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Article: The End of History and the Last Man.
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- March 7, 1992
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1992 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN. By Francis Fukuyama. Hamish Hamilton; 418 pages; [Br pound]20. Free Press; $24.95
MUCH of Francis Fukuyama's fame rests on a misunderstanding. when he wrote that history had ended, he did not mean that the grand surge of human affairs had run its course. He simply meant that the old dialectic, those groaning railroad tracks on which Hegel and Marx saw mankind progressing (if the right people threw the switch), had reached the terminus at last. Evolution seemed to have brought man to a natural political apotheosis: liberal democracy, hand in hand with the free market.
Mr Fukuyama first put these thoughts into an ...