End of History

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The End of History hypothesis, first proposed by neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, holds that, with America's hegemony following its victory in the Cold War, liberal democracy, as an ideology, had triumphed over fascism and communism, thus ending the history-driving Hegelian dialectic. This theory was popular in the early part of the 1990s, but with the rise of religious extremist doctrines as a challenger to liberalism's supremacy, and the increasing economic power of both China and India, it has been largely discredited... by Fukuyama himself. After a certain event, the "End of History" trend was basically completely discredited.

At the end of 1066 and All That, published in 1930, W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman state that World War I ended with the world in a situation where:

"America was thus clearly Top Nation, and history came to a full stop."[1]

Curiously, the concept doesn't really address the fact that Hegelianism aside, things have a tendency to keep happening whether history has been declared over or not.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. For our American readers, the punctuation mark "period" is called "full stop" in other Anglophone countries.
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