Maybe you didn’t notice, but 1989 saw the end of history as we know it. While the world’s attention was fixed on the struggles in Prague, Berlin, and San Salvador, the outcome of the human project was already being summed up in America’s middlebrow journals of opinion, where Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” became the most talked-about article since David Stockman gave away the game of the Reagan administration in the Atlantic Monthly.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But if liberalism now rules the earth, how to account for the illiberal cruelties of apartheid, Tiananmen Square, the West Bank, and the west side? Patience, instructed Fukuyama. A devout Hegelian idealist, confident that the spirit of history would soon come to rest where his sage finger had pointed, he considered it of no great import that “the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas and is as yet incomplete in the material world. [For] there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”
But it was Fukuyama’s reach rather than his grasp that excited his fellow pundits, who scrambled to get in on the victory celebration before it was over. Allan Bloom praised the article as “bold and brilliant.” Irving Kristol was “delighted to welcome G.W.F. Hegel to Washington.” Arrangements were made to translate the piece into several foreign languages, and Fukuyama quickly became the academic cause celebre of the year.
What’s more, the article’s release was a masterstroke of timing and promotion. Kristol, publisher of The National Interest, clearly meant for it to be a publishing event, lining up for the same issue commentaries on Fukuyama by such neocon drawing cards as Bloom, Moynihan, and himself. But that wasn’t the end of it. Six more commentaries appeared in the fall issue, with Fukuyama’s rejoinder promised for the winter. It was a superb marketing job, designed to prolong the shelf life of the product and conceal its faults in lavish packaging. A truly postmodern achievement.
