The End of History and the Last Man

The spiritual history of capitalist liberalism at its very apogee

Not many men today practice anything resembling spiritual history in the ambitious and profound sense of the term, and very few within that are capable of doing so with a large audience. This fact bodes poorly for the West’s self-understanding. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man may have been the last prominent spiritual history in American public discourse, and it seems that now is a good time to return to it. Sniveling social media pseudo-intellectuals love to use it as the butt of the joke (it seems to them to be the case that obviously Fukuyama was gloating and obviously must be idiotic for standing by the book over the decades) revealing in the process that they haven’t read it and maybe don’t read at all. Let’s start with a little background.

There is something animating in the Western intellectual tradition—something that I would call “historical thought,” and I would maintain not so controversially that its origins lie in the fusion of Hebraic and Greek thought in the Christian world. A few of months ago I gave my splenetic views about the legacy of Herodotus, in a screed outlining some basic dimensions of what I call the dismal history of the present, a very different history from Fukayama’s vision of history, whose vision of history was laughed at for being not even a little dismal at all. Let me add to that earlier view disparaging Herodotus the additional view that the real origins of Western history, as a genre, lie in Church history, and that figures like the Venerable Bede are more important for its development than Herodotus, and that the first articulation of the historical sensibility of the Western World lies in the work of Saint Augustine. For many of you this will be uncontroversial, and to some of you seem a view so radically out of style that it may even possess a certain novelty. It is from church history that we get the prospect of a spiritual history—a history of revelation in historical time. This history is what has allowed history as a genre to transcend its place as a chronicle of princes—a form of history traditional in all literate civilizations, one in which the historian indexes the passage of time to the rising and falling of dynasties or to the natural world—and instead being to index historical events to an inner and esoteric plotline of World History comprehensible only with the second sight. Without this kind of history we would have no conception of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, no notion of progress as we currently mean it, no modern Leftists or Rightists reading tea leaves in an attempt to understand the machinations of the Neoliberals or the Modernists. We would have never begun to utilize the Seeing Stone of Lukacs.

Hegel is famous for many things, and one of them is being systematic about providing a spiritual history of the modern West. His Philosophy of Right coherently endorsed the modern state, modern Western (specifically Protestant) religious ethics, and modern Western conceptualization of laws and rights all as being the terminus of a spiritual history that goes back to the origins of the West in the ancient synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem, vindicated ultimately in a culture endowed with many gothic virtues inherited from ancient Germanics. Famously, Marx inverted this story into a strictly material World History—one concerned exclusively with the mechanical domination of this-worldly things by men—and since this point no one has successfully synthesized a total orienting history of the world that has had even a small portion of the influence as the grand historical visions of either Hegel or Marx. Marx, in doing this, established the architecture for a new understanding of world history that has in the last century been triumphant in reorganizing the West’s—and maybe the world’s—conception of history. I will explain more about the 20th century triumph of Marx’s historical ideas elsewhere.

By comparison to this, grand-scope historians like either Toynbee or Harari are just playing an unambitious game within which the stakes are peanuts and the analytical frameworks that they employ can allow them to narrate almost none of the true depth of World History. Instead we get just a pile of facts and events called World History that matters to us almost none at all. It’s only a vague narrative of the past-as-dataset without making it legible through the parallax between the movement of historical events and the movement of the spirit.

The Triumph of Capitalist Liberal Democracy

That Marx was triumphant at the plane of historiography—ie that he won the war waged internal to the history of history—very importantly happened at the same time that he lost the war in actual history. There is much to understand about how intellectuals are often mopey lost-causers, and here we have received an abject lesson! Internationalist Liberalism won and Communism lost, and so some large bulk the intellectuals immediately found total agreement that everyone had to treat liberals and capitalist as being bunch of idiots and laugh at their attempts to narrate the history of the world. Marx was for intellectual sophisticates, which was obvious because he had been proven wrong. If we, you and I, my dear reader, are not specimens of some inferior breed of underman (I am uncertain about this, but let’s just assume for now) then presumably we would consider that maybe internationalist liberals understood something at the end of the last century? Surely the alternative, in which we chose to laugh at internationalist liberals and to refuse to admit that they were right about something, anything, would be rank resentment, and surely we would be repulsed by this intellectual cowardice? (Again, here I am before you clutching to an uncertain and optimistic premise)

