POLITICS & HISTORY
History: Finished or Sleeping? HUW EDWARDS
What comes to mind when the word ‘history’ is mentioned? Perhaps the images of various and disjointed periods in the past are conjured, those of Elizabethan monarchs or World Wars. However, what if there is an underlying process, a mechanism, which drives civilizations from one stage to another. If so, what drives this process, and will it eventually end? Such are the questions asked by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, an enormously controversial work in which he proposes that humanity has reached this final point, the ‘end of History’. In this book, Fukuyama argues that there is a coherent and evolutionary process which drives the seemingly random occurrence of events, a process called ‘History’ (The uppercase ‘H’ is used to prevent this theory being confused with ‘history’, the record of events). When one reflects on the past, it is easy to view history as cyclical, or at least not ‘going’ anywhere. Especially in the last century it seems that we have lost our optimism that the world is moving to a better state, a conclusion not wholly unreasonable given the atrocities of the World Wars and persistent threats of nuclear attacks. Whereas 18th and 19th century
writers could share Robert Mackenzie’s view of history as a “continual advancement from a lower to a higher platform of intelligence and well-being”, we seem to be thoroughly pessimistic about the future. Perhaps Fukuyama offers a corrective to this crisis of faith in the doctrine of historical progress. Based on an interpretation of Hegel, Fukuyama identifies the process driving History as the ‘struggle for recognition’. According to this view, people strive for their ‘thymos’, a Platonic concept broadly corresponding to dignity, to be recognised by others. When they find this not to be the case, they revolt, often changing their historical circumstances in one way or another, and so History continues. For example, the citizens of France in the late 18th century may have felt as if the Monarchy denied them the recognition of their dignity, eventually revolting against their Monarch in the brutal French Revolution, changing their system of governance in the process. Fukuyama sees the struggles of the French against their Monarchs, the English serfs against their masters, and the Hungarian people against their government, as being protests against faults in the respective systems of governance. In short, civilisations
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