The End of History and the Last Man

A book-length development of a 1989 essay, The End of History and the Last Man is a book by Francis Fukuyama, in which he argues that two forces, "the logic of modern science" and the "struggle for recognition" make liberal democracy a natural end state of historical development. If this is the case, however, he asks whether man will be satisfied with this, or if the "last man" will have a need to seek power and fulfillment through military or theological dictatorship.

Fukuyama's model is certainly not universal in futures studies or political science. His teacher and friend, Samuel Harrington, has a quite different view in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

The struggle for recognition

While Fukuyama agrees the term may not be familiar, he traces it to the earliest Western political philosophy. Plato wrote there were three parts to the soul:

• A desiring part
• A reasoning part
• thymos, or a spiritual parts

Fukuyama wrote that "the propensity to feel self-esteem arises...out of the thymos. It is like an innate sense of justice."

When human beings are treated as being less than their sense of self-worth, they feel anger, while if they fail to live up to their own sense of self-worth, they feel guilt. The relative emphasis is dependent on the society, with anthropological discussions of shame-based cultures and guilt-based cultures.

He returns, again and again, to Hegel's ideas in this area "the desire to be recognized as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle for the death for prestige...[this divided society] into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death."