Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'

The Ezra Klein Show

In this episode of The Ezra Klein Show, host Ezra Klein discusses Francis Fukuyama's seminal work 'The End of History and the Last Man' with the author himself. Originally published in 1989, the book is often misremembered as a triumphalist declaration of liberal democracy's victory

Key takeaways

• Liberal democracy's victory after the Cold War was not an endpoint of progress but a fragile state that risks collapse if it fails to address deeper human needs like recognition and dignity.
• Fukuyama argues that Hegel's concept of 'recognition'—the desire to be seen as worthy—is more central to political life than mere freedom or material well-being, explaining the rise of populist movements seeking validation.

Main topics

• The true meaning of 'the end of history' as a philosophical concept
• Hegel's theory of recognition vs. Hobbesian and Lockean views of human nature

Notable quotes

You cannot build a good society atop a flawed vision of human nature.

Liberal democracy might win, but it may win atop a cramped and partial vision of the human soul.

Conclusion

Fukuyama's insights from 'The End of History' remain urgently relevant today. While liberal democracy has triumphed as the dominant political system, it

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I'm John Caramonica, a critic at The New York Times. And I'm Joe Cascarelli, a culture reporter at The Times. Together we host PopCast, a weekly pop culture chat show where we speak to the biggest musicians, actors, internet celebrities, and more. We've had Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, and Anne Hathaway. We've also hosted live performances with Andre 3000 and Erykah Badu. Plus, we end every conversation with a snack. Catch new episodes of PopCast every week on YouTube. And Speaker 1 (0:25) anywhere you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (1:00) Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay, The End of History, is remembered as this triumphalist argument heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy. After it, anything major that happened in the world, you would get these people saying, well, I guess history didn't really end, did it? I remember this particularly after 9-11. This week, of course, is the 25th anniversary of 9-11. Speaker 4 (1:26) But this was such a terrible misreading of Fukuyama's argument. Because if you actually read his essay, and particularly if you read the book that came out of that essay, he is saying something very different. The book was called The End of History and The Last Man. And it was anything but triumphalist. Liberal democracy might win, Fukuyama thought. It might become the way most states organize themselves. But it might win atop a cramped and partial vision of the human soul. One that... believed in our ability to consume, but had little room for our desire for recognition, for greatness, for daring. And no political system without room for those parts of our souls would be stable for very long. You cannot build a good society atop a flawed vision of human nature. My view is that very few books in politics are as insightful or as important for understanding where liberal democracy went wrong. why figures like Donald Trump keep rising, and why the opposition to them seems so wan and uninspiring so often. So this is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin they didn't really commit, because it has something to say to us now. Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University. He's written many books since that one, including a two-volume series on the nature of political orders, a critique of the neoconservative world that he was once part of, and a defense of liberalism from its attackers. But his new book is a memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man. And so I wanted to begin with that idea of the end of history and the last man. I wanted to begin by rediscovering the book that made Fukuyama famous, so we can hear what it has to say about the world we now live in. Speaker 4 (3:13) Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the show. Speaker 1 (3:15) Thanks very much for having me. Speaker 4 (3:16) So I want to begin the conversation in your most famous book, a book I'm a huge fan of, which is The End of History and The Last Man. So this is built on an essay that comes out in 1989. It's a few months before the Berlin Wall falls. The book comes out after the fall of the wall. You have this moment where liberal democracy really seems to be triumphing. The end of history has become this highly memed. in many ways, Speaker 1 (3:42) simplified concept. So what was it? Well, this was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel, and he meant history with a capital H. So we would use the word development or modernization today. But it's directional. It's progressive. Things are getting better. Human reason is prevailing in structuring societies. And the question of the end of history was not the end of events. It was to what objective does this historical process seem to be leading. The Marxists took that same concept of history. They believed in history also, but they believed that the end was not a liberal society. It was a communist utopia. was their guiding star in their political movement. And my observation back in the late 1980s when Gorbachev was in the Soviet Union was that we weren't going to get there. We were going to stop at the penultimate stage, which was some version of liberal democracy and a capitalist economy. And for me, that was the practical end of history that had really emerged. Speaker 4 (4:51) So this is more, the way to think about the term the end of history is the end of the process of figuring out how to politically organize society. Yeah, Speaker 1 (4:59) or the goal or the objective of that process. Why did you think we Speaker 4 (5:03) were going to Speaker 1 (5:03) stop Speaker 4 (5:03) there? Speaker 1 (5:04) Well, I didn't know that we were going to stop, but all of these big systematic competitors had all either self-destructed or had been rejected by the people that once followed them. And I think the challenge that I was trying to make was to ask people, yeah, can you locate something that's better than this outcome? Not necessarily that Our society is perfect. It obviously is not. But is there an alternative form of political and social organization that you think will make people in the end happier and lead more fulfilled lives? And to this