama's thesis about "the end of history" is controversial. History is not an ideology. History cannot be ended, if by history we mean the past, which we remember and interpret for the purpose of orientating ourselves in the present and the future. Fukuyama has a right to declare the victory of liberal democracy, but other political ideologies have not become extinct. If we look at the thesis of the "end of history" from a scientific point of view, then we can conclude that such a thing is impossible: for after the "end of history", history continues. Therefore, there is no real end to history. It is continuing a quarter of a century after the Fukyama's thesis was published. Even if we can accept the thesis of the end of history as an ideology, we still cannot accept the end of philosophy. Phenomenology, Critical Realism, Existentialist Philosophy, Hermeneutics, Structuralism, etc. are just some of the evidence that contemporary philosophy continues to exist and evolve, despite the rising and falling of various ideologies in the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. This can also be said about art, culture, and history as a science.

"History" Did Not Die: The Ideological Battle in the Post Cold-War World

Sapguskanda Defence Review, 2023

Francis Fukuyama, political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer, in his 1989 essay argued that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the end of ideological battle between the two major power blocks in cold-war politics and history would not progress further, in Marxist or Hegellian sense. Fukuyama's argument was that liberal democracy will be the only ideological alternative for humanity. But, this paper argues that the history did not end and the ideological battle still continues; individualism vs communitarianism [my coinage]. The post coldwar ideological battle between Individualism based on liberal democracy and communitarianism based on tribalist (or collective identity based) approach manifests in the present world and the ideological ground for the communitarianism among the "Rest (as per Samuel Huntington)" does not manifest affirmatively, rather negatively. The overall argument in this paper is that dialectical sublation of ideologies has not died and the progression is still alive.

A Brief Analysis of Fukuyama's Thesis ''The End Of History

Makalede Francis Fukuyama kısaca tanıtıldıktan sonra, 1989'da yazdığı "Tarihin Sonu" makalesi, makalede temel vurgulanan konular ve çelişkili yanla rı tartı §ılıyor. Ardından makalenin tartışmalara yol açması üzerine 1992'de yaz dığı "Tarihin Sonu ve Son İnsan" kitabında savunduğu temel noktalar belirtilerek, makaleyle karşılaştırmalar yapılıyor.

Globalization and World Economic Crisis: Antinomy of Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man

The end of phenomenal cold war in the 1990s between western and eastern Europe, following the dramatic exit of soviet union from global political theatre saw the emergence of new world order and the truimphism of capitalism and liberal democracy even among the countries hither to under the shackles of dictatorial regimes. These international trends in no small way reinforced the "third wave" of global capitalist democracy revolution. At the apex of the epoch of deepening globalization, there exist the general belief and tendency particularly among the western inspired conventional wisdom that with the collapse of soviet union, socialism has demised giving room for the establishment of capitalism and liberal democracy as the only arrangement under which human aspiration and prosperity became tenable.

Fall of Communism and End of History, Encyclopedia of Political Thought

The end of history is a concept developed by G. W. F. Hegel, according to whom the unplanned struggles of history have produced a progress of human consciousness that culminates in the final, rational state of humanity. The notion of such a historical progression of consciousness was adopted by Karl Marx, who however attributed progress to the economic history of humans. With the fall of the (Marxist) Soviet Union, the Hegelian notion was revived by Francis Fukuyama.