Fukuyama End Of History Quotes

It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master

The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.

For capitalism flourishes best in a mobile and egalitarian society

For Hegel, by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

لقد إتضح في أواخر القرن 20 أن نظامي هتلر و ستالين إنما كانا طريقين فرعيين للتاريخ لم يوصلا إلى شيء، و لم يكونا بديلين حقيقيين للتنظيم الإجتماعي البشري

و لا شك في أن الأمريكي الذي تربى على أفكار هوبز و لوك و جيفيرسون و غيره من الآباء المؤسسين الأمريكيين سيرى في تعظيم هيجل للسيد الأرستوقراطي الذي يخاطر بحياته في معركة من أجل المنزلة مفهوماً يعبر عن الثقافة الجرمانية "التيوتونية

For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon, but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense, freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature or according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself. The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige.

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

But supposing the world has become “filled up”, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

التاريخ العالمي ليس بحاجة إلى تبرير كل نظام مستبد و كل حرب حتى يوضح نمطاً أكبر دا معنى و هدف في التطور الإنساني.

But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between socalled "interest groups" that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving.

-و ليس بوسع الديموقراطية أن تنهض إلا على أساس من تقسيم الدولة إلى وحدات قومية أصغر . -الديموقراطية لا تصبح بالضرورة أكثر فعالية كلما إزداد المجتمع تعقيداً و تنوعاً في تكوينه، بل إنها لتفشل حين يتعدى التنوع حداً معينا.

و قد كان الفشل المطرد الذي صادفته الشيوعية في سعيها في التغلغل إلى العالم النامي، مع انتشارها في دول هي على وشك الدخول في المراحل الأولى من التصنيع، موحياً بأن "إغراء الشمولية" هو كما وصفه والت روستو "مرض المرحلة الانتقالية" أو هو حالة مرضية ناجمة عن احتياجات سياسية و اجتماعية خاصة في دول تمر بمرحلة معينة من التطور الاجتماعي و الإقتصادي.

Major thinkers in this century from a wide range of traditions in philosophy are scarcely comprehensible without understanding their relation to Hegel. This is true of Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, Kojève (whose thought has been reworked by Francis Fukuyama in his writing on the ‘end of history’), Derrida, Lacan, Rorty, Royce, Althusser, Charles Taylor, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and many others.

What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism.

Men are made unhappy not because they fail to gratify some fixed set of desires, but by the gap that continually arises between new wants and their fulfillment.

no man is a good judge in his own case.

men had been everywhere and had seen everything, life’s greatest experience had ended with most of life still to be lived, to find common purpose in the quiet days of peace would be hard

In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are “masters of the universe.” (They will believe this, however, only in bull markets.) But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question. One suspects that some people will not be satisfied until they prove themselves by that very act that constituted their humanness at the beginning of history: they will want to risk their lives in a violent battle, and thereby prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to themselves and to their fellows that they are free. They will deliberately seek discomfort and sacrifice, because the pain will be the only way they have of proving definitively that they can think well of themselves, that they remain human beings.

For Nietzsche, the very essence of man was neither his desire nor his reason, but his thymos: man was above all a valuing creature, the "beast with red cheeks" who found life in his ability to pronounce the words "good" and "evil.

An industrial policy worked in Taiwan only because the state was able to shield its planning technocrats from political pressures so that they could reinforce the market and make decisions according to criteria of efficiency—in other words, worked because Taiwan was not governed democratically. An American industrial policy is much less likely to improve its economic competitiveness, precisely because America is more democratic than Taiwan or the Asian NIEs. The planning process would quickly fall prey to pressures from Congress either to protect inefficient industries or to promote ones favored by special interests.

The experience of the twentieth century made highly problematic the claims of progress on the basis of science and technology. For the ability of technology to better human life is critically dependent on a parallel moral progress in man. Without the latter, the power of technology will simply be turned to evil purposes, and mankind will be worse off than it was previously.

