From ‘The End of Ideology’ to ‘The End of History’: The Strange Revival of a Discredited Idea
Francis Fukuyama’s famous article ‘The End of History’ turns 30 this year, and continues to fuel debates over the post-Cold War world. Much of Fukuyama’s energy over the years has been spent resisting misinterpretations of his claim that the end of the Cold War marked the end of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. And yet even with all of the qualifications to this argument, Fukuyama’s latest book, Identity, concedes that so-called ‘identity politics’ and the turn to global ‘tribalisms’ now threaten to undermine his prophecy from 1989. This talk argues that Fukuyama’s argument has run up against the same challenges his forebears – Edward Shils, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell and others – encountered when they boldly proclaimed the ‘end of ideology’ in the West thirty years earlier. The talk explores the parallels and differences between the two arguments, the context of their emergence, and their proponents’ relationship with the American neoconservative movement.
Date:
7 March 2019, 17:00 (Thursday, 8th week, Hilary 2019)
Venue:
Radcliffe Humanities, Woodstock Road OX2 6GG
Venue Details:
TORCH seminar room
Speaker:
Dr Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (Yale University)
Organising department:
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Organisers:
Prof. David Priestland (University of Oxford),
Prof. Faisal Devji (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
david.priestland@history.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
Rethinking the Contemporary. The World Since the Cold War
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Public
Editor:
David Priestland
