I composed my essay “The End of History?” sitting in my in-laws’ house in Las Vegas in the winter of 1988–89. I was preparing for a lecture at the University of Chicago organized by Allan Bloom and Nathan Tarcov at the Committee on Social Thought. Bloom was habitually pessimistic about the ability of Western liberal democracies to defend themselves, and the overall rubric of the lecture series was “The Decline of the West.” I told Bloom I was happy to participate, but that I would have a more optimistic take on what was going on in the world. He said that was fine, and I gave my talk a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Owen Harries, an Australian former ambassador, was the new editor of a small magazine founded by Irving Kristol called The National Interest. He had lunch with me at the Beverly Hills Hotel that winter and asked whether I had anything to contribute. I told him about my upcoming lecture, and he promised to publish the written version, which came out in the summer of 1989. The phrase “the end of history” was not my invention; rather, it was central to the thought of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was the first explicitly historicist philosopher; that is, a philosopher who argued that human thought and institutions were not fixed but evolved over historical time, and that the “truth” of a particular assertion needed to be judged in relation to the historical era in which it was articulated. We may not believe in the legitimacy of monarchy or slavery today, but there were certainly times in the past when many people did support such ideas. The fact that we believe in democracy and equal rights today is testimony to the reality of “History” in Hegel’s sense.
The idea that human societies evolved over time was something that took root only in modern times. Both Plato and Aristotle argued that there was a cycle of regimes that succeeded one another, but this led to cyclical change that simply reproduced previous forms of government in succession. The idea that history was progressive, that it had a beginning point in primitive societies but moved toward more complex and advanced ones, was adumbrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality under the heading of “perfectibility.” His description of “man in the state of nature” was not simply a thought exercise, as it was for Thomas Hobbes, but an actual effort to describe human behavior that drew on what Europeans at that time knew about non-Western societies. Europeans were aware of the existence of other sophisticated societies, such as those of Islam and China, but the opening up of the New World suggested societies differed in what we would today call their level of development. Hegel simply systematized the idea of History and provided an intellectual structure for understanding what drove that evolution.
The notion that societies evolve over historical time in a progressive fashion is tacitly accepted by almost everyone today, whether they self-consciously understand that fact or not. The idea of a Hegelian history is embedded in our words “development” and “modernization.” Organizations such as the former US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (i.e., the World Bank) were both dedicated not to simply helping poor countries become rich, but to helping them create modern institutions that make life more secure and predictable.
The most important intellectual to accept and then modify Hegel’s concept of history was Karl Marx. Hegel argued that history had evolved into the modern liberal state in the wake of the French Revolution. Marx criticized Hegel’s understanding of the end of history and argued that the true end of the human development story would be a Communist utopia. This would come only after the working class rose up and displaced the bourgeoisie, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the Marxist end of history, the alienation brought on by the capitalist division of labor would be abolished and human beings would be able, as Marx said in The German Ideology, “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”
My particular understanding of Hegel did not come directly from Hegel but from Hegel’s twentieth-century interpreter, the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève taught an extremely influential seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris in the late 1930s that was attended by many luminaries who would go on to become major figures in the French postwar intellectual firmament: Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Éric Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron. He had an extended dialogue with Leo Strauss on philosophy and tyranny, and got to know Allan Bloom as well. Kojève’s lectures were later transcribed and published as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.
Kojève of course accepted Hegel’s historicism, but he made historical progress revolve around a critical human characteristic: the desire for recognition. Human beings do not simply desire material resources such as food, clothing, and shelter; they also crave the respect or recognition of other human beings. This struggle for recognition results in bloody battles at the beginning of history as individuals seek dominance; those who achieve it become masters, while the losers become slaves. But neither the master nor the slave finds his desire for recognition fully satisfied: the slave for obvious reasons, but the master as well because he is recognized not by another master but by a slave.
In Kojève’s account, human beings are unique insofar as they seek recognition for their willingness to risk their lives in a bloody battle. Other creatures in nature are instinctively programmed to preserve their own lives or the lives of their offspring; only human beings are willing to risk their biological lives for the sake of recognition alone, as opposed to, say, the material spoils that come as a result of victory in war.
In this respect, Kojève’s human being is similar to that of his predecessor Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that what made human beings distinctive was their possession of moral will, an ability to choose right or wrong that was ultimately not subject to the laws of physics. Human beings therefore had to be treated as ends in themselves rather than as a means to other ends. But in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, masters cannot achieve the satisfaction of recognition until they realize that this will come only with the equal and mutual recognition by fellow citizens. My particular gloss on Kojève/Hegel was that this could only come about in a modern liberal state, where the equal and mutual recognition of all citizens was guaranteed by a rule of law that granted them basic rights. The liberal state was legitimate and stable not necessarily because it distributed material rewards equally, but because it provided equal recognition and thus satisfied the thymotic side of human striving.