The effect of education on political attitudes is complicated, for democratic society. The self-professed aim of modern education is to "liberate" people from prejudices and traditional forms of authority. Educated people are said not to obey authority blindly, but rather learn to think for themselves. Even if this doesn't happen on a mass basis, people can be taught to see their own self-interest more clearly, and over a longer time horizon. Education also makes people demand more of themselves and for themselves; in other words, they acquire a certain sense of dignity which they want to have respected by their fellow citizens and by the state. In a traditional peasant society, it is possible for a local landlord (or, for that matter, a communist commissar) to recruit peasants to kill other peasants and dispossess them of their land. They do so not because it is in their interest, but because they are used to obeying authority. Urban professionals in developed countries, on the other hand, can be recruited to a lot of nutty causes like liquid diets and marathon running, but they tend not to volunteer for private armies or death squads simply because someone in a uniform tells them to do so

Following the horrors of 9/11, Fukuyama and his ideas were derided as triumphalist nonsense. But he was only half wrong. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction. It could ride on the nihilistic rejection of the established order, regardless of alternatives or consequences. That would not be without precedent. The Roman Empire wasn’t overthrown by something called “feudalism”—it collapsed of its own dead weight, to the astonishment of friend and foe alike. The centuries after the calamity lacked ideological form. Similarly, a history built on negation would be formless and nameless: a shadowy moment, however long, between one true age and another.

يمكن القول في ثقة بأن القرن العشرين قد غرس فينا جميعاً تشاؤماً تاريخيا عميقاً

يقول إلكسندر كوجيف في تفسيره لهيجل : "-إن كانت السيادة الخاملة طريقاً مسدوداً، فإن العبودية النشيطة هي مصدر كل تقدم إنساني و اجتماعي و تاريخي، و ما التاريخ إلا تاريخ العبد النشيط

Christian freedom was an inner condition of the spirit, and not an external condition of the body.

Whether or not true free will exists, virtually all human beings act as if it does, and evaluate each other on the basis of their ability to make what they believe to be genuine moral choices.

See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last man (London: Penguin, 1993). Note the often-overlooked second part where Fukuyama criticizes the end of history as leading to the last man.

but on Hegel, his "idealist" predecessor who was the first philosopher to answer Kant's challenge of writing a Universal History. For Hegel's understanding of the Mechanism that underlies the historical process is incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist. For Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. Hegel's Universal History complements the Mechanism we have just outlined, but gives us a broader understanding of man—"man as man"— that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history.

recent events compel us to raise anew. From the beginning, the most serious and systematic attempts to write Universal Histories saw the central issue in history as the development of Freedom. History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out. And if we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that History itself might be at an end.

نحن في حاجة إلى معيار يلم بالتاريخ كله حتى يمكننا الحكم على هديه على المجتمع الديموقراطي، و إلى مفهوم عن "الانسان باعتباره انسانا" يسمح لنا برؤية نقائصه الكامنة. و هذا هو السبب الذي دفعنا إلى أن ندرس "الإنسان الأول" عند هوبز و لوك و روسو و هيجل.

و قد أسفرت محاولتنا السابقة لبناء تاريخ عالمي عن مسارين تاريخيين متوازيين، الأول : تحكمه العلوم الطبيعية الحديثة و منطق الرغبة، و الثاني : يحكمه الصراع من أجل الاعتراف. و قد كانت نهايتا المسارين واحدة لحسن الحظ، ألا و هي الدبموقراطية الليبرالية الرأسمالية.

Verily, men gave themselves their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself—he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore he calls himself “man,” which means: the esteemer. To esteem is to create: hear this, you creators! Esteeming itself is of all esteemed things the most estimable treasure. Through esteeming alone is there value: and without esteeming, the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear this, you creators!

On 11 September 2001 the Twin Towers were hit. Twelve years earlier, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. That date heralded the “happy 90’s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history” –the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won; that the search was over; that the advent of a global, liberal world community lurked just around the corner; that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending were merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance were the leaders did not yet grasp that their time was up). In contrast, 9/11 is the main symbol of the Clintonite happy 90’s. This is the era in which new walls emerge everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European union, on the U.S.-Mexico border. The rise of the populist New Right is just the most prominent example of the urge to raise new walls.

