/lit/ - Literature

This actually aged extremely well and the people who cite it as an example of liberal naivete haven't read it.

Is this the most wrong book of all time?

Fukuyama was right. Complain all you want about his thesis but no one has thought of an alternative to Liberalism in 30 years. You're stuck no matter how much you want to escape.

Reminder that there has been 30 years of nonstop coping over this book and no one has been able to disprove his thesis

He was literally correct. The modern world inherently develops and mediates into liberal capitalism. Since Liberalism turns people into pathetic cattle however we resembles Nietzsche's Last Men and will probably self-destruct soon. Tell me why people deny this again when it's plainly obvious? Our future is pretty much just a less technologically advanced cyberpunk world.

Is Fukuyama right? Are we at the end of history? Is liberal democracy all that's left? Let's talk about in terms of the first world. What could possibly be next except for some different form of liberal democracy. I hate Zizek but I agree with him when he says "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism". Compared to the past 250 years we are at an extremely stable time in history.

What is the single most wrong book ever made?

I hate this bastard, because he was right. Nothing interesting will ever happen again and we are stuck with the current systems of power.

。。。
does any well known book on modern politics cause more ass hurt than this?

Who was right, Fukuyama or Huntington?

>>16789684
I mean the idea that history ended with the fall of the Soviet Union and that American-style liberal democracy is the final form of human government (pic related), although there are a lot of parallels between that and the narratives that were floating around post-WWI. The idea that significant political struggle is eliminable is ridiculously hubristic. The best we can do is keep it from going totally savage, and to do that requires a competent, confident, ethical ruling class, which we don't currently have.

Would an undergraduate be able to understand this without having read Hegel or Marx?

Nothing.

The End of History and the Last Man

Was Fukuyama completely misunderstanding Hegelian political philosophy or was this book completely based?

Discuss.

woah, so like... that's it then huh?

Why does nobody actually bother reading this book?

Just judging by the title and all the offhand remarks about this book, you could be forgiven for thinking Fukuyama was proclaiming a chiliastic Brave New World of the stable monopolar 1990's to last forever. But actually reading it, that's not what Fukuyama wrote at all.

His argument is a lot more subtle, and frankly a lot more depressing. Fukuyama lays out an alternative theory of governability, and shows how different system of government (even theoretical ones) all have to solve a tension between personal autonomy and the need for restrictive organizational hierarchies. This tension is essentially resolved best in liberal democracies, where a strong state constrained by constitutional law and popular accountability occupies a golden mean between anarchy (not the leftist kind) and arbitrary oppression.
He argues that, just like in dialectical materialism, history naturally progresses toward a goal. Only instead of Marx's nebulous future communism, history's end point is a form of "bourgeois democracy".

It doesn't mean history stops happening once we reach it. It doesn't mean things can't regress. Fukuyama's point is that liberal democracy is simply as good as it gets.
He then predicts it's actually going to get a whole lot worse as technology further develops and pulls us away from liberal democracy.