Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1992
Language: English
Pages: 424
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140134557
Description
Three years ago an article entitled The End of History?...sparked off an explosive debate about the future of the world in the post-Cold War era. In this book Fukuyama expands on his original themes to address some fundamental and far-reaching questions.
Francis Fukuyama contends that History, with its capital letter, is over…Why? Because the winner is clear: liberalism and markets… There is much to grumble about in Fukuyama’s book, but it has a most respectable base in history and a good framework in philosophy…I do not really believe in its End of History…but Fukuyama makes me think, and I am grateful for that experience, rare in Legoland.
EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:
A Fascinating historical and philosophical setting for the twenty-first century.
- Tom Wolfe
With clarity and an astonishing sweep of reflection and imagination…Fukuyama tells us where we were, where we are, and most important, speculates about where we will likely be.
-Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind
Fukuyama’s claims, and his book, merit close attention… His writing is bold and clear and it captures the prevailing spirit of our times.
-Steven Lukes in the New Statesman & Society
Arms Western political thought with new fundamental theoretical arguments to reinforce its practical actions.
-Eduard Shevardnadze
In the mastery and scope of its case, The End of History and the Last Man may be seen as the first book of the post-Marxist millennium-The first work fully to fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world.
-George Gilder in the Washington Post
Why should we think that history (or, as Fukuyama prefers to call it, History) has a direction at all, let alone a final resting-place? In The End of History and the Last Man, he answers that question by means of a rather subtle balancing trick Noel Malcolm.
-Sunday Telegraph
Fukuyama has undoubtedly written a clever and important book, teeming with original ideas Piers Brendon.
-Mail on Sunday
He is a lively, if somewhat tendentious, commentator on current affairs…Many of his readers will recoil at the breathtaking ethnocentricity which can regard late twentieth-century America as the final culmination of human achievement or treat the last two centuries as a reliable guide to the future pattern of the whole of human history.
-Keith Thomas, Observer
Quixotic and tightly argued…His book deserves respect William H McNeill.
-The New York Times Book Reviews
Like an updated de Tocqueville, Fukuyama is both fascinated and appalled by the extension of democratic egalitarianism…Fukuyama’s writing is an expression of the sentiment of a great liberal cause… He has tried to rescue optimism by linking it with an elegiac nostalgia for aristocratic society…but there are also less narcissistic ways of expressing optimism, and they include being just relatively proud of where History has got us, rather than completely convinced that we are right.
-Harold James, The Times
Brilliantly argued and scholarly.
-Norman Lucas, Daily Mail
Contents
Acknowledgements
By Way of an introduction
PART I: AN OLD QUESTION ASKED ANEW
Our Pessimism
The Weakness of Strong States I
The Weakness of Strong States II, or, Eating Pineapples on the Moon
The Worldwide Liberal Revolution
PART II: THE OLD AGE OF MANKIND
An Idea for a Universal History
The Mechanism of Desire
No Barbarians at the Gates
Accumulation without end
The Victory of the VCR
In the Land of Education
The Former Question Answered
No Democracy without Democrats
PART III: THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION
In the Beginning, a Battle to the Death for Pure Prestige
The First Man
A Vacation in Bulgaria
The Beast with Red Cheeks
The Rise and Fall of Thymos
Lordship and Bondage
The Universal and Homogeneous State
PART IV: LEAPING OVER RHODES
The Coldest of All Cold Monsters
The Thymotic Origins of Work
Empires of Resentment, Empires of Deference
The Unreality of Realism
The Power of the Powerless
National Interests
Toward a Pacific Union
PART V: THE LAST MAN
In the Realm of Freedom
Men without Chests
Free and Unequal
Perfect Rights and Defective Duties
Immense Wars of the Spirit
Notes
Bibliography
Index