يذهب هيجل إلى أن الرغبة في نيل الاعتراف هي التي كانت تدفع أي متصارعين بدائيين في قديم الزمان الى المخاطرة بحياتهما بالدخول في عراك حتى الموت، حيث إن كلاَ منهما يسعى إلى نيل اعتراف الآخر بأدميته. فإن حدث وأدى الخوف الطبيعي من الموت بأحد المتصارعين الى الخضوع والإذعان، نشأت علاقة السيد بالعبد.

The Great Transformation (1944) that ‘the utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory’. In the 1980s, the decade of deregulation and privatization in the West, however, this experiment was revived. The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened the bland fanatics, who had been intellectually nurtured during the Cold War in a ‘paradise’, as Niebuhr called it, albeit one ‘suspended in a hell of global insecurity’. The old Hegelian-Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history hypothesis.

If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, ... then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom; for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.

As Alenka Zupančič put it, the problem with the idea of the end of the world is the same as with Fukuyama’s end of history: the end itself doesn’t end, we just get stuck in a weird immobility. The secret wish of us all, what we think about all the time, is only one thing: when will it end? But it will not end: it is reasonable to see the ongoing pandemic as announcing a new era of ecological troubles.

In America, conservative historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history: liberal capitalist democracy had won, no ideology could challenge it anymore, and nothing remained but a little cleanup work around the edges while all the world got on board the train headed for the only truth. … On the other side of the planet, however, jihadists and Wahhabis were drawing very different conclusions from all these thunderous events [Iran's 1979 revolution and ouster of US presence and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan]. In Iran, it seemed to them, Islam had brought down the Shah and driven out America. In Afghanistan, Muslims had not just beaten the Red Army but toppled the Soviet Union itself. Looking at all this, Jihadists saw a pattern they thought they recognized. The First Community had defeated the two superpowers of its day, the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires, simply by having God on its side. Modern Muslims also confronted two superpowers, and they had now brought one of them down entirely. On down, one to go was how it looked to the jihadists and the Wahabbis. History coming to an end? Hardly. As these radicals saw it, history was just getting interesting.

و كما في نظرة كانط إلى نزعة الإنسان للإجتماع التي تتسم بطابع غير اجتماعي ـ فقد رأى هيجل أن التقدم في التاريخ لا ينشأ لا عن تقدم مطرد للعقل، و إنما عن التفاعل الأعمى للعواطف التي أدت بالإنسان إلى الصراعات و الثورات و الحروب، و هو ما أطلق عليه وصفه الشهير "دهاء العقل" و مسار التاريخ هو مسار دائب من الصراعات، تتصادم فيه الأنظمة الفكرية و الأنظمة السياسية، و تتفكك نتيجة لتناقضاتها الداخلية، ثم تحل محلها أنظمة أخرى تحمل تناقضات أقل، فتكون بالتالي أرقى من سابقاتها. و هو ما يسمى بالدياليكتيك أو الجدلية

* إن مشروع الانسان بعد أن حرر نفسه من قيود الفلسفات السابقة التي كانت تؤمن باحتمال وجود حقيقة مطلقة أصبح يتمثل في "اعادة تقييم كافة القيم" بدءا بالقيم المسيحية، و قد سعى عامدا إلى زعزعة الايمان بالمساواة بين البشر، ذاهبا الى أنها مجرد تعصب غرسته المسيحية فينا، و كأن نيتشه يأمل في أن يتخلى مبدأ المساواة في يوم ما عن مكانه لأخلاقيات تبرر هيمنة الاقوياء على الضعفاء، و انتهى بتمجيد ما يمكن أن نعتبره فلسفة القسوة، كان يكره المجتمعات التي تأخذ بالتنوع و التسامح، و يفضل عليها تلك التي تأخذ بعدم التسامح و التصرف الغريزي دونما شعور بالندم،...