Fukuyama’s fateful book was preceded by an article, published in 1989, in which he said, very roughly paraphrasing, that if Marxists thought that there will be an end of history and it will be Communism, then looking around the world at the end of the 20th century clearly indicated that they were wrong and capitalist liberal democracies being at peace and engaging in trade within an internationalist framework had to be, by the Marxist standards, the victors of the great ideological struggle and a very serious candidate for the end of history. This was obviously hubristic, triumphalist and had a strong element of mockery, but we should note in hindsight that the Marxists deserved it! Moreover, looking around the world, Fukuyama’s view was fairly reasonable. Why would we not tentatively take his side over the Marxists in this controversy?

If we were to live in a certain pseudoreality favored by many intellectuals, and have acute and common vices so common to intellectuals, then the article would obviously produce in us reactions that would range from bratty eye-rolling to apoplexia. Scorn, mockery, smug dismissal, and so on. And so it was exactly such a way amongst some very large swathe of the intelligentsia in the 1990s, and in all decades following from there to the present.

Fukuyama developed his position over the following years and he ultimately printed them in book form in 1992 as The End of History and the Last Man. Despite the fact that any intellectual should have noticed from the title that the book was about Nietzsche, he has been greeted with the same derision and dismissal ever since. The last man is, in the Nietzschean idiom, the last form of man at the end of progress, and he is a dismal and pathetic sort of creature. Fukuyama has largely, although not quite entirely, stood by the book for decades, prompting chagrin amongst his aliterate critics.

Let us continue to imagine that we are not resentful underman. Let us instead continue to presume that the recent golden age of peace, prosperity and technical progress must have indicated, even just a little, that liberals actually knew something. Unthinkable, truly. What did the view of world history look like from the apex of capitalist liberalism qua Fukuyama? Did Fukuyama’s view from all the way up there at the tippy top of World History allow him to see beyond the clouds?

The book is constructed in two parts, the first half being a history of modern man’s ability to dominate nature using technology, and the second half being a history of the spirit that manifests in political freedom. The first is contra Marx, while the latter is contra Nietzsche. The first is a history of the triumph of capitalism over socialism by the standards of socialism; if socialists are materialists they must admit to the superiority of capitalism by their own standards, because in a history of material domination of nature capitalism won and socialism lost. The latter is a history of man’s will to greatness, and how liberal democracy emerges from the choice to allow—or even demand—that all men strive for greatness in the form of self-rule within the framework of liberal protections against harm against the individual. In this latter history, Fukuyama is not so certain as he is when dispensing with Marx; it is not so obvious that if men are motivated by irrational desires outside of the ken of the French Enlightenment that liberal democracy will truly be the end of history. He determined, presciently, that this is not clear either way, or at least wasn’t in the 1990s. Perhaps liberal democracy is the end of history, and perhaps men are irrational and frightening by nature and will destroy it on the basis of impulses outside of the world view of liberalism. It may in fact be the case that men by nature need a struggle. It may additionally be the case that when they fall behind they are consumed by resentment, and then also the case that when they achieve equality their will to greatness leads them to desire ever more, and to fight bitterly for supremacy over other men. If so, capitalist liberal democracies would face choppy waters indeed.

