The Forgotten Beginning of the End of History

In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an essay in the National Interest arguing that the collapse of the Soviet Union and growing U.S. influence in China might signal the final form of human government—namely, the combination of Western liberal democracy and state capitalism. He called this “the end of history,” a term that has since become a byword for the neoliberal era that may now be nearing its end. But Fukuyama did not coin the term. He got it, via his mentor Allan Bloom, from the Russian French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Indeed, much of Fukuyama’s essay, as well as the book that followed, was devoted to interpreting Kojève’s thought and life.