و قد دار جدال واسع النطاق بشأن صلة نيتشه بالفاشية الألمانية. و رغم أنه بالوسع الدفاع عنه و تبرئته من التهمة ضيقة الأفق بأنه كان أباً للإشتراكية القومية و نظرياتها الساذجة، فإن العلاقة بين فكره و النازية ليست من قبيل المصادفةـ فقد زعزعت النسبية عند نيتشه –كما عند خلفه مارتن هايدجر- كافة الأسانيد الفلسفية التي تقوم عليها الديموقراطية الليبيرالية الغربية، و قد أقامت مكانها نظرية القوة و الهيمنة. و كان نيتشه يرى أن مرحلة العدمية الأوروبية التي أسهم بجهد لتدشينها ستؤدي إلى "حروب كبرى تشنها الروح و هي حروب لا هدف لها غير تأكيد أهمية الحرب ذاتها.

The decline of community life suggests that in the future, we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts. But the opposite danger exists as well, namely, that we will return to being first men engaged in bloody and pointless prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons. Indeed, the two problems are related to one another, for the absence of regular and constructive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later resurgence in an extreme and pathological form.

according to Fukuyama, modern liberal democracies produced men composed entirely of desire and reason, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest…. It is not an accident that people in democratic societies are preoccupied with material gain and live in an economic world devoted to the satisfaction of the myriad small needs of the body…. The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause, because he recognizes that history was full of pointless battles in which men fought

فمن المفارقات إذن أن يكون استمرار الحروب و التنافس العسكري بين الأمم من العوامل الكبرى لتوحيد الأمم، فمع أن الحروب تؤدي إلى الدمار، فهي تجبر الدول على قبول الحضارة التكنولوجية الحديثة و الهياكل الإجتماعية التي تدعمهاـ و العلوم ا...لطبيعية الحديثة تفرض نفسها على الإنسان ، سواء كان مبالياً بها أم لا ، و ما من خيار أمام معظم الأمم غير قبول العقلانية التكنولوجية للحداثة، إن هي شاءت الحفاظ على سياستها القومية، و هو مصداق لمقولة كانط بأن التغيرات التاريخية إنما تحدث نتيجة نزعة الإنسان للإجتماع المتسمة بطابع غير إجتماعي، فالصراع لا التعاون هو أول ما يغري الإنسان بالعيش في مجتمعات، ثم محاولة تطويرها..بصورة أرقى.

---يقول كارل ماركس :"كان هيجل يعتقد أن العمل هو الجوهر الحقيقي للإنسان" --- إن أي شخص قضى زمنا في السفر أو الإقامة خارج وطنه، لا يسعه إلا أن يلاحظ كيف تؤثر الحضارات و الثقافات القومية تأثيراً حاسماً في موقف الشعب من العمل.... ---و قد أشار توماس سوويل إلى ما في الولايات المتحدة من اختلاف شديد في الدخل و التعليم بين نسل السود الذين هاجروا طوعا من جزر الهند الغربية، و نسل السود الذين جيء بهم مباشرة من إفريقيا كعبيد... ---و الواقع أن تفوق الألمان العريق على جيرانهم من الأوربيين في الحفاظ على المهارات الصناعية بالغة الرقي، هو من الظواهر التي يصعب تفسيرها على ضوء السياسات الإقتصادية العريضة. أما سببه النهائي فلا بد أنه كامن في المجال الثقافي.

Nietzsche believed that no true human excellence, greatness, or nobility was possible except in aristocratic societies. In other words, true freedom or creativity could arise only out of megalothymia, that is, the desire to be recognized as better than others. Even if people were born equal, they would never push themselves to their own limits if they simply wanted to be like everyone else. For the desire to be recognized as superior to others is necessary if one is to be superior to oneself. This desire is not merely the basis of conquest and imperialism, it is also the precondition for the creation of anything else worth having in life, whether great symphonies, paintings, novels, ethical codes, or political systems. Nietzsche pointed out that any form of real excellence must initially arise out of discontent, a division of the self against itself and ultimately a war against the self with all the suffering that entails: "one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star." Good health and self-satisfaction are liabilities. Thymos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that the self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal. Not all men feel this pull, but for those who do, thymos cannot be satisfied by the knowledge that they are merely equal in worth to all other human beings.

