The Last Human

Abstract

The history of Western political theory, Norman Jacobson wrote, is a history of “various structures of solace.” Beginning with the ancient Greeks and persisting through the modern era, canonical works evinced a recognizable “rhythm,” despite other deeply discordant features: occasioned by worldly crises, they aimed first to stoke fear in readers—fear the authors attributed to specific political conditions—and then offered a comforting “resolution,” a vision of sound public order that had vanquished, or at least properly managed, “men’s dread.” This pattern of thought and expression was disturbed, Jacobson argued, by the unprecedented disasters of the twentieth century. The brutal realities of world war, totalitarianism, and nuclear weaponry could be counted upon to provoke fear, but these collective experiences seemed to resist assimilation into any, even the most creative or carefully wrought, “structure of solace.” When Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man appeared in 1992, however, it announced itself as an anachronistic project, proudly out of synch with what Fukuyama called the “pessimism” of the times. While the “deepest thinkers” had concluded that there was no such thing, Fukuyamamade the case for a “Universal History of mankind,” reviving an older form of theorizing that had been thrown into question by the devastating events of the twentieth century. Fukuyama’s broadlyHegelian approach posited a “single, coherent, evolutionary process”moving