That he dispenses almost wholly with the Left is evidence of some great deftness that cannot be overlooked! So let us discuss the deftness of his arguments on this front before moving on to his engagement with Nietzsche. The primary Left challenge to the reign of capitalist liberal democracy—after the failure of the Communists—essentially amounted to this: That capitalism produces too much income inequality and this inequality will challenge the underlying class basis of the democratic state. Fukuyama’s maneuver in response to this amounted to saying that firstly this was a critique internal to liberal democracy—so if you are making this argument you are a liberal democrat, and so game over—and that also, if this were true, it would amount to agreement with the right about the irrational power of resentment and the unfulfilling character of liberal freedom—and so game over again, because now you are no longer a Leftist. This, if extended further, would be agreement by Fukuyama with something long obvious, which is that the rational account of man embedded in the Left’s optimistic program of universal emancipation cannot explain the lust for blood, glory, charity or revenge that motivates actual Left-wing activists or revolutionaries.

Such a challenge, and his response to it, necessarily presumes a relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy, and this is precisely the point at which Fukuyama’s conceptualization of liberalism is revealed. Why do the material history of capitalism and the spiritual history of liberal democracy necessarily go together? Why not capitalism with authoritarianism? Many liberal and conservative thinkers asked this question in the 1920s and 1930s. Meanwhile, Left challenges to capitalist liberal democracy essentially maintain either that capitalism will destroy liberal democracy, and this will vindicate either social democrats—who hold the view that capitalism is the wrong economics for liberal democracy—or the hard Left—who anticipate the failure of capitalism because it will beget the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The linchpin for Fukuyama consists precisely in his definition of liberalism as being, in essence, the political system that protects us from injury and death. The liberalism of Francis Fukuyama is a Hobbesian politics motivated by rational fear. What this means is that the increasing rationality of the world, dominated as it is by capitalism, necessarily gets a rational politics that follows capitalism—a politics that grants equality and autonomy through submission to the modern and rights-providing state because this state can allow you to live without fear of injury.

However, Fukuyama left the door open to being wrong by the standards of the Right, so if we would prove him wrong it would not even be so satisfying for us or humiliating for him! And so it was. He was proven right about how he would be proven wrong! Aggravating!

There are some legitimate challenges to liberal democracy in his view of things, and many of them seem in hindsight prophetic. His material history of rational domination—the first part of his book that answers Marx—is in truth a history of rationality, and then his spiritual history—answering Nietzsche—is in turn a reflection on modern history that speculates about what man’s nature and impulses must be. This is a little odd that he means this of all things when he says he is writing a spiritual history, but never mind that. Spirit means breath in Latin, so it should not be too controversial that the history of the spirit would entail a history of life. It is a peculiarity of German and not English that Geist would conflate spirit and mind, and it is a peculiarity of German intellectual history that Hegel’s history of the spirit would make an idol of the finite mind. Fukuyama picking upon the Greek thymos certainly has a kind of genius to it. This is the Greek word for spiritedness, and it is the meaning of spirit with which is concerned; he is interested in the history of man’s aspiration for recognition and glory. This is what his history of spirit is, and its substance is in fact not a history at all but is instead a rumination on the character of human life.

It is in this second half of Fukuyama’s project, which he calls a history of spirit but which is really a philosophico-historical rumination on the psychology of modern man, that Fukuyama picks up a proud tradition in American social science and political thought; he begins to explore a deep problem with Enlightenment political thought that damns large swaths of modern ideology and social-scientific expertise. This line of attack is not unique to Fukuyama, and it amounts to saying that human nature, empirically, looks nothing like the banal, competent and sanguine human nature buried deep down as the basis of optimistic Enlightenment thought.

The Enlightenment held within it two contradictory views, the first being that all of mankind would be set free through the elimination of atavistic repression and authority, and the second being that science should inform our views because it allowed us to see reality clearly. The contradiction that has always reasserted itself from this is that scientific evidence about human nature has never given any good evidence that large swathes of mankind can be or even wants to be free. What this means is that we have two routes forward, and the first is that if we are committed to the Enlightenment—and by that we mean that we are proponents of scientific knowledge in modernity—then that means by implication that we can’t be optimistic about universal and easygoing emancipation. Alternately, if we are committed to the Enlightenment and by that we are committed to modern revolution then we need to have faith beyond reason in man. Both of these two lines of thought lead to conclusions more dialectically advanced than the thought of the French Enlightenment and the Left that descends from it. Both of these two lines of thought, in more advanced and developed forms, are traditional to American political culture, what we might call the optimistic and pessimistic branches of the American mind. Let us focus on the latter, the dissent against Enlightenment optimism, as it is clearly the mold of Fukuyama’s mind. This line of dissent is so traditional to American thought that it can be found in a highly developed form, for example, in the political thought of Madison, perhaps the Enlightenment’s greatest pessimistic liberal, and has been reasserted in some form in every generation of American thought ever since.