صحيح أن الإسلام يشكل أيديولوجية متسقة ومتماسكة شأن الليبرالية والشيوعية، وأن له معاييره الأخلاقية الخاصة به ونظريته المتصلة بالعدالة السياسية و الاجتماعية. كذلك فإن للإسلام جاذبية يمكن أن تكون عالمية، داعيا إليه البشر كافة باعتبارهم بشرا لا مجرد أعضاء في جماعة عرقية، أو قومية معينة. وقد تمكن الإسلام في الواقع من الانتصار على الديمقراطية الليبرالية في أنحاء كثيرة من العالم الإسلامي، وشكل ذلك خطرا كبيرا على الممارسات الليبرالية حتى في الدول التي لم يصل فيها إلى السلطة السياسية بصورة مباشرة. وقد تلا نهاية الحرب الباردة في أوروبا على الفور تحدي العراق للغرب، وهو ما قيل (عن حق أو عن غير حق) إن الإسلام كان أحد عناصر غير أنه بالرغم من القوة التي أبداها الإسلام في صحوته الحالية، فبالإمكان القول: إن هذا الدين لا يكاد يكون له جاذبية خارج المناطق التي كانت في الأصل إسلامية الحضارة. وقد يبدو أن زمن المزيد من التوسع الحضاري الإسلامي قد ولى. فإن كان بوسع الإسلام أن يكسب من جديد ولاء المرتدين عنه، فهو لن يصادف هوى في قلوب شباب برلين، أو طوكيو، أو موسكو، ورغم أن نحو بليون نسمة يدينون بدين الإسلام (أي خمس تعداد سكان العالم) فليس بوسعهم تحدي الديمقراطية الليبرالية في أرضها على المستوى الفكري. بل إنه قد يبدو أن العالم الإسلامي أشد عرضة للتأثر بالأفكار الليبرالية على المدى الطويل من احتمال أن يحدث العكس، حيث إن مثل هذه الليبرالية قد اجتذبت إلى نفسها أنصارا عديدين وأقوياء لها من بين المسلمين، على مدى القرن ونصف القرن الأخيرين. والواقع أن سبب الصحوة الأصولية الراهنة هو قوة الخطر الملموس من جانب القيم الغربية الليبرالية على المجتمعات الإسلامية التقليدية.

The possibility that liberal society does not represent the simultaneous satisfaction of desire and thymos but instead opens up a grave disjuncture between them is raised by critics on both the Left and the Right. The attack from the Left would maintain that the promise of universal, reciprocal recognition remains essentially unfulfilled in liberal societies, for the reasons just indicated: economic inequality brought about by capitalism ipso facto implies unequal recognition. The attack from the Right would argue that the problem with liberal society is not the inadequate universality of recognition, but the goal of equal recognition itself. The latter is problematic because human beings are inherently unequal; to treat them as equal is not to affirm but to deny their humanity.

---ستواجه عملية الأخد بالديموقراطية هي أيضاً مستقبلا يشوبه الغموض، و مع كثرة الشعوب في عالمنا التي تعتتقد على المستوى النظري أنها تريد الرخاء الرأسمالي و الديموقراطية اليبيرالية فلن يكون من المتاح للجميع تحقيق هذه الأهداف. --قد يُكتب النصر في المستقبل لبدائل إستبدادية جديدة. فإن تحققت مثل هذه البدائل فستكون من خلق مجموعتين متباينتين من الدول: الدول التي فشلت لأسباب حضارية في تنمية اقتصادها بالرغم من محاولتها تطبيق الليبيرالية الاقتصادية، و الدول التي صادفت نجاحا غير عادي في اللعبة الرأسمالية. و قد شهدنا في الماضي أمثال هذه الظاهرة الأولى، و هي بزوغ نظريات معادية لليبرالية نتيجة فشل اقتصادي، فحركة الاحياء الراهنة للأصولية الإسلامية التي نلمسها في كل دول العالم تقريباً ذات التعداد الكبير من المسلمين، يمكن إعتبارها رد فعل لفشل المجتمعات الاسلامية بوجه عام في الحفاض على كرامتها في مواجهة الغرب غير المسلم...

