The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama - 1992

Free Press, 1992. Hardcover. New/New. New hardcover in a new dust jacket. Pages are clean and free of marks or underlining. 8vo. (6.25 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches) Includes author's notes, bibliography, and index. 418 pp.

Fast shipping in a secure book box mailer with tracking. As the tumultuous twentieth century shudders toward its close - with the collapse of communism leading to a transformation of world politics - Francis Fukuyama asks us to return with him to a question that has been asked by the great philosophers of centuries past: is there a direction to the history of mankind? And if it is directional, to what end is it moving? And where are we now in relation to that "end of history?"

In this exciting and profound inquiry, which goes far beyond the issues raised in his world- famous essay "The End of History?" in the summer 1989 National Interest, Fukuyama presents evidence to suggest that there are two powerful forces at work in human history. He calls one "the logic of modern science" and the other "the struggle for recognition." The first drives men to fulfill an ever-expanding horizon of desires through a rational economic process; the second. "the struggle for recognition" is, in Fukuyama's (and Hegel's) view, nothing less than the very "motor of history."

It is Fukuyama's brilliantly argued theme that, over time, the economic logic of modern science together with the "struggle for recognition" lead to the eventual collapse of tyrannies, as we have witnessed on both the left and right. These forces drive even culturally disparate societies toward establishing capitalist liberal democracies as the end state of the historical process. The great question then becomes: can liberty and equality, both political and economic - the state of affairs at the presumed "end of history" produce a stable society in which man may be said to be, at last, completely satisfied? Or will the spiritual condition
of this "last man" in history, deprived of outlets for his striving for mastery, inevitably lead him to plunge himself and the world back into the chaos and bloodshed of history?

Fukuyama's contemporary consideration of this ultimate question is both a fascinating education in the philosophy of history and a thought-provoking inquiry into the deepest issues of human society and destiny.