Hegel and ‘The End of History’

Extract

In September 1989, while the dominoes were falling in the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, a very minor revolution occurred in our national newspapers: the face of the German philosopher Hegel suddenly and briefly, and surely for the first time, was allowed to dominate the centre pages.

The deputy director of the American State Department’s policy planning staff, Francis Fukuyama, had published an essay entitled ‘The End of History’ in the right-wing journal The National Interest, suggesting that contemporary events were vindicating Hegel rather than Hegel’s unruly disciple, Karl Marx: that ideas and ideology were a genuinely motivating force in history, rather than mere economics; that Hegel had seen the ideas of the French Revolution, which Fukuyama identified with modern liberal democracy, as the ultimate goal of history; that we were witnessing the worldwide extension of those ideas through the collapse of the Soviet bloc; and that since no further ideological conflict or development was possible, history had come to an end. In other words — and though Fukuyama did not say it, it was soon enough said— America had won the Cold War and though things would undoubtedly continue happening, nothing much, nothing big, would ever change again. In the Independent the much-regretted Peter Jenkins aptly quoted Arnold Toynbee’s childhood memories of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897:

I remember the atmosphere. It was: well here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there — forever!