In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève playfully asserted that history ended in 1806 at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, where Napoléon defeated the Prussian monarchy. The idea that history ended that year, prior to all of the huge political upheavals that followed in the two subsequent centuries—Italian and German unification; the American Civil War; the colonization and later decolonization of much of the non-European world; two World Wars; the Holocaust; revolutions in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere—is on the face of it much more absurd than an assertion that it ended in 1989 or 1991 when Communism collapsed. But what Kojève meant by this was summed up in the following passage from his lectures on Hegel:
What has happened since then [i.e., the Battle of Jena] has been nothing but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the genuinely historical perspective, the two World Wars with their train of small and large revolutions have only had the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the outlying provinces into line with the (really or virtually) most advanced European historical stages . . . It might even be said that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already reached the final stage of Marxist “communism,” since all the members of a “classless society” can, for all practical purposes, acquire whatever they please, whenever they please, without having to work for it any more than they are inclined to do.
With the defeat of the Prussian monarchy in 1806, Napoléon brought to the core of old Europe the Code Napoléon, the modern legal framework coming out of the French Revolution. The latter established the underlying principles of a modern liberal order, namely, the two principles of liberty and equality, or the equality of liberty. Obviously, these principles were nowhere truly implemented. As Napoléon was advancing in central Europe, for example, the French colonial authorities were putting down a slave revolt led by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti; colonization of Algeria and Vietnam were still decades in the future. But Kojève’s point was that once the idea of universal freedom got out, it was only a matter of time before those principles became accepted and practiced around the world. Toussaint himself had started his uprising, for example, under the banner of the Rights of Man and Citizen that had been recently declared in Paris. So there were rearguard actions to defend the old order everywhere, but in the end they would not stop the march of the idea of liberty, or of the equality of liberty.
The implication of this understanding of Kojève/Hegel was that no amount of “stuff happening” out in the real world of global politics could by itself falsify the notion that history had ended, whether in 1789, 1806, or 1989. The actual diffusion and spread of the ideas of liberty and equality have been very uneven both temporally and geographically since the French Revolution. The real question had to be understood not just in terms of the flow of day-to-day events around the world, but on the level of ideas: Was there an alternative set of principles upon which a different society could be based that were fundamentally at odds with those of the French Revolution? And were there societies built around those ideas that looked like they were sustainable, and would satisfy the wishes of their inhabitants better than existing liberal democracies built around those principles?
These would be the grounds for a serious refutation of Kojève’s assertion that history had ended.
The original essay “The End of History” appeared in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, when I had started working as a Deputy Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under my old colleague Dennis Ross. The Berlin Wall came down a few months later, on November 9, and set in motion a series of events that would lead to the dissolution of the former Soviet Union two years later. The emergence of a Europe “whole and free,” as George H. W. Bush put it, was the greatest geopolitical event of my lifetime, and vindicated the historical direction I had pointed to in the article.
Today’s ideological landscape is obviously far more fragmented than it was thirty-five years ago. There is today far more consensus on the democratic side of liberal democracy than there is on the liberal part. While there are obviously huge remaining social inequalities in many societies, few try to assert that there are reasons why a certain subgroup of people have an intrinsic right to rule over others. The PRC is a dictatorship, but the Chinese Communist Party claims a right to rule because it believes it represents the people: it is the People’s Republic of China. Ethno- and religious nationalism have been on the rise in recent decades. Most of these groups represent rearguard efforts to protect perceived privileges, rather than assertions of the inherent inequality of groups. In the United States, we’ve seen the ugly return of earlier forms of racism and misogyny. But groups taking such positions do not seem poised to systematically overturn the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”
What has been under much more sustained attack in recent years is the liberal part of liberal democracy; that is, the idea that governments should be constrained in their powers by a rule of law and constitutional checks on state power. Much of the democratic backsliding we’ve seen over the past decade has in fact been driven by groups claiming to represent “the people,” whose democratic legitimacy gives them the right to dismantle the constraints imposed by liberal restrictions on state power. Hence Viktor Orbán’s claim to be presiding over an “illiberal democracy.”
Support for liberalism, as opposed to democracy, has always been more fragmented and episodic. The reason for this, as I explained in Liberalism and Its Discontents, is that one of its important justifications is a pragmatic one concerning the management of political diversity, rather than any deep commitment to the liberal principle. Support for liberal constraints on state power is often derived from the experience of authoritarian government and the wars and privation that the latter often entail. So seventy years of relative peace and prosperity can lead to a broad forgetting of what illiberal rule can bring.
Liberalism also raises the problem of the Last Man, which is not a contingent but an intrinsic issue buried in the heart of the doctrine. This requires further discussion.
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