Nida Forum 19-09-2025, History Museum of Curonian Spit
Few works have been so often cited and so little read as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Perhaps this is also due to the fact that it was published at a time when the titular phrase – “the end of history” – had already become part of the common language in the media, intellectual circles, and public discourse. Fukuyama published the essay of the same name in the revolutionary year of 1989, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When, three years later, he elaborated his theses in a book, the phrase “the end of history” had already become famous and overshadowed the author’s broader points. So it has remained to this day.
We can see this if we look at how Fukuyama’s work is cited. At every one of the events that in recent years have profoundly shaken the world as we knew it after the end of the Cold War (or even since the end of the Second World War), we have heard: “The end of history: what now?” Or: “The illusion of the end of history has finally passed.” Or: “We live in the time after the end of history.”
I admit that I myself have sometimes used the last description. Yet the very appeal of the sentence—that we live in a time that has followed the end of history—attests to the fundamental dilemma of why Fukuyama’s phrase remains so attractive, even though in the past three decades it has been the target of mockery like few others.
For the time we live in, we have no name. We sense that we are still heirs of modernity; that perhaps we live at its furthest points of development. Technological progress advances rapidly, though unevenly in different fields, yet it seems to us that the idea of progress in the social and cultural spheres has completely dissipated. Because of all this, we are accompanied by an anxious feeling. Are we at the extreme edge of the historical universe, which continues to expand? Has its expansive force weakened? Or are we perhaps at a point in the order of time when an order has reached its outer limits and has begun slowly but inexorably to collapse in on itself?
All these dilemmas show that the themes Francis Fukuyama concisely articulated more than thirty years ago are no less relevant today than on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Francis Fukuyama has often been accused of “liberal triumphalism.” The idea of the “end of history” was supposed to symbolize the liberal hubris that followed 1989. Yet it is enough to open his book—literally, simply to open it—for the notion of smug liberal optimism of the nineties, which he supposedly embodied, to vanish. The first chapter of Fukuyama’s book is devoted to Pessimism and begins with the statement: “We may say that the twentieth century has made us all into profound historical pessimists.” The book is best understood as a cautious and skeptical reflection that seeks to overcome this pessimism. To do so, it turns back to the earlier “long nineteenth century,” which he characterizes, on the contrary, as a century of optimism.
One of the concepts that took hold with the Enlightenment and spread in the nineteenth century is the idea of “universal history,” which—as Fukuyama puts it—“is not an encyclopedic catalog of everything known about mankind, but an attempt to find a meaningful pattern in the overall development of human societies in general.” After the millenarian philosophies of the 19th century and the totalitarianisms of the 20th had thoroughly discredited this idea, Fukuyama sought to revive it, though with a strong dose of historical criticism. The entire first part of the book is in fact a historical survey of the idea of universal history and an attempt to situate it within the Western philosophical tradition.
The notion of a universal history of mankind that reaches its end stems, of course, from the linear conception of time introduced by Christianity, which broke with ancient conceptions of cyclical history. Fukuyama, quite rightly, finds in the Enlightenment the true sources of the modern conception of “universal history.” The idea of the “end of history,” at least in its modern sense—not as an eschatological completion of earthly time guided by transcendent Providence, but as the culmination of an inherent process of development through contradictions—has its intellectual parentage in Hegel (though the outlines of such a conception of history, which develops through different stages in which economy, politics, and society are bound into a logical, temporally limited whole, can already be found in many Enlightenment authors, beginning with Giambattista Vico). Fukuyama’s entire reflection thus proceeds in the shadow of Hegel’s conception.
Fukuyama considers Hegel the central Western thinker on history. He also sees Marx primarily as a student and continuer of Hegel’s philosophy (interestingly, this is also the view of one of Fukuyama’s sharpest critics, the Slovenian Slavoj Žižek). Marx applied Hegel’s speculative theory to the study of class relations, but the structure, Fukuyama argues, remained the same. What changed, of course, was the idea of which social form represented “the end of history.” For Marx, this was of course socialist society: with it, the history of class struggle (which began at the very dawn of humanity with the emergence of the division of labor and was driven by internal contradictions) would end, and the “true history of mankind” would begin.