Fukuyama does not attempt to fully dismiss the challenges to liberal democracy from the Right, but instead absorbs or manages those intellectual challenges within a framework indigenous to the history of liberal thought across the centuries. The Right-wing challenges to the liberal end of history are numerous and obviously damning. This includes prominently the fact that men, on account of the will to greatness, don’t just want equality, but want supremacy. This challenge, based on a conceptualization of what Fukuyama calls megalothymia, is similar to the critiques of memetic desire or of conspicuous consumption that also torpedo the prospect of happy and easy progress. Megalothymia means that men yearn for supremacy beyond equality with other men: Game over. They will never be satisfied by a revolution in favor of equality in citizenship, at least for long. Memetic desire means that once people see that they can want something, or that other people already want it, that they will probably learn to want it too: Game over, again. People’s interests within the liberal political system can essentially grow forever, and the satisfaction of their basic needs by Left-wing charity will never come to pass. Demands will grow and grow and will never be satiated or achieve stability in such a society. This idea, of French vintage, is currently en vogue amongst many Americans, most prominently one Peter Thiel. Conspicuous consumption as a concept amounts to just the observation that if people are being rational about how they obtain and use material things, then it’s obviously the case that what they are rationally pursuing is demonstration of their superior status: Game over yet again! If they are rational when they waste California water on their green lawns then they are evil because they are wasteful in the name of pure status. If they are good in their intentions then they are obviously irrational and in need of paternalistic governance because they clearly keep wasting water on their green lawns in California, and so either way the French Enlightenment is toast. Veblen’s work on this topic generated very large problems for optimistic Enlightenment political economists trying to theorize how rational men derived utility from the things that they bought and consumed. There are more variants of these lines of attack traditionally appealing to the American mind, but I will stop here with these.

All the more prescient is Fukuyama’s attentiveness to resentment. His theorization of megalothymia reads today as a clever attack on ill-thought French Enlightenment optimism, but his theorization of resentment reads today as darkly prophetic. Resentment in this context is of Nietzschean vintage. Its technical definition for most modern thinkers is something like: The choice to redefine good as bad and bad as good as an act of revenge, practiced by pathetic losers who can’t look in the mirror and admit to inferiority. Thus Harold Bloom’s choice to name the post-68’ and post-69’ Left-Wing conspiracy theory that has taken over academic humanities as the School of Resentment. Fukuyama observed, at the end of the Soviet Union, that resentment in postcolonial societies would almost certainly create a whole new era of revolution, terror and geopolitical conflict that would both internally and externally challenge the capitalist world. He notes that this might be internal to countries like the United States in white-black race relations, and this might be between former colonies and their former overlords, as between Middle Eastern countries and the West. Put simply: Freedom for most of the world would probably create hideous and destructive envy and stoke a lust for revenge dooming the world to conflict. Fukuyama foretold that this conflict could conceivably be a lethal threat to the perpetual peace that lies at the end of history. Bleak, but also a prediction that is probably already vindicated.

But wait—why would perpetual peace be the end of history?

Let us respectfully move past the fact that Fukuyama’s liberalism is unremittingly bleak and also move past the fact that he is prescient about the threats it faces. Let us say, maybe as some kind of gesture of good will or perhaps even because we are really convinced that we agree that liberal democracy is more than equal to its challenges and let us say also that the Right critique is not in fact so lethal. What then? Well we would have perpetual peace. Let us also move past the postulate, rejected by many political scientists, including Fukuyama, that democracies tend to befriend one another and wage war far less frequently, opting instead for trade.

