• Ned Resnikoff critiques a recent podcast by Michael Hobbes and defends Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “the end of history.”
• Fukuyama’s argument is that human civilization has a teleological purpose and that liberal democracy represents a transcendent culmination of that purpose.
• Critics argue that Fukuyama’s argument is too narrow, too limited, and too particular, and that it is fundamentally inhumane.
• Fukuyama’s defenders often act as though he’s this humble intellectual who put out a modest argument and was suddenly waylaid by bad-faith critics.
• The challenge is to have humility enough to recognize ourselves as blips in history, as opposed to acts of historical chauvinism like The End of History.
• The attacks and their aftermath demonstrated that the abstraction that is “liberal democracy” operates at such an immense altitude above daily human life that talking about the end of history becomes irrelevant.
Published February 13, 2023
Visit Freddie deBoer’s Substack to read Freddie deBoer’s original post No, Francis Fukuyama is Wrong, Not Just Not Even Wrong