For Fukuyama, Marx’s theory was the last great attempt at a universal history. In the “pessimistic twentieth century,” as he puts it, various philosophies of history followed—from Spengler to Toynbee—that in fact sought to revive the cyclical conception of history. The last “Indian summer” of the idea of universal history was the so-called modernization theory. Just as Marx wrote that “a society that is more industrially developed only shows to the less developed country the image of its own future,” so modernization theory saw in the developmental path of Western societies a template for the universal development of humankind.
From the 1960s onward, and especially in the 1970s, it succumbed to criticism that accused it of ethnocentrism: the idea that the West is the future of non-Western societies is racist, since it merely elevates one cultural and civilizational model above the others…
It is enough to think of the current state of intellectual debate in the United States and other Anglophone societies to dispel the notion of Fukuyama’s work as a naïve apology that has nothing to say about our present. Page after page we read about problems that are most certainly still ours—perhaps even more so than at the time when the book was first published.
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Among all the thinkers Fukuyama examines in his historical survey, the most crucial for the further development of his reflections is Alexandre Kojève. Kojève and his idiosyncratic thought would merit a lecture of their own. A Russian émigré, Kojève rose to great fame in Parisian intellectual circles from the late 1930s onward: he taught an entire generation of French thinkers a new, strongly historicist interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy (and not only French ones: on the eve of the Second World War his lectures were also attended by numerous Central European intellectuals who found themselves exiled in Paris—suffice it to mention Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss).
Fukuyama rightly pointed out that the context of Kojève’s arguments about the “end of history” was the 1960s, when Western prosperity truly seemed at its peak. The image of societies with no fundamental conflicts or great goals, in which people could therefore devote themselves solely to economics, appeared to Kojève as the crystallization of the idea of the “end of history” as the final stage of universal human development. After the collapse of Stalinism (for which, as we now know from recently uncovered documents, Kojève served as a secret agent), Kojève saw in Europe of the 1960s the completion of the dialectical process of human history. As a kind of “existentialist Hegelian,” Kojève ultimately “practiced what he preached”: he left behind a brilliant intellectual career and became a high-ranking bureaucrat in the nascent European Community. He followed his philosophy and embodied the “spirit of the age.”
Fukuyama’s brilliant insight was that in 1989—when the disintegration of actually existing socialism was already well under way, but the Berlin Wall still stood, and when in Prague, Bucharest, and Sofia, if not in Warsaw and Budapest, few would have dared to predict the collapse of the regime—he recognized how relevant the thought of this half-forgotten intellectual still was. In 1989, Kojève’s idea of Western modernity (above all, let us not forget, European modernity) as the conclusion of universal history seemed to have reached its actualization.
The question I will try to answer today is: “To what extent can we still say that Fukuyama’s insight holds true?”
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Before we try to answer this question, let us return for a moment to the idea of universal history, since only on its basis does the idea of the “end of history” make sense.
Fukuyama observed that the profound pessimism of the twentieth century cast a poor light on the idea of universal history. The notion of the unstoppable flow of History that justifies endless crimes—about which, in Lithuania, you know much more than most Europeans—delegitimized any teleological conception of historical development. And indeed: many early critics of totalitarianism wrote about how crucial the idea of History, with a capital H, was for totalitarian thought—among them Hannah Arendt and your Lithuanian compatriot (though writing in Polish) Czesław Miłosz.
Fukuyama recognized that, because of the totalitarian experience, the teleological conception of historical development had lost its appeal, and that it was the (justified, in his view) target of most critics of totalitarianisms. Yet despite this, he insisted on it, since he regarded it as the only serious alternative to either a complete dissolution of historical consciousness or a relapse into ideas of cyclical history:
“If history is never to repeat itself, there must exist a constant and unified mechanism or set of historical first causes that dictate evolution in a certain direction, and that in some way preserve within the present a memory of past periods. Cyclical or random views of history do not exclude the possibility of social changes and limited regularities in development, but they do not require a unified source of historical causality. They must also include a process of degeneration by which the consciousness of past achievements is completely erased. Without the possibility of complete historical forgetting, each subsequent cycle, even if only to a small degree, would build upon the experiences of the previous one.”