Perpetual peace? Perpetual peace! That’s the end of history? Fukuyama’s history of the world is not just by far the intellectual superior of the histrionic crisis history practiced by current-year activist historians, but it is also so much more disturbing. Bleakness beyond bleakness. Conquest and subjugation of the world by sheer acquisitiveness and fear of injury cannot be stopped; the world and all natural things in it will be successfully dominated and then exploited fully and totally by people who are driven by what?—a potent admixture of venality and risk-aversion! And in the end there will be no bloodshed and history will be at rest, because craven rationality reigns supreme.

The dream of perpetual peace has clanked around as an idea in the history of Western thought for centuries. A permanent world empire, or an inter-imperial order, that is so durable and complete that it transcends historical conflict and is an end of history. It is no surprise that the totalitarians were preoccupied with this apocalyptic project and that it meant, in practice, forms of brutal imperialism totally unthinkable to conscious mind of the intellectual Left. Thus the lacuna in the world view of so many partisan Lefties about the Soviets; it was unthinkable that the end of history, as a fantasy born of Western thought, could mean nothing other than absolute and total imperial despotism. Thus, also, the easy affinity between the utopian end of history of the late 19th century Right—the eugenecist world order—and the revolutionary fervor of the National Socialists. In many ways, the end of history pursued by the Third Reich was similar to that of the Bolsheviks, and was similarly an extension of the Western imperial project at its 19th century apex.

And why would such a form of total domination of the Earth be the end of history? Picture it in your mind: There is one empire, maybe Communist, maybe with its capital in Russia or France, or one system or racial empires, one of their capitals probably in either Germany or France, and this imperial order never declines and the world is in permanent bondage. How did we get to the point—internal to the history of Western thought—that this political terminus was an object of serious philosophical speculation and anticipation? Because, of course, the history of this world has been inflected by special significance in the minds of Western historians by some special revelation that shines a light across the course of history, a light that makes history’s true structure visible to us. If we were on the verge of holding the whole world in permanent bondage, then what would be revealed about the movement of the spirit in this fact? This is bleak a question to ask if you are alive, looking at the world and thinking clearly, in the 1930s, which thankfully I am not.

Fukuyama’s end of history is by comparison banal. What would be revealed if such an end of history came to pass as that of Fukuyama’s prediction, in which capitalist liberal democratic nation states generated perpetual peace through infinite rational domination of nature and infinite rational self-interest? Alternatively, what would be revealed to us in the failure of such an end of history, if such a conquest of the world failed?

This brings us to some very important odds and ends that Fukuyama’s spiritual history of liberal democracy fails to include, ultimately to the benefit of the perfect cleanliness of his composition and his argument, an argument with so little exposed surface open to attack, but also an argument that is in many ways unsatisfying because it has many omissions. In his perfectly rational scheme of history, liberal democracy has no roots in any religiously-inflected program of righteousness or emancipation, called in another time the New Jerusalem. His liberal democracy is preceded by something called Enlightenment liberalism, but not even more deeply by something called Protestant Republicanism, even though in historical fact it was. His end of history is an end of history without anything to hope for, and his liberal democracy is a liberal democracy without virtuous citizen soldiers.

There are also problems in his rational account of capitalist domination that have been empirically confirmed to us since he published his seminal work; today it is discussed everywhere that the rich and advanced countries all have steeply negative birth rates, indicating that the system of material domination particular to exactly Fukuyama’s era was, in some way, obviously not the ultimate and final system of world domination.

The Blindness of Capitalist Liberal Democracy

Let us say before moving on, by way of a book review, that his End of History and the Last Man is almost certainly some kind of historic masterwork, and still now in 2025 after everything that has come to pass, remains required reading for social critics, political philosophers and contemporary historians. But with all that said, what was omitted from its view of the world from up in the clouds of world-historic triumph?