day, I've not seen anyone really posit that. Speaker 4 (5:44) What the Marxists thought, and you talk about this in the book, is that a capitalist system has within it a contradiction that will inevitably lead to its undoing. which is you have this class conflict and you have a small number of people at the top who are exploiting the great mass of workers beneath them. And liberal democracy is lying when it says that it equally or even reasonably apportions freedom. That the, you know, as a famous line goes, that the fact that the rich and the poor men are free to sleep under the bridge is not an equality of freedom. So why are you not convinced class is such a dangerous contradiction? Well, it Speaker 1 (6:27) could be, especially with the rise of technology. But, you know, for much of the period after 1945, you didn't have pure capitalism. You had basically, in most advanced countries, a form of social democracy. And I think the democracy part of it was absolutely necessary because unless you provide certain social protections, unless you do a certain amount of redistribution, the inequality in the society is going to become intolerable. And for most of that period, you actually had rising... real incomes for working people. And so even though there was inequality, you had political stability because everybody could buy into it. Now, I never argued that this would be true for all time. And I think that the nature of technology is changing such that the degree of inequality has grown. I think globalization has also contributed to this. And unless you moderate those inequalities through political means, you're just not going to have stable democracy. Speaker 4 (7:28) So one of the things that I think is fascinating about the way you frame this in the book is you try to move the foundation for liberalism off of some of the philosophers we normally give it to, Hobbes and Locke and onto Hegel. And one of the ways you do that is to say that Hobbes and Locke had this much more narrow vision of what a liberal society or even just a just society is trying to achieve, which is self-preservation. It is simply almost existing at a reasonable level of material well-being. And you say Hegel understands the human soul better than that and that the human soul wants more than that. It wants recognition. And the fundamental question for liberal societies. the one that will decide whether or not they are the end of history, is whether they are actually able to spread recognition around society equally enough, not just freedom, recognition, being seen, being valued enough to survive. So tell me a bit about that move, that it's actually recognition that is at the center of political life. Speaker 1 (8:39) Well, this is an idea that goes all the way back to Plato. Socrates in the Republic asks, well, we have reason, we have desire, but isn't there a third part of the soul that he calls thumos, which can be translated as spiritedness or pride? And it's a non-material drive that people have, that they want other people to acknowledge their humanity. So I have these, I invented these two Greek words, isothumia and megalothumia. is basically, it's the foundation of a liberal society that everybody by virtue of being born as a human being has a certain base level of dignity that has to be recognized by the rest of society. We recognize it in a liberal society by giving people rights. And that means that you are seen as a human being that has, you know, some share of the power of the community. And that's Speaker 1 (9:36) generates a huge amount of resentment if you feel that other people are being recognized in a way that you are not. And that really, I think, drives a lot of democratic politics. Just to give you one example, in the gay marriage movement, you could have solved the economic problem of gay couples by giving them, you know, inheritance rights and that sort of thing, the ability to pass on property to the children they raise. Civil unions. Yeah, civil unions. But that wasn't enough because gay people wanted to have acknowledgement that their unions had just as much dignity and just as much value as that between a man and a woman. And I think that was the fundamental drive that led to, you know, the legalization of gay marriage. So that's just an example. But I think, you know, civil rights, Ralph Ellison wrote a book novel back in the 1950s about, you know, the experience of African Americans that had moved from the South to the North. You didn't have official legally sanctioned segregation. What you had was the invisibility. That's where the invisible man in the title comes from, that white people in the North simply didn't see a black person as a fellow human being. And that was really what I think generated the deep, you know, resentment and distrust that existed in northern cities and in racial politics. Speaker 4 (11:00) One of the really interesting sections of the book to me is where you talk about the ways in which material politics and a politics of recognition can blur into each other. That there are many places where people would, they have a level of material wealth that say in another country would be amazing, but in the country they're in, Because it puts them further down the scale of recognition. It, for them, is a terrible injury. You have Adam Smith talking about this, that much of what people want from wealth is to be seen. It isn't simply to consume. So tell me a bit about that side of it, because I think that also makes sense of some parts of our economic politics, too, where you'll sometimes have somewhat self-satisfied liberals say, Well, actually, if you look on a chart, you know, people have been getting richer and it's better than it was in the past and we have antibiotics now. But actually, if you understand that part of what people want from even the money they make is to be seen and recognized a certain way in society, that that actually contains within it a never-enoughness, a constant instability, because there is always a certain amount of inequality of recognition in society. Speaker 1 (12:11) Well, to expand a little bit on that, Adam Smith, section that you referred to. He says, the rich man glories in his wealth, and the poor man is unseen, is invisible to his fellow human beings. That's really the pain of poverty, is this invisibility to other people. And I think that still operates. And I think if you think about our politics, a lot of it is about recognition rather than simply the distribution of material resources. A lot of populism today. is