In the West, we are perilously getting down to our last man. Liberal democracy, among us, is achieving the goal that Fukuyama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is still alive and well. While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless…. We are proud if our sons get into a good college; they are proud if their sons die as martyrs. To rid your society of high-testosterone alpha males may bring peace and quiet; but if you have an enemy that is building up an army of alpha boys to hate you fanatically and who have vowed to destroy you, you will be committing suicide…. The end of testosterone in the West alone will not culminate in the end of history, but it may well culminate in the end of the West.

Moreover, it appears to be the case that rational recognition is not self-sustaining, but must rely on pre-modern, non-universal forms of recognition to function properly. Stable democracy requires a sometimes irrational democratic culture, and a spontaneous civil society growing out of pre-liberal traditions. Capitalist prosperity is best promoted by a strong work ethic, which in turn depends on the ghost of dead religous beliefs, if not those beliefs themselves, or else an irrational commitment to nation or race. Group rather than universal recognition can be a better support for both economic activity and community life, and even if it is ultimately irrational, that irrationality can take a very long time before it undermines the societies that practice it. Thus, not only is universal recognition not universally satisfying, but the ability of liberal democratic societies to establish and sustain themselves on a rational basis over the long term is open to some doubt.

We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts. Aristotle was more correct than these early modern liberal theorists when he said that human beings were political by nature. So while an individualistic understanding of human motivation may help to explain the activities of commodity traders and libertarian activists in present-day America, it is not the most helpful way to understand the early evolution of human politics. Everything

Another potential challenge to my thesis is that I myself would be hypocritical to continue in biblical studies. However, while I concede that this would be true if I were pursuing biblical studies for the sake of keeping the field alive, I have instead used my work in biblical studies to persuade people to abandon reliance on this book. I see my goal as no different from physicians, whose goal of ending human illness would lead to their eventual unemployment. The same holds true for me. I would be hypocritical only if I sought to maintain the relevance of my profession despite my belief that the profession is irrelevant. If I work to inform people of the irrelevance of the Bible for modern life, then I am fully consistent with my beliefs. From a different angle, our work is part of the proliferation of books preoccupied with the finality of different aspects of the human experience. Perhaps the most famous recent example is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (2002), in which he argued that liberal democracy constitutes the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution," so that we should expect no new historical developments in world history. Fukuyama's thesis, of course, has been misunderstood to mean that historical events would end. However, the truth is that he has a more Hegelian view of history, in which history ends when a sort of stasis in the development of new ideas is reached. According to Fukuyama, liberal democracy cannot be superseded and will triumph over any other competing political idea; people will see its advantages and will universally adopt it. And so, in that sense, history will end.

There’s another way to understand Fukuyama’s boredom with history’s end: success breeds its own type of sadness. Once a goal is achieved or an adversary vanquished, the victor’s sense of purpose becomes less relevant. The import of future endeavors begins to lack the significance of what has already been achieved. And that’s always a depressing state of affairs.

We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.

The End of History and the Last Man in 1992,3 I have regularly been asked whether event X didn’t invalidate my thesis. X could be a coup in Peru, war in the Balkans, the September 11 attacks, the global financial crisis, or, most recently, Donald Trump’s election and the wave of populist nationalism described above.

A liberla democracy that could fight a short and decisive war every generation or so to defend its own liberty and independence would be far healthier and more satisfied than one that experienced nothing but continuous peace.

The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life.

Recognition is the central problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism, and the desire to dominate.

As John Gray,* a philosopher and critic of Fukuyama, pointed out, “In a span of six years [Tony] Blair took Britain into war five times," and [George W.] Bush's* invasion of Iraq* and Afghanistan has cost the United States $1.4 trillion. All of this was done in the name of expanding Western liberal democracy.

Regardless of a country's history or cultural makeup, science will guarantee that all societies become more alike.

The last man" will be stripped of purpose and ambition.

Democracy and the market cannot flourish without a stable state apparatus and the willingness of most people to adopt the "Western system.

If modern science made possible weapons of unprecedented destructiveness like the machine gun and the bomber, modern politics created a state of unprecedented power, for which a new word, totalitarianism, had to be coined.