On the basis of these reflections, Fukuyama’s book does, in fact, shift into that part which corresponds rather closely to the clichéd image of its content. Fukuyama affirms (though with a whole series of reservations and critical notes) Kojève’s idea of liberal democracy as the culmination of universal human history. But this of course does not mean that liberal democracy will not have challengers, nor that it will not regress or undergo deep crises. It does mean, however, that no other form of government will take its place.
The possibility that liberal democracy might consequently become just a particular form of government in one part of the world—that the idea of universal history might thus conclude in fragmentation and particularism—is inherent in Fukuyama’s reflection itself. As you know, Samuel Huntington picked up this ball and developed this scenario in his thesis on the “clash of civilizations.” Huntington’s thesis was highly attractive in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when it seemed to find confirmation in the rise of militant Islamism, the increasingly obvious drift of Russia away from Western models, and the stabilization of China—with its authoritarian system—as one of the most successful capitalist states in the world.
Theories of “alternative modernities,” which flourished at the beginning of the new century (the landmark work here was Shmuel Eisenstadt’s Multiple Modernities, published—how fitting—in the year 2000), responded to this new reality and at the same time shaped the debate about it. Yet even though it became ever more likely that liberal democracy is not the telos toward which all humanity is moving, Fukuyama’s judgment—that no other system has managed to establish itself as a serious alternative to its claim of universal validity—still holds true.
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Even more: I think that another central point of Fukuyama’s has also been confirmed. In his philosophy of history, Fukuyama sketched the trajectory of two tendencies: on the one hand, the development of science, driven, in his view, by “desire,” the longing for prosperity and comfort, which only in modern science finally finds its stable formula; on the other, the striving for “recognition” (in line with the influential theory developed just a few years earlier by the Canadian philosopher—and, originally, fellow Hegelian—Charles Taylor). Both universal human impulses converge in liberal democracy.
The thesis that liberal democracy is the political system most in tune with the needs of scientific development sounded much more credible in the late 1980s and early 1990s than it does in 2025. Today, many look to China, a country that—unlike other authoritarian systems—seems almost entirely immune to the allure of liberal democracy, and they see in it the shadow that the future already casts upon the present. One need only recall the fascination the Chinese model inspires among many neo-reactionary thinkers considered to be the ideologues of Trump’s movement. How advanced and sustainable Chinese scientific development truly is, only time will tell. The Covid pandemic might have served as its Chernobyl, but for now it seems not to have damaged its reputation.
China’s technological development is indeed astonishing. But here it is worth returning again to the author of The End of History, who insisted that the stability of liberal democracy and its claim to universality rests crucially on the balance between science and what Fukuyama, borrowing from ancient Greek, called thymos. This refers to a complex inner force, linked to the desire for recognition, but signifying much more than that: passion, courage, the capacity for strong emotions such as anger and righteous indignation, and the striving for a dignified life. For the ancient Greeks, thymos was considered a fundamental component of the psyche, set in tension with both reason and appetite, and regarded as one of the essential elements of political action. Thymos was key to the capacity for heroic and selfless deeds, though it could also manifest as a destructive force.
In modern European literature, perhaps the work that best illustrates this aspect of thymos—albeit in a romantically ironic manner—is Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, the story of a horse trader who, because of a minor injustice, embarks on a long and devastating quest for justice that ultimately inflicts far greater suffering than the original act of arbitrariness. Kleist’s drama, published in 1810, can be read as a bitter critique of the zeal for righteousness that had fueled the French Revolution. But it can also be read as an ambiguous tribute to the untamable longing for justice.
I think it is precisely at this point that Fukuyama was most right. Although today we may say without much hesitation that liberal democracy is in crisis, the thesis still holds that it is the only modern system capable of channeling thymos—the unstoppable passion for recognition, freedom, justice, and dignity—into its institutional framework, and of turning it into a source of its own stability.