driven by people who feel they're invisible. You know, that the world is run by educated elites and they don't listen to the concerns of people like them and they don't recognize them as being fully equal because they don't have the educations or the sophistication. And I think that that unequally distributed recognition is actually at the base of a lot of our problems. Speaker 4 (13:07) I think something you see, you see it in some cases on the left. I think wokeness had a lot of this in it. But you see it in some cases on the populist right, which is, I don't have a word to make up for it, but a desire to invert status in a society. So a belief that your white privilege or your wealth and your riches make you suspect and you should be treated as suspect until you, say, prove yourself otherwise. On the right, This can take forms of attacks on their chosen elites, journalists and cosmopolitans. And, you know, populism has a lot of this in it. The people who have been judged excellent or who have attained power, there's an effort to sort of alter the moral valence of that power and the way society sees them. And I actually see the last couple of years as in some ways a fight between these. Some of the radicalization of the tech right comes from... You know, their feeling of, well, we did what you wanted. We made our money under capitalism. We built these great companies, and now you hate us. And that pushed them into a very, very different and eventually quite scary politics. Speaker 1 (14:13) No, that's absolutely right. I think that your judgment of the moral character of the people you don't like then blends with resentment at the fact that they are unjustly recognized. Speaker 1 (14:28) That's really the source of many of the forms of backlash that we see in our society, both on the left and the right. You don't want to be seen as lesser than other people, and you get very resentful when you're treated that way. And the inversion, I think, is simply a demand that that stop, you know, that you be recognized at least as the equal. So just because you've made a lot of money doesn't mean that you're a bad person. The real anger comes from people that feel that they're victimized, that they are marginalized, you know, as a result of their identities. And that, you know, is now something that's occurred to a lot of people that occupied previously privileged positions in the society. Speaker 4 (15:12) So you define there the version in which recognition is equal. But you said you invented another word. Yes. Megalothumia? Speaker 1 (15:21) Yes, megalothumia. So that is the desire to be... recognizes greater than other people. And I think that this is obviously a threat in a democracy because a liberal democracy is based on the premise that all people, all citizens are essentially equal. But that's not enough for a certain group, a certain subset of human beings. They want to dominate. They want to be more than others. It takes oftentimes a very negative form of political domination. So you want to be a dictator or an autocrat. But it's also necessary because you can't have any kind of human excellence if you didn't have the desire to be better than other people. You know, if you want to be a great pianist or, you know, a football star or… you know, a great artist, I think that's also driven by a certain kind of desire to be recognized, you know, as better than other people. So I think that you can't have a society of perfectly equal recognition. That has to be the basis for social cohesion. But you also can't have a dynamic society without people that want something more than that. Now, I actually wrote about Donald Trump in the original book, The End of History and the Last Man. He comes up a few times. Yeah. And, you know, Back then, I thought, well, one of the virtues of living in a capitalist democracy is that this desire for unequal recognition can be satisfied just by becoming rich. And it's a way of bleeding off that energy. Little did I know that, you know, 30 years later, that wouldn't be enough for Donald Trump and that he'd want political power as well as, you know, fortune. Speaker 4 (16:58) So that brings us to the other side of the book, which gets talked about somewhat less. And maybe the way to get into this is simply to say, who is the last man? Speaker 1 (17:09) So the last man is the creature that Friedrich Nietzsche, the other great German philosopher of the 19th century, identified as the product of the end of history. A person that was satisfied with the things that liberalism provides, basically peace and prosperity, but had no further aspirations, no... desires for a better vision of the world, nothing that they would risk their lives on behalf of. And for Nietzsche, it was really that extraordinary ambition that was really what made a human being a human being. And instead, in a liberal society, you've got this very flat world where everybody has to tolerate everybody else and nobody wants to think of themselves as better. Speaker 4 (17:55) So there's something interesting here. One of the constant critiques of at least a portion of the right towards liberalism, for that matter, towards socialism, is that it's fundamentally built on a lie and that that lie is equality. And the form of equality that is a lie can take different versions, right? You can have people who see racial equality as a lie and they get obsessed with race and IQ and things of that nature. You can have people who see just individual quality as a lie. Obviously, some people are either more morally good than others. Other people are more talented, more capable. They work harder. But that many on the right see it as a dangerous lie that a society could or should be equal. And that the particular danger of that lie is that it blunts ambition. It pulls down those who would strive for excellence. I certainly see in much of the sort of tech right reaction in the last couple of years, in some parts of the new right and how they look at society, a sort of sense that this happened. This is why so many on the right are rediscovering Nietzsche. Like, who is there in your title, you know, the sort of originator of the last man idea? Speaker 1 (19:11) No, that's right. Well, first of all, let me just defend the idea of universal equality, because I do think... You know, and ultimately, if you look historically, it derives from a certain Christian interpretation that human beings are fundamentally equal. There's a passage in Galatians that says, there's neither Jew nor Gentile, master nor slave, male