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23 March 2024

BLOG The End of History?

Tag(s): History, Languages & Culture, Future
I'm fascinated by history. It was my favourite subject at school. I took an A level in it and also took papers in it to gain a place at Oxford University. I continue to read extensively about history, and probably about half of the non-fiction books I read are history books., whether it be history of a country, a movement, an invention or a biography of individual people. The philosopher Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) wrote “There is no history of mankind. There are only many histories of all kinds of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.” His contention is that many people interpret the development in political power as being the history of all mankind. But there is no such thing.

In 1992 the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a book of political philosophy called The End of History and The Last Man. His contention was that now that the Cold War was over, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact owing to the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy, humanity had reached not just the passing of a particular post war history, but the end of history as such. That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution. The universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government based on previous political philosophers such as Hegel and Marx who defined human history as a linear progression, from one socioeconomic epoch to another. Fukuyama’s argument was that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. It has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system ethically, politically, economically than any of the alternatives and so there can be no progression from it to an alternative system. He was not arguing that there wouldn't be alternatives. But because democracy was inherently superior it would become more and more prevalent in the long term.

Some 30 years or so later I don't think it is so clear. As I've argued in these pages before democracy is at risk. Not least in countries like the USA which has repeatedly argued around the world that its form of democracy is the best way, and in some cases it has been able to successfully export this model. But still the majority of countries in the world are not yet democratic in the true sense. Some pretend to be like Russia or Iran when clearly they are autocratic. There has been the emergence of other autocratic countries that nevertheless have successfully embraced capitalism like Singapore and more recently China. This also shows that the link between capitalism and democracy is not automatic, or indeed necessary. Under Deng China successfully introduced a Communist form of capitalism, even if it was state sponsored.

Indeed, liberal democracy is still a relatively recent phenomenon particularly if we use universal suffrage in our definition of the term. We British like to think of a long proud tradition of our democracy but the number of citizens who could vote was a minority of adult males until the Great Reform Act of 1832, but that only extended the vote to middle class men leaving working class men disappointed. Women did not get the vote until almost a century later. In the USA black people did not get the vote until after the Civil War and there were still many limits on their freedom until the 1960s. France is already on its fifth Republic; Germany, Japan, Spain and Italy have all had extensive interruptions to their constitutional status.

Populism is on the rise in many western democracies and in the USA there was almost insurrection when President Trump lost the last General Election. In several European countries there are similar trends perhaps caused by what seems the unstoppable increase in migration particularly from countries like Afghanistan where western intervention has caused some of the problems from which locals want to flee.

Various Westen observers have described the thesis of The End of History as flawed because it fails to consider the strength of ethnic loyalties and religious fundamentalism as a counter-force to Islamic extremism, the most powerful of these. Fukuyama himself has on several occasions defended his thesis and insisted that he was right but in March 2022 he said his “ultimate nightmare” is a world in which China supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia supports a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. If that were to happen and be successful, Fukuyama said “then you would  really be living in a world that was being dominated by these non-democratic powers. If the United States and the rest of the West could not stop that from happening, then that really is the end of the end of history.”

That seems somewhat circular to me but there is another sense in which we may be reaching the end of history. I don’t mean in the sense of the end of human civilisation but in the  sense that history is what is written about what happened in the past. The historian conducts considerable research into what has happened in the past in their chosen subject and this research largely consists of reading and studying various documents. These might be official records  like Hansard for the speeches and votes in the Houses of Parliament. It would also include letters which have been written for centuries. Other sources include the diaries of important people. Some of the most important wrote the history themselves.

My favourite person in history is Sir Winston Churchill. I have read over thirty books about Churchill or indeed written by him. He was often asked how history would treat him and he said "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it" . That was Churchill's way of saying he was going to be the winner, as well as the keeper of his own legacy.

But who these days is writing letters? Who is keeping a diary? Indeed, probably many young people no longer learn to write with their hands but instead learn to type on a keyboard and although their text messages may remain in the memory of their device how will future historians access such records?

What is more as artificial Intelligence becomes widely adopted in its numerous forms, future records will have been created artificially by machines that may be able to process data very quickly, but the data will not show what people’s emotions were, how they reacted to events. And so that would be the end of history as it won’t be written.



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BLOG The End of History?
23 March 2024

Democracy Under Assault
27 January 2024


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