![]() ![]() Fukuyama is in, and is worthy of, a grand tradition. However, that will not necessarily be good for humanity's soul. We have won the struggle for the heart of humanity. His conclusion is at once exhilarating and sobering. His subject was, and in this far more sweeping book is, the place of America, and the American idea, in the stream of history. Fukuyama has given it a deep and highly original meaning'.' - Charles Krauthammer "With one now-famous essay, Frank Fukuyama did what had hitherto seemed almost impossible: he made Washington think. Until now the triumph of the West was merely a fact. The End Of History and the Last Man "Bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant. (New York) jacket design © REM Studio, Inc. THE FREE PRESS A Division ofMacmillan, NEW YORK © 1992 Macmillan, Inc. He is currently a resident consultant at the RAND Corporation in Wash ington, DC. State Department's Policy Planning Staff. The great question then becomes: can liberty and equality, both political and eco nomic - the state of affairs at the presumed "end of history" - produce a stable society in which man may be said to be, at last, com pletely satisfied? Or will the spiritual condition of this "last man" in history, deprived of outlets for his striving for mastery, inevitably lead him to plunge himself and the world back into the chaos and bloodshed of history? (Continued on back flap)įukuyama's contemporary consideration of this ultimate question is both a fascinating education in the philosophy of history and a thoughtprovoking inquiry into the deepest issues of human society and destiny.įRANCIS FUKUYAMA is a former deputy director of the U.S. These forces drive even culturally disparate societies toward establishing capitalist liberal democracies as the end state of the historical process. ![]() He calls one "the logic of modern science" and the other "the struggle for recognition'.' The first drives men to fulfill an ever-expanding horizon of desires through a rational economic process the second, "the struggle for recognition',' is, in Fukuyama's (and Hegel's) view, nothing less than the very "motor of history'.' It is Fukuyama's brilliantly argued theme that, over time, the economic logic of modern science together with the "struggle for recogni tion" lead to the eventual collapse of tyrannies, as we have witnessed on both the left and right. As the tumultuous twentieth century shudders toward its close - with the collapse of commu nism leading to a transformation of world politics - Francis Fukuyama asks us to return with him to a question that has been asked by the great philosophers of centuries past: is there a direction to the history of mankind? And if it is directional, to what end is it moving? And where are we now in relation to that "end of history"? In this exciting and profound inquiry, which goes far beyond the issues raised in his worldfamous essay "The End of History?" in the summer 1989 National Interest, Fukuyama presents evidence to suggest that there are two powerful forces at work in human history. ![]()
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