End of History

Ontological position
• Nation state system in the international
structure
• Idealism and Materialism from Hegel and
Marx respectively
It is not ‘ideas all the way down’
• The phrase End of History is not new
 Idealism from Hegel
• Berkeley’s Idealism
– World exists in human mind
– Experiences are subjective
• Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
– Reality lies in time and space
– Neumena and Phenomenon
• Hegel’s Absolute Idealism
– Distaste for Neumena (not accessible)
– Rational alone is real
– Abstracts broadly shared ___ Spirit (all reality)
– World is the reflection of our ideas
– History is linear
– The spirit evolves through dialectic ___ the drive for Change
• Understood as a linear process
• 3 parts of Spirit (Plato)
– Rationality, Appetite and Thymos (desire for recognition, victory, betterment)
• Fukuyama’s reliance on Human Nature
• Hegel’s idea that inspired Fukuyama centers on Consciousness

What is Consciousness?
How consciousness-dialect nexus is understood?
Consciousness is cause and not effect, and can develop autonomously
from the material world; hence the real subtext underlying the apparent
jumble of current events is the history of ideology.

The mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of

consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages
corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal,
slave-owning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian societies
 Materialism
• Materialism
– Many definition
• Obsession with material
• Reality is independent of Human thought
• World is made of matter
• Even thoughts and consciousness are reducible to electro-
chemical reactions electro-mechanical forces
• Ideas and thoughts are shaped by the material
environment
• Traditionally, methodologically stronger
• Dialectical Materialism
 Materialism from Marx
• Criticised for categorizing Hegel’s idea of consciousness (realm
includes religion, art, culture, philosophy) into superstructure
– Primacy of the variable ‘Material Mode of Production’
– Philosophical tilt towards materialism and utilitarianism
• Materialist Bias in Modern Western Thought
– RCT
• Economic Behavior and Maynard Keynes
– Disapproval of governments’ interference
– Distaste for culturally/ religiously imposed restriction
– Internationally speaking, isolation was not an option
– Priority of wealth over security
“Every theory is for someone and for some
purpose”
• Which side to take?
• Can the two approaches explain everything
separately?
• Is the cross criticism justified?
Commentary on the System Of Government

• Unit level of analysis

• Reference framework is French Revolution
• Reference to the events of cold war
– Too many ideologies were there to propose them
selves for state-units to practice; Bolshevism, Fascism
etc
– In Communism vs liberal Democracy, the later
determines the end of evolution of human struggle
for ideology on the basis of which they to build
politico-socio-cultural polity and eventually the world
Difference between Democracy and Liberal
Democracy?

The Tenacity of Liberal Democracy

 Winning the Argument for Liberal
Democracy
• From Idealism
– Ideologies are reducible to human consciousness; whatever Human
values become part of the practice and culture
– Consciousness and Human needs, desires, interests and actions
• From Materialism
– Eviction from socialism and communism in East Europe
– Market Economy led
– Reforms in communist states
• Where the two coordinates/ build nexus
– It is the material manifestation and success of liberal democracy that
we can say that the ideals became part of the consciousness first and
then culminated in the human habits for they saw goodness in it.
– The contradictory ideologies were countered at both fronts
 Thesis
• The end of history is the end point of mankind's
ideological evolution and the universalization of
Western liberal democracy as the final form of
human government.

• Are there any fundamental "contradictions" in

human life that cannot be resolved in the context
of modern liberalism, that would be re solvable
by an alternative political-economic structure?
 Criticism
• The linear nature of evolution of ideology
– Which may recede back
• Challenges catered are taken as a whole ideology
– Where problems may be taken separately
• People are still taken as collectives when following
ideology/ having inspiration for any of them
• Challenges from a separate class outside the
realm of nation-state system
– Middle class/ some revolutionaries (Arab Spring)