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If Fukuyama—at least regarding his most famous work—is often accused of overly confident and self-satisfied triumphalism, nothing of the sort can be said about the illiberal regimes of our time. Their rise is often cited as a counterargument to the thesis that liberal democracy is the “last word” of universal history, but a closer look at their rhetoric reveals a profound, sometimes almost childish insecurity. Of course, in the discourse of a Putin or an Orbán, there is undoubtedly the notion that their regimes are moving in the right direction, that “history is on their side.” Yet what strikes us is the derivative nature of their discourse. It rests almost entirely on the prefix anti-: anti-liberal, anti-Western, etc. Its entire fervor relies on “reaction” to the Other—in Russia’s case, to the evil West, with which it constantly compares itself. These illiberal regimes cannot be imagined without constant mimetic competition, which necessarily presupposes the existence of a stronger and more dangerous Other, against whom their virtually “resistant” pathos is directed. Much of the appeal that Russian propaganda enjoys in the Third World stems from this skillful manipulation of the feeling of wounded inadequacy.
Here we are very far from the consciousness of a new order that permeated the official discourse of Mussolini’s regime (in which, to be sure, there was no shortage of feelings of inferiority). It is hard to find a belief in the building of an entirely new order, such as characterized fascism in the early twentieth century.
In fact, none of the illiberal systems that have taken hold in recent decades even pretend to universal validity. The closest to this are various Islamist regimes, which present themselves as an alternative suited for the entire Islamic world. No other illiberal regime has an ideological projection outward that is comparably strong. At least the Russian regime compensates for this lack of attractiveness (and quite successfully, at that) with internal subversion of liberal democracies.
But this too, in a way, represents an acknowledgment of the basic correctness of Fukuyama’s thesis. Liberal democracies may experience decay or even “death,” as Levitsky and Ziblatt warned us seven years ago in their famous book How Democracies Die; yet today hardly anyone confidently and convincingly threatens that they will “bury” them, as Khrushchev boasted in 1956.
In this sense, we still live in the end of history. Even those who reject such phrasing often think along similar lines. The excellent book by historian Christopher Clark on the revolutionary year 1848–1849, published in 2023, nicely illustrates this notion. In the conclusion of his monumental work, Clark explicitly plays with parallels to the present and concludes that the world of the revolutionary year 1848 is, to a great extent, still our world.
This brings us back to a point in Fukuyama’s thesis that is often completely overlooked: if Hegel was always right and the dialectical process of historical development culminated in liberalism, then we have not been living in the “end of history” only since 1989, but already since the establishment of liberal-democratic systems in the nineteenth century. Communism thus never even reached the level of an “antithesis” that might then have spurred the emergence of a new synthesis. It is merely an unsuccessful attempt to escape from the end of history. The same can be said of fascism and of all the tragedies and wars of the twentieth century.
When we think of it this way, the thesis of the end of history appears far more bitter, uncomfortable, and indeed frightening than in its usual interpretation.
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Yet it can also inspire a certain optimism. When we observe the crisis of liberal democracy today, we can easily find precedents in the past. In the 1930s, when these systems first fell into deep crisis, it was impossible to look for any truly useful precedents in history. Some brilliant analysts of the interwar crisis, such as the French historian and philosopher Élie Halévy, did attempt to understand the rise of fascism and Bolshevism through historical precedents, but the results were dubious. The past turned out to be a very poor guide for understanding contemporary phenomena. This was also the starting point for Hannah Arendt in her theory of totalitarianism: since the past had ceased to shed light on the present, modernity had to be “thought without supports.”
Today we are in a significantly better position. Most of the phenomena we are witnessing today have their historical precedents, which substantially help us in both political analysis and moral judgment.
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What we are witnessing today is in fact not so much a crisis of liberal democracy as such. To be sure, we are undoubtedly dealing with a serious crisis of democracy. This is discussed regularly and in depth, for example, by the Russian-British philosopher Vlad Vexler, whom I highly recommend (his analyses of Putin’s regime are among the better ones). But more than an internal political crisis of liberal democracies, what matters is the crisis of global liberal hegemony. And this latter crisis, we cannot count on it passing. And if its decline is inevitable (which is quite likely), the main question is how to preserve liberal democracy in a world governed by other principles—or, as may well be the case in the medium term, in an anarchic world governed by no principles at all.
Whatever the answer to this dilemma may be, I believe it will not be possible without the awareness that liberal democracies simply have to be better: that they are called to higher standards both in domestic and foreign policy. A symptom of today’s crisis of liberal democracies is precisely the spread of the conviction that we may be just as bad as the others.
