Less than a year after the end of the Cold War when the former Soviet Union collapsed on the last day of 1991, Simon & Schuster’s Free Press division published the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man by then 40-year-old Japanese American professor of political science Francis Fukuyama. The author’s forward-looking conclusions and concerns, which were based on his deep knowledge of the literature of political philosophy from Europe’s Age of Enlightenment, made it something of a publishing sensation. As I’ve learned this year after self-publishing HOW THE JEWS HIGH-JACKED HISTORY (HTJH-JH), which is available for purchase at Amazon.com, it isn’t easy to attract readers to a book on the history of philosophy (or in my case the history of religion) and politics. Nevertheless, having read, re-read, and quoted from Fukuyama's The End of History, I can assure you that it is a scholarly masterpiece which continues to be well worth the read in its updated 2006 edition.
Informed by more than 30 years of history since 1992, I begin this critique with what Prof Fukuyama unequivocally got right. In the concluding 5th part of his book, which is entitled “The Last Man,” he contemplates Friedrich Nietzsche’s deep contempt for both Christianity and democracy. To understand the origin of this contempt, one must recall that Nietzche was the sickly son of a Lutheran pastor who died of a brain ailment (stroke?) at the age of 36 in 1849, and that Friedrich spent the last ten years before his death by stroke in 1900 in a state of extreme mental distress and under the doting, manipulative, and intensely antisemitic care of his younger sister Elizabeth. Consequently, as Fukuyama explicates Nietzsche’s political philosophy,
“Nietzsche’s last man was, in essence, the victorious slave. He agreed fully with Hegel that Christianity was a slave ideology, and that democracy represented a secularized form of Christianity. The equality of all men before the law was a realization of the Christian ideal of the equality of all believers in the Kingdom of Heaven." [p.301]
Looking farther back in HTJH-JH, I trace the idea of the rule of law transcending the rule of the King from the story recorded in the Holy Bible’s 2 Kings 23. In it, Judah's pious King Josiah reads publicly from a new book of the law - that is, an update of the Torah. As the Hebrew Bible tells what scholars assure us very likely is a factual recounting, that book was handed to Josiah in 621 BCE under the false pretense that it had been authored by Moses and “discovered” in the First Temple during renovations by a leader of the Temple priesthood who had raised him from childhood. But as Prof Fukuyama goes on accurately to summarize regarding Nietzsche's adamantly anti-Christian ideas,
“The liberal democratic state did not constitute a synthesis of the morality of the master and the morality of the slave, as Hegel had said. For Nietzsche, it represented an unconditional victory of the slave. The master’s freedom and satisfaction were nowhere preserved, for no one really ruled in a democratic society.” [p.301]
A few pages later (on p. 328), the good professor backhandedly fingered Donald Trump as the obstreperously Megalomanic kind of character who might upend early 19th century German political philosopher Georg Hegel’s implicitly Left-leaning political ideals following the American and French revolutions. As Fukuyama explained, Hegel recognized the grounding of democratic ideals in the Judeo-Christian ethical concept of the universal equality of all men before the law based on our moral freedom (i.e., free will). Hegel further argued that the rise of democracies marked the demise of what he called earlier stages of history’s “master-slave relations” and thus, democracy was the natural end state of political evolution – and in that sense, the End of History.
Indeed, the great strength and lasting academic value of Fukuyama’s book is how clearly and concisely he introduces readers to aspects of political philosophy that continue to undergird political arguments of the present day – including ideas of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke which remain the backbone of conservative liberalism (and no, as Prof Fukuyama explains at length, that is not an oxymoronic self-contradiction). In addition, he goes on to highlight an assortment of subtleties that influence the relative strength and weaknesses of democracies and the ways in which they are organized and can decay.
By the time he wrote his "Afterword" to the 2006 edition, historical events had not yet transpired to inspire Prof Fukuyama to warn of the rise of a new axis of authoritarian leaders that would include Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Kim Jung-un of North Korea, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran who are now collaborating to challenge the hegemony of the Western democracies of the US and EU which seemed secure at the end of the Cold War. Neither did he write of anticipating the rise of Right-wing, authoritarian, political parties in democratic nations as epitomized by Trump’s MAGA movement in the U.S.A.
On the other hand, in his "Afterword" written some 5 years after the shock of the fall of the Twin Towers in NYC on 9/11/2001, Fukuyama did identify Islam as the first of four “challenges to the optimistic, evolutionary scenario that he lays out in The End of History” (p. 347). Nevertheless, the good professor wisely steered clear of the potentially calamitous intellectual sholes associated with political discussions of Zionism. Indeed, the closest he came in The End of History to sharing such politically polarizing thoughts is the following:
“Orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Islam, by contrast, are totalistic religions that seek to regulate every aspect of human life, both public and private, including the realm of politics. These religions may be compatible with democracy – Islam, in particular, establishes no less than Christianity the principle of universal human equality – but they are very hard to reconcile with liberalism and the recognition of universal human rights, particularly freedom of conscience and religion.” [p. 217]
What Prof Fukuyama is not saying, there, speaks every bit as loudly as what he says. But having also read and greatly enjoyed and benefited from his later works including The Origin of Political Order: From Prehistoric Times to the French Revolution (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2015), it appears to me that he wants nothing to do with writing about the enduring religious controversy being expressed in today’s Israel-Hamas war which has been with us since long before the British and American, Christian evangelical, post-WWII creation of the Jewish State of Israel. You can learn more about that seminal evangelical influence in Bart Ehrman's Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End (2023), which I reviewed in my Blog post {here} at historyhighjackers.com on Nov. 10, 2023.
For those interested in reading unbiasedly between the political lines, I know of no wiser nor more knowledgeable source than Francis Fukuyama, who is both largely detached from our world’s current, authoritarian-friendly move to the far Right and from its Christian evangelical and Muslim sponsored religious conflicts in the Middle East. In my following Blog post at historyhighjackers.com, I'll review Prof Fukuyama's Liberalism and Its Discontents (2021). In it, he presents a nearly up-to-date analysis of the causes and dangers associated with world-wide threats to the West's liberal democracies which have arisen in the intervening years.
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