What is at stake for people around the world, from Spain and Argentina to Hungary and Poland, when they throw off dictatorship and establish a liberal democracy? To some extent, the answer is a purely negative one based on the mistakes and injustices of the preceding political order: they want to get rid of the hated colonels or party bosses who oppressed them, or to live without fear of arbitrary arrest. Those living in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union think or hope that they are getting capitalist prosperity, since capitalism and democracy are closely intertwined in the minds of many. But as we have seen, it is perfectly possible to have prosperity without freedom, as Spain, or South Korea, or Taiwan did under autocratic rule. And yet in each of these countries prosperity was not enough. Any attempt to portray the basic human impulse driving the liberal revolutions of the late twentieth century, or indeed of any liberal revolution since those of America and France in the eighteenth century, as merely an economic one, would be radically incomplete. The Mechanism created by modern natural science remains a partial and ultimately unsatisfying account of the historical process. Free government exercises a positive pull of its own: When the president of the United States or the president of France praises liberty and democracy, they are praised as good things in, themselves, and this praise seems to have resonance for people around the world.

modern thought has arrived at an impasse, unable to come to a consensus on what constitutes man and his specific dignity, and consequently unable to define the rights of man.

The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.

In many cases, authoritarian states are capable of producing rates of economic growth unachievable in democratic societies.

This is why we shouldn’t dismiss as ridiculous Fukuyama’s talk about the end of history in 1990: after the victory of global capitalism, the sense of history changed. And, in some properly metaphysical sense, our total immersion in the global digital network which makes our entire tradition instantly accessible, signals the end of historical experience as we knew it. We already “feel” how, in some sense, cyberspace is “more real”—more real than external physical reality: it is a complex version of the Platonic realm of Ideas where all that has happened and that happens now is inscribed into an atemporal synchronous order. In our physical reality that we relate to through our senses, things always change, everything is set to disappear, reality comes to fully exist only when it is registered in cyberspace.

In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.

More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such constituted the “end of history.” That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was

التدمير الإنتحاري الذي تسبب فيه النظام الاوروبي للدولة خلال حربين عالميتين هدم فكرة تفوق العقلانية الغربية، في حين أضحى من الصعب التمييز بين المتمدن و الهمجي –و هو تمييز كان غريزيا لدى الاوروبيين في القرن التاسع عشر

دولة بيروقراطية مثقلة بالقوانين ترى أن توزيع الثروة القومية أهم من إنتاج الثروة

لإندثار المفاجئ للديناصورات لا يزعزع من صحة النظرية البيولوجية الخاصة بالتطور

حروب نابليون الدموية باستطاعة الفلاسفة أن يفسروها في ضوء الحركة العريضة للمدنية على أنها في نتائجها تخدم التقدم الإجتماعي لأنها تساعد على انتشار مفهوم الحكومة الجمهورية

من الخصائص اللافتة للنظر للمواقف الثورية أن الأحداث التي تدفع الناس إلى القيام بأعظم المخاطرات و التي تؤدي إلى إنهيار الحكومات، نادراً ما تكون هي الأحداث الكبيرة التي يصفها المؤرخون اللاحقون بالأسباب الرئيسية للثورة، و إنما هي أحداث صغيرة تبدو عارض.

ي نهاية التاريخ ليس ثمة منافسون أيديولوجيون للديموقراطية الليبيرالية، و قد رفض الناس في الماضي هذه الديموقراطية الليبيرالية لاعتقادهم أن الملكية و الارستوقراطية و الثيوقراطية أو الحكومة الدينية و الشمولية الشيوعية و سائر الأيديولوجيات التي اتفق أن آمنوا بها أفضل منها. أما الآن فيبدو أن ثمة اتفاقاً عاماً –إلا في العالم الإسلامي- على قبول مزاعم الديموقراطية الليبيرالية بأنها أكثر صور الحكم عقلانية، و هي صورة الدولة التي تحقق إلى أقصى حد ممكن إشباع كل من الرغبة العقلانية و الإعتراف العقلاني. فإن كان ذلك كذلك، فلماذا لم تصبح كافة الدول خارج العالم الإسلامي ديموقراطية؟ لماذا لا يزال الانتقال إلى الديموقراطية صعباُ بالنسبة لدول عديدة قبلت شعوبها و قياداتها المبادئ الديموقراطية نظرياً؟ لماذا نشعر بالشك حيال أنظمة معينة في مختلف أنحاء العالم تدعى الآن أنها ديموقراطية و لا نحسبها ستظل دوماً هكذا، في حين نجد دولاً أخرى لا نكاد نتخيلها إلا ديموقراطيات مستقرة؟ و ما سر إيماننا بأن التيار الراهن المتجه صوب الليبيرالية قد ينحسر و يتراجع رغم أنه يبشر بالإنتصار في المدى البعيد ؟