But when we speak of the crisis of liberal democracies, we must not overlook the fact that authoritarian systems are in an even deeper crisis. With the exception of China and a few other Asian countries, their crisis is in fact permanent, and they increasingly seek to escape it through external military adventures. And even China—which I have several times in this talk cautiously mentioned as an exception—can expand its influence globally only by relying on elites in individual countries who either want to imitate its model or, more often, simply want to find in it support for their own autocratic and kleptocratic practices. This means that the more its influence expands globally, the more it will generate the kind of nationalist reaction that Christopher Clark vividly described in his book on the revolution of 1848, in which patriotism, sometimes in highly virulent forms, went hand in hand with the affirmation of the liberal order. We already saw this dynamic in Hong Kong. There, the population’s desperate resistance was indeed crushed by extreme repressive measures. But this is a scenario the Chinese regime will find very difficult to replicate in more distant countries.
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Today it is harder than ever before in history to believe in the decline of the idea and the attitude summed up by the concept of thymos. No matter how much we hear (following Fukuyama as well) about the psychology of the “last man,” about the decadence of Western culture, about the loss of meaning and the endless boredom that supposedly pervades Western postmodern societies, a quick look at what is happening in the West and across the world shows how far removed this discourse is from reality. Everywhere liberal democracy is under threat—especially where that threat is linked to the erosion of national sovereignty, as in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and elsewhere—we see mass movements in its defense.
It is true that at the same time we also witness the passivization of young people in particular through new technologies. Yet everything suggests that activation is the stronger trend. What marks our age is an immense politicization at all levels—and most of this politicization speaks the language and follows the practices of liberal democracy. It brings with it many unpleasant things: the self-righteous radicalism of Michael Kohlhaas, who was prepared to destroy the entire social peace over a few confiscated horses, is still a phenomenon of our time. But even this unbridled and often destructive zeal for justice, such as we see in student radicalism on American campuses or in various populist movements across Europe, bears witness to the power of thymos as a driving force in contemporary societies. And as long as this remains one of the motors of social and political life, it is hard to believe that any regime will succeed in destroying liberal democracy. However this present crisis ends, I believe that the new synthesis will be formed within the parameters of liberal democracy.
As a witness to confirm this conviction, I would like to call upon the Italian playwright and Nobel laureate Dario Fo. In the last years of his life, at the height of Berlusconi’s power in Italy, Fo performed a sketch in which he pretended to cite quotations from Machiavelli’s The Prince. He based his performance on a view quite widespread in Italian culture since the mid-nineteenth century, when the literary historian Francesco De Sanctis elevated Machiavelli to the status of the greatest writer of Italy’s late Renaissance:
“Let it be clear,” Fo instructed his audience: “The advice that the secretary of the Florentine Republic addressed to the prince was in reality not directed to him, but to the entire population. Machiavelli pretends to speak to his master, but in truth he wants to warn every citizen how the machinery of power works and what tricks it employs.”
What interests us here is not the correctness of Fo’s interpretation, but the virtuosity with which he managed, on its basis, while imitating Machiavelli’s diction, to sum up a point that is in fact quite close to Machiavelli’s actual arguments:
“Bear in mind, sir, that when you conquer a city and its territory, you must immediately investigate what form of government its people were accustomed to before you subjugated them. If you find that this people is not accustomed to participating in common government and knows nothing of its natural right to take part in governing the city—keep it as you found it! For heaven’s sake, do not grant your new subjects any privileges they are not used to enjoying. If you were to grant them such, they would never understand the reason for your generosity and would become highly suspicious. But if, on the contrary, after subjugating a city and its territory, you discover that the population living there has always been accustomed to ruling itself, with its own freely adopted laws, with mayors, chiefs, and officials elected by customary democratic procedures, then do not, at any cost, attempt to rule these people yourself! Go further, far away from them, otherwise this will bring you grave, very grave harm. And if, against reason and against all wise counsel, you still wish at all costs to control this city and territory, the only solution will be to destroy them, to kill every man and every woman within its walls. Kill even the children, without stopping at the tears of infants. Kill even the unborn still in their mothers’ wombs, for the taste of freedom already permeates their tiny heads, and as soon as they see the light of day, they will feel an irresistible passion for liberty, so strong that they will always, at every moment, rise in furious uprisings against you to win back their freedom. In this they will persist at any cost and against all reason. Do you understand?”
Thank you.