It has been known since ancient times that the origins of wisdom lie only in revelation, and that the precondition for virtue lies in wisdom. If the ancients could practice righteous self-rule inside of history, in either Athens or Jerusalem, then it must have been the case that this was contingent on revelation and revelation alone. In the Middle Ages, Christians lost faith in this-worldly politics and in doing this they separated moral virtue from political virtue; the prior was reserved for martyrs in either flesh or will who had no place in our fallen world, while the latter was essentially pagan and led men to ultimate ruin. Revelation led to wisdom, which led to martyrdom, not sovereignty. Pagan pride and lust for blood led to power, and power led to sovereignty, but in the final days these vain and pagan rulers of the fallen world would be brought low and made equals to the most-bitterly suffering unfortunes at the foot of the cross.

However, from the Renaissance onward new ideas entered currency. Maybe Christianity had been a mistake like the latter Romans had thought, and maybe the late Romans had actually been right when they said that the abandonment of their traditional and pre-Christian religion was the reason that the West had spent a millennium in the clutches of tyrannical Kings. Maybe it was actually religion of sheep, maybe the Romans had been right that Christian virtue was really just an ideal that appealed to resentful peasants, slaves and women, and the pagan virtues necessary for civic life had to make a comeback. This view would span from thinkers like Machiavelli down through the ages into the present, taking along the way various forms.

There were other equally radical interpretations of contemporary events that emerged no later than the 15th century. Perhaps, if we now seem to have universal education, civic life, excellence in politics and in science, then perhaps there is now, today, universal virtue of the kind required for a republic. If there is universal virtue then there must be universal wisdom, and if universal wisdom then universal revelation, and so it follows logically and from the evidence looking around us that we must today be in some new messianic age of the world. Similarly, if virtuous action in historical time leads to the republic rather than martyrdom then surely we must be in a new age of the world and the New Jerusalem must be possible inside of this-worldly history. We are at the inflection point of world history toward apocalyptic time, and righteousness now no longer leads us to die but leads us to freedom in republican government. This logic exploded across Europe and later the world, it has permeated through Protestantism’s entire history to the present, it precipitated the wars of religion, and today still reverberates in India, in the Middle East, in some parts of Europe, and it is today still part of the Evangelical-Enlightenment alliance that has always been at the core of American political culture, as well as in the Evangelical-Zionist alliance that today draws so much ire and is treated with such non-comprehension. The Republic and the New Jerusalem are one and the same, and if we have obtained them then we must have rounded the corner into the end of days.

The fundamental unit of both Protestant ethics as well as republican political thought is the individual. The individual citizen, who owns his land and owns himself, was a conceptual framework that in this context fit snugly to the traditional small holders and merchant republics of Northern and Western Europe, and so it is no surprise that various Gothicist and Anglo-Saxonist ideas have been traditional to certain forms of European political thought, and they were until recently foundational to both American and British political thought. Ancient Anglo-Saxons were a culture wherein traditionally a man is high enough that he owns a plot of land or somehow buys into a merchant town, but in which he is traditionally not so high that he can own others as slaves. A true man does not live off domination or parasitic extraction, but through toughness and rugged self-rule in the austere and difficult beauty of the North Atlantic or the Baltic. This self-reliance and close relationship to nature through autonomous labor insured that those rugged small holders were autonomous and manly throughout the Middle Ages. Now, in modernity, with the Protestant recovery of both the Gospel and the Hebrew Bible, and with the conceptual framework of citizenship recovered out of ancient texts by modern humanists, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant Citizen is fully capable of self rule in a way that most men are not, and the system of government appropriate to his way is one that respects his liberties and allows him parliamentary self-rule. Such a story is traditional to American republicans both in and out of that political party, a variant is traditional to the American, English and Scottish Enlightenments, and another variant can be found in German thought, including in the story that Hegel tells in his Philosophy of Right.

