The End of History as Science Fiction

Abstract

One consequence of the success of The End of History was a degree of fame for Professor Fukuyama, and this, one imagines, is what led Slate magazine to invite him to host a well-publicized movie series. Between 2012 and 2019, Fukuyama introduced and screened a series of science fiction dystopias: Blade Runner; Children of Men; District 9; Gattaca; Soylent Green; Total Recall; The Road Warrior. I think that we might shed some new light on The End of History by reading it alongside and against these science fictions, each of which tells the story of a dystopic state that has suffered the catastrophic deterioration or perversion of a democratic-capitalist political system. That is to say, these movies, selected by Fukuyama as of particular significance, are legible from within the framework elaborated in The End of History, an argument I have developed at length elsewhere. Thus Blade Runner, for example, can be read as a dramatization of the Hegelian battle between the “first men,” the replicant “slave,” Roy Batty, challenging the policeman “master,” Rick Deckard. “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?” Batty taunts the policeman as he beats him.Children ofMen becomes legible as the exhausted last gasps of an aging British state, once a center of global capital and now irredeemably insular. If Blade Runner is about the battle between first men, Children of Men can be interpreted as a story about what Fukuyama termed the Last Man, serving out his time in a world with little left to excite him. The Road Warrior shows the devastation of a nuclear war