World Without End

Even setting aside the ways in which Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man introduces questions that he himself pursued in his subsequent thirty years of wide-ranging scholarship, it is remarkable howmany topics in academic debates of the following generation are present in its pages. Fukuyama focused on Hegel’s (or “Hegel-Kojève’s”, as he sometimes names the hybrid theorist of most interest to him) theory of recognition in a book published contemporaneously with work by both Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth that madeHegelian recognition a central theme in political theory. But there are also, for example, discussions of the democratic peace, the limits of so-called realism in international relations, and Kant’s call for a federation of republics. These anticipate work by John Rawls a few years later, and the subsequent literature about relationships within the community of liberal democracies and between that community and the rest of the world; they also anticipate the enthusiastic visions of the European Union in the 1990s and 2000s. There are also pre-Robert Putnam worries about the decline of civil society and associational life. And, of course, the misremembered version of Fukuyama’s thesis both influenced and became a synecdoche for liberal democratic triumphalism in politics and political science alike through the