On Fukuyama’s Idea of End of History

In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama introduces his readers to his end of history thesis; he says that in future there will not be any conflict about the most legitimate type of government because it is now established that the liberal type of government is the final form. Later he denied that he believed in the end of history, but in his book he has written these lines: “What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs's yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”