Whither the citizen and whither his virtue? How could we now have a political theory of liberal democracy without any robust account of human nature, the family, the community, of social, economic and biological reproduction, without an account of practical wisdom and without an account of the origins of binding moral claims? It seems that in Fukuyama’s view we can have liberal democracy without producing liberal democrats.

Let us take the popular topic of the day: Declining birth rates. What if capitalist liberal democracies, as Fukuyamna defines them, cannot produce the citizens that they need in order to perpetuate themselves? This could be in the form of a spiritual crisis, or a very direct and statistically measurable one. The marketization of basic social functions, including sexual relations, the penetration of the family by bureaucracy, the effeminization of the labor pool all destroy birth rates, which destroys basic social reproduction. While there is little evidence that Soviet Socialism was any better in this regard, it does still challenge the notion that capitalism is a system of world domination that is either inexorable or distinctly connected with liberal democracy. It looks as though, in its current form, it depresses birth rates and destroys social bonds in a way that cripples the society and its ability to produce liberal democrats. The basic social structure of the modern middle class, the modern inheritors of those gothic small holders, is at best under siege and is at worst already wrecked.

What’s more, his account of the inexorability of perpetual peace—resting atop a Hobbesian liberalism—in no way resolves the fundamental spiritual problem at the core of the republican political tradition foundational to liberal democracy. This problem has always been, roughly, that the ideal citizen soldier needs a spiritual virtue that makes him trustworthy with power, otherwise his individual freedoms will lead to ruin for society, he will be corrupt as a voter, and he will be tyrannical when elected or in some other way entrusted with power, as in the military. Even if he were not in charge of this military, it would still be a problem: How, in a time of war, would he die for the polity rather than flee, if his motivation to participate in the polity were rooted in self-interest? The citizen needs a moral insight that allows him to transcend self-interest.

It has been discussed at length, and for over a century, that modernity has within it a growing spiritual crisis. The modern sciences were born of men willing to submit themselves to things as they truly are, but the fruits of these selfsame sciences produce men who think it their right to reshape the world and dictate that things are thus and so. As this spiritual crisis of modernity transpires, the modern sciences born of humility produce a society not of God-fearing citizen soldiers but instead of would-be sorcerers. Modern man grows ever more Faustian. The West increasingly resembles Egypt more than Jerusalem. All of these things have been said, in these terms, in the last century, and with good warrant. It is not obvious at all that the capitalism of Fukuyama produces a society free of domination. To the contrary, its affinity seems to be with domination. This rational domination of nature that he rests on so heavily in his argument seems to produce exactly the spiritual crisis that would cripple any liberal democracy worthy of the name. When Western man’s inward relation towards nature fully resembles witchcraft, what will transpire is that the civic structure of the modern West, as well as its carefully cultivated excellence in war and science, will all fall into ruin. These things had already been said and forgotten and said again, and by important thinkers known to the subtler minds of all the advanced Western societies, and had all been said long before Fukuyama started work on his End of History.

He has admitted since the original publication of the book that China is proof that capitalism may lead to authoritarianism, a damning prospect, and it is to his credit that he can admit this, even if there was already strong evidence present since the 1920s and 1930s.

As far as I can tell, he has not internalized quite yet that what he thought might be the end of history, something like internationalist liberal democratic capitalism, as it existed then and still exists today, is destroying its own preconditions. It is doing so not just spiritually, but also materially, and it is doing so through the destruction of the family as well as all other intimate and loving social bonds, and in the end eliminating all individuals capable of responsibly wielding real authority.

And so we now enter onto our current plane of history, now that late-20th-century capitalist liberalism is wobbly and creaking, and we see clearly that his fears of the Nietzschean attacks against the liberal end of history were all well-founded. However, it seems apparent in hindsight also that his vision of liberal democracy is being undone by forces outside of his sight—whether it be through the destruction of the demographic base of advanced capitalist societies or a spiritual ill that is lethal in ways inaccessible to a perfectly rational account of liberal democracy—or, put more simply, being undone by loss of virtue.