Fukuyama "End of History and the Last Man" Sumarry
Summary
The subject of the book is the fact that all societies in the world, with rare exceptions and some delays and setbacks, are generally moving towards liberal democracy. Throughout the work, Fukuyama compares liberal democracy with other economic systems, highlighting why, perhaps, this particular one has the biggest chance of becoming the last one the human kind has ever known, putting in other words why is liberal democracy “the right one”. These highlights throughout the book are being mostly advocated with the help of ideas from 19th century philosophers such as Karl Marx, Georg W. H. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. The title of the work is a composition of pair of these ideas such us Marx and Hagel’s “end of history” theory, and Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch” or concept of “the last man”.
Fukuyama first spends time explaining the difference between democracy and liberalisms, as well as presents an evolutionary pattern applicable to most of the societies - moving towards the liberal democracy. Author names this phenomenon “Universal History”, and while listing the reasons for failure of other systems such as communism, he also relieves that essentially nothing has been powerful enough to suspend the desire for freedom and that from the beginning of the time human has been seeking for this liberal democracy. Fukuyama also suggests that the historical change is directed by a “mechanisms” he calls modern natural science, adding also that it is not leading human kind to a one specific economic system. This mechanism cannot be reversed, and that at the end of the day a technology driven country will have to apply capitalism, in order to sustain it because apparently nothing has been proven working better than the markets. However, Fukuyama also introduces a contradiction to the aforesaid mechanism, which is Hegel’s concept of human “struggle for recognition” which along with the progression of book becomes one of the most convincing arguments why the history
The subject of the book is the fact that all societies in the world, with rare exceptions and some delays and setbacks, are generally moving towards liberal democracy. Throughout the work, Fukuyama compares liberal democracy with other economic systems, highlighting why, perhaps, this particular one has the biggest chance of becoming the last one the human kind has ever known, putting in other words why is liberal democracy “the right one”. These highlights throughout the book are being mostly advocated with the help of ideas from 19th century philosophers such as Karl Marx, Georg W. H. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. The title of the work is a composition of pair of these ideas such us Marx and Hagel’s “end of history” theory, and Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch” or concept of “the last man”.
Fukuyama first spends time explaining the difference between democracy and liberalisms, as well as presents an evolutionary pattern applicable to most of the societies - moving towards the liberal democracy. Author names this phenomenon “Universal History”, and while listing the reasons for failure of other systems such as communism, he also relieves that essentially nothing has been powerful enough to suspend the desire for freedom and that from the beginning of the time human has been seeking for this liberal democracy. Fukuyama also suggests that the historical change is directed by a “mechanisms” he calls modern natural science, adding also that it is not leading human kind to a one specific economic system. This mechanism cannot be reversed, and that at the end of the day a technology driven country will have to apply capitalism, in order to sustain it because apparently nothing has been proven working better than the markets. However, Fukuyama also introduces a contradiction to the aforesaid mechanism, which is Hegel’s concept of human “struggle for recognition” which along with the progression of book becomes one of the most convincing arguments why the history