Exactly thirty years ago, as the Berlin wall came down and the Cold War ended, the London Review of Books published an essay on ‘Endism’ by Paul Hirst. In it he assaulted with what we can now see as superb foresight, the west’s celebration of the ‘End of History’. We reproduce Paul’s outstanding argument below.
The idea that history had culminated in the triumph of liberal capitalism and this had put to bed any need for serious opposition to its hegemony, was proposed in an article by Francis Fukuyama, who was then working as a researcher for the US State Department. The timing gave his claim enormous publicity. He summarised it saying:
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such.... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
