The End of History Theory

American diplomat and philosopher Francis Fukuyama published his famous article The End of History in 1989. This was one of perhaps twenty articles, not books, which changed the make-up of social sciences, and to some extent (in some cases a greater extent) of the social conscience and nature of public discourse in this century. In this example we see the fundamental reflexivity of the social sciences. ,. Fukuyama (1992) attempted to demonstrate that liberal democracy, backed by the equality and freedom idea and the free market and enterprise mechanisms, had proven beyond doubt its superiority over all other systems, including hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most importantly, communism. Liberal democracy stands for the ‘final stage of the ideological evolution of humankind’ and, in this respect, the end of history. The notion that history has ended for the entire world is the globalising dimension of Fukuyama’s deliberation, but also the deceptive one. The fact that history is over does not mean that nothing else is going to happen, but that a stage in the humans’ development in which they sacrificed themselves and others for ideals is over. As Mike Featherstone says, it is the end of the age of heroes, of struggling for truth, justice, freedom, equality, communism, liberation, homeland, the nation. We now live in a global post-heroic age.