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Williams Howard , Sullivan David and Gwynn Matthews E. , Francis Fukuyama and the End of History Cardiff: University of Wales Press , 2016 Pp. 288 ISBN 9781783168767 (hbk) £ 95
Book Reviews
If one name dominates the popular understanding of international relations it is that of Francis Fukuyama, a former RAND employee and State Department official turned intellectual guru. What the three authors of Francis Fukuyama and the End of History offer the reader is a semi-hagiographical work, compensated for by an exhaustive study of their subject's main thesis, and the intellectual influences that lie behind it - Kant, Hegel and Marx all figure prominently.
The book is actually a second edition which contextualizes Fukuyama's work in the broader trends in the philosophy of history. Two new chapters discuss the ways in which Fukuyama's thinking has developed - his criticism of the neo-conservatism which he once espoused, and which led him to support the invasion of Iraq (2003); and his complex intellectual relationship with his old Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, and open disagreement with the influential thesis of the latter's The Clash of Civilisations. All of these issues relate to the 'end of history' - the big idea of the 1990s - but the authors are keen to insist that there is much more to Fukuyama's thinking than a neo-Kojevian spin on the meaning of history.
Kant was the first modern philosopher of history. He never claimed that history (as events) would come to an end, but he did believe that there might be a purpose behind events, a significance immanent in the process of history itself which, if uncovered, would allow human beings to find meaning in their lives as they experienced the present. This view is to be found in the nine propositions which are central to his essay 'An Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose' (1784), a classic Enlightenment text. Some of these propositions, such as that regarding 'asocial sociability', have found contemporary champions (see Robert Wright's Non-Zero World, a work which Bill Clinton encouraged his staff to take to heart). And the idea of an 'evolutionary process' in history is developed by writers such as Matt Ridley in his recent book The Evolution of Everything