Abstract

Fukuyama’s most well known book, The End of History and the Last Man, argued that history was directed toward an end in liberal democracy and capitalism and that, generally, we had arrived. His argument appealed to those convinced that liberty in the human condition would invoke invisible hands to lift civilization into a bourgeois paradise. Yet its conclusion troubled others. Leftists and poststructuralists saw Fukuyama’s end as more like an iron cage to repress difference and class resistance. Traditional conservatives and communitarians, on the other hand, saw the present age as one of great disruption—and not as one of triumphal completion.