the end of history

• Francis Fukuyama 1989 & 2022
• the phrase "the end of history" was coined by Hegel (the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science) to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending ... notion that 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, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man
• weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states
• confused dictatorships of prosperous liberal democracies
• distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial #wordgem
• 1989: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
• We Have Never Been Liberal, Lilith Mahmud