https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-history-francis-fuku…

In 1989, a policy wonk in the US State Department wrote a paper for the right-leaning international relations magazine The National Interest entitled “The End of History?”. His name was Francis Fukuyama, and the paper stirred such interest – and caused such controversy – that he was soon contracted to expand his 18-page article into a book. He did so in 1992: The End of History and the Last Man. The rest, they say, is (the end of) history.
Fukuyama became one of those academics whose work was cribbed to a shorthand: The End of History. It is, no doubt, a memorable and dramatic phrase – but it is as unclear as it is striking.
Put very simply, by “the end of history,” Fukuyama did not mean that we had reached a stage where nothing else would occur of historical significance – that all problems had been solved and politics would now be smooth-sailing.
His argument was that the unfolding of history had revealed – albeit in fits and starts – the ideal form of political organisation: liberal democratic states tied to market economies. (Or to put it in Churchillian language, the least-worst form.)
Fukuyama’s use of the word “history” here is best approximated by synonyms in sociology such as “modernisation” or “development”.
He wasn’t saying those states that claimed to be liberal democracies lived up to this ideal, nor that such a political organisation resolved all possible problems – merely that liberal democracy, with all its flaws, was the unsurpassable ideal.
For him, a liberal democratic state requires three things. First, it is democratic, not only in the sense of allowing elections, but in the outcomes of these elections resulting in the implementation of the will of the citizenry. Secondly, the state possesses sufficient strength and authority to enforce its laws and administer services. Thirdly, the state – and its highest representatives – is itself constrained by law. Its leaders are not above the law.
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Fukuyama, now a seni…