The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. A variety of authors have argued that a particular system is the "end of history" including Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexandre Kojève,[1] and Francis Fukuyama in the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.[2]
The concept of an end of history differs from ideas of an end of the world as expressed in various religions, which may forecast a complete destruction of the Earth or of life on Earth, and the end of the human race. The end of history instead proposes a state in which human life continues indefinitely into the future without any further major changes in society, system of governance, or economics.
The phrase the end of history was first used by French philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1861 "to refer to the end of the historical dynamic with the perfection of civil society".[3] Arnold Gehlen adopted it in 1952 and it has been taken up more recently by Heidegger and Vattimo.[3]
The formal development of an idea of an "end of history" is most closely associated with Hegel, although Hegel discussed the idea in ambiguous terms, making it unclear whether he thought such a thing was a certainty or a mere possibility.[4] The goal of Hegel's philosophy on history was to show that history is a process of realization of reason, for which he does not name a definite endpoint. Hegel believes that it is on the one hand the task of history to show that there is essentially reason in the development over time, while on the other hand history itself also has the task of developing reason over time. The realization of history is thus something that one can observe, but also something that is an active task.[5]
A postmodern understanding of the term differs in that:
See main article: The End of History and the Last Man. A name that is commonly linked to the concept of the end of history in contemporary discourse is Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama brought the term back to the forefront with his essay The End of History? that was published months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this essay, which he later expanded upon in his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, Fukuyama builds on the knowledge of Hegel, Marx and Kojève. The essay centers around the idea that now that its two most important competitors, fascism and communism, have been defeated, there should no longer be any serious competition for liberal democracy and the market economy.[6]
In his theory, Fukuyama distinguishes between the material or real world and the world of ideas or consciousness. He believes that in the realm of ideas liberalism has proven to be triumphant, meaning that even though a successful liberal democracy and market economy have not yet been established everywhere, there are no longer any ideological competitors for these systems. This would mean that any fundamental contradiction in human life can be worked out within the context of modern liberalism and would not need an alternative political-economic structure to be resolved. Now that the end of history is reached, Fukuyama believes that international relations would be primarily concerned with economic matters and no longer with politics or strategy, thus reducing the chances of a large scale international violent conflict.
Fukuyama concludes that the end of history will be a sad time, because the potential of ideological struggles that people were prepared to risk their lives for has now been replaced with the prospect of "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."[7] This does not mean that Fukuyama believes that a modern liberal democracy is the perfect political system, but rather that he does not think another political structure can provide citizens with the levels of wealth and personal liberties that a liberal democracy can.[8]
A 2022 research article published by the Royal Society Open Science models the transition between political regimes as a Markov process and, using a Bayesian inference approach, it estimates the transition probabilities between political regimes from time-series data describing the evolution of political regimes from 1800 to 2018. The author then computes the steady state for this Markov process which represents a mathematical abstraction of the End of history and predicts that approximately 46% of countries will be full democracies. Furthermore, he finds that, under his model, the fraction of autocracies in the world is expected to increase for the next half-century before it declines. Using random-walk theory, he then estimates survival curves of different types of regimes and characteristic lifetimes of democracies and autocracies of 244 years and 69 years, respectively. He argues there is no statistical evidence that the End of history constitutes a fixed, complete omnipresence of democratic regimes.[9]