فالاشتراكية إذن لم تعد مغرية كنموذج اقتصادي للدول النامية أكثر مما هي مغرية للمجتمعات الصناعية المتقدمة.

إن أولئك الذين درسوا تكرار قيام و سقوط دول كبيرة معينة في الماضي، و قارنوها بقيام و سقوط الدول الكبيرة في التاريخ المعاصر، ليسوا مخطئين في إشارتهم لأوجه التشابه، غير أن تكرار ظهور أنماط تاريخية معينة طويلة الأمد لا يتنافى مع وجود تاريخ ديالكتيكي غائي. ....إن الديموقراطية الأثينية مختلفة عن الديموقراطية الحديثة.

خاتم البشر هو في جوهره عند نيتشه العبد الظافر، و هو يتفق تماما مع هيجل في قوله إن المسيحية هي أيديولوجيا العبيد، و أن الديموقراطية تمثل صورة مدنية للمسيحية. و ما مساواة الناس كافة أمام القانون إلا تحقيق للمثال المسيحي الخاص بمساواة كافة المؤمنين في ملكوت السماء. غير أن الإيمان المسيحي بالمساواة بين البشر أمام الله لم يكن أكثر من تعصب نابع عن كراهية الضعفاء للأقوياء منهم. و قد نبعت الديانة المسيحية عن إدراك أن الضعفاء يمكنهم التغلب على الأقوياء متى تجمعوا معا في قطيع، و استخدموا سلاحي الذنب و الضمير. و قد غدت هذه الفكرة في العصور الحديثة واسعة الإنتشار و من الصعب مقاومتها، لا لأنه قد ثبت صحتها، و إنما لضخامة عدد الضعفاء.

And then, a new post-human history will begin.”—Francis Fukuyama, George Mason University, author of The End of History.[122

According to Hegel, the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to seek to make the other “recognize” their humanness by staking their lives in a mortal battle. When the natural fear of death leads one combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born. The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige. And precisely because the goal of the battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first glimmer of human freedom.

The twenty-first century will be a century of iron and storms. It will not resemble those harmonious futures predicted up to the 1970s. It will not be the global village prophesied by Marshall MacLuhan in 1966, or Bill Gates’ planetary network, or Francis Fukuyama’s end of history: a liberal global civilization directed by a universal state. It will be a century of competing peoples and ethnic identities. And paradoxically, the victorious peoples will be those that remain faithful to, or return to, ancestral values and realities—which are biological, cultural, ethical, social, and spiritual—and that at the same time will master technoscience. The twenty-first century will be the one in which European civilization, Promethean and tragic but eminently fragile, will undergo a metamorphosis or enter its irremediable twilight. It will be a decisive century.

This means that there is no "End of History," as Francis Fukuyama claimed at the end of the Cold War, but it also means that the dialectic always labors in the service of Logos, which is to say, in the service of God's providence. No matter how messy their activity seems, the mills of history always grind out the truth. History is dialectical, but it is also teleological;

Belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama warns. “American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.”1 And so it has. From a reading of history going back to ancient Rome, we know that this is the way republics unravel. That danger should be our uppermost concern today.

The young Hegel witnessed Napoleon riding through his university town after the Battle of Jena in 1806 and saw in that act the incipient universalization of recognition in the form of the principles of the French Revolution. This is the sense in which Hegel believed that history had come to an end: it culminated in the idea of universal recognition;

The political philosopher Francis Fukuyama captured the spirit of the time best in his 1989 essay “The End of History.