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The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. A variety of authors have argued that a particular system is the "end of history" including Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexandre Kojève,[1] and Francis Fukuyama in the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.[2]
The concept of an end of history is a globalist form of the same end of the world philosophy as expressed in various religions. Religious ideas may forecast a complete destruction of the Earth or of life on Earth, as well as the end of the human race. In contrast, the concept of an End of History posits a scenario in which human existence persists indefinitely into the future, devoid of any significant alterations to the prevailing social, political, or economic structures.
The phrase the end of history was first used by French philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1861 "to refer to the end of the historical dynamic with the perfection of civil society".[3] Arnold Gehlen adopted it in 1952 and it has been taken up more recently by Heidegger and Vattimo.[3]
The formal development of an idea of an "end of history" is most closely associated with Hegel, although Hegel discussed the idea in ambiguous terms, making it unclear whether he thought such a thing was a certainty or a mere possibility.[4] The goal of Hegel's philosophy on history was to show that history is a process of realization of reason, for which he does not name a definite endpoint. Hegel believes that it is on the one hand the task of history to show that there is essentially reason in the development over time, while on the other hand history itself also has the task of developing reason over time. The realization of history is thus something that one can observe, but also something that is an active task.[5]
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A postmodern understanding of the term differs in that:
The idea of an "end of history" does not imply that nothing more will ever happen. Rather, what the postmodern sense of an end of history tends to signify is, in the words of contemporary historian Keith Jenkins, the idea that "the peculiar ways in which the past was historicized (was conceptualized in modernist, linear and essentially metanarrative forms) has now come to an end of its productive life; the all-encompassing 'experiment of modernity' ... is passing away into our postmodern condition".[6]
A name that is commonly linked to the concept of the end of history in contemporary discourse is Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama brought the term back to the forefront with his essay The End of History? that was published months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this essay, which he later expanded upon in his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, Fukuyama builds on the knowledge of Hegel, Marx and Kojève. The essay centers around the idea that now that its two most important competitors, fascism and communism, have been defeated, there should no longer be any serious competition for liberal democracy and the market economy.[7]
In his theory, Fukuyama distinguishes between the material or real world and the world of ideas or consciousness. He believes that in the realm of ideas liberalism has proven to be triumphant, meaning that even though a successful liberal democracy and market economy have not yet been established everywhere, there are no longer any ideological competitors for these systems. This would mean that any fundamental contradiction in human life can be worked out within the context of modern liberalism and would not need an alternative political-economic structure to be resolved. Now that the end of history is reached, Fukuyama believes that international relations would be primarily concerned with economic matters and no longer with politics or strategy, thus reducing the chances of a large scale international violent conflict.
Fukuyama concludes that the end of history will be a sad time, because the potential of ideological struggles that people were prepared to risk their lives for has now been replaced with the prospect of "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."[8] This does not mean that Fukuyama believes that a modern liberal democracy is the perfect political system, but rather that he does not think another political structure can provide citizens with the levels of wealth and personal liberties that a liberal democracy can.[9]
Following the end of the Cold War, as liberal democracy and free market economy began to dominate even outside the traditional Western World, his was also referred to as the world being on vacation from history. As the War on Terror, following the 2001 September 11 attacks, and the Second Cold War escalated during the 21st century, the vacation was referred to as being over.[10][11]
In a 2022 research article published by the Royal Society Open Science, the author models the transition between political regimes as a Markov process. Using a Bayesian inference approach, he then estimates the transition probabilities between political regimes from time-series data describing the evolution of political regimes from 1800 to 2018. The author then computes the steady state for this Markov process which represents a mathematical abstraction of the End of history and predicts that approximately 46% of countries will be full democracies. Moreover, the model indicates that the fraction of autocracies in the world is expected to increase over the next half-century before declining. Using random-walk theory, the author estimates the survival curves of different types of regimes and the characteristic lifetimes of democracies and autocracies at 244 years and 69 years, respectively. The argument is made that there is no statistical evidence that the End of history constitutes a fixed, complete omnipresence of democratic regimes.[12]
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