Posts tagged "philosophy":

The End of History.

Francis Fukuyama is probably the person most connected to the concept of “the End of History”, but he is not the originator of it. Fukuyama’s initial article (that was then later expanded upon to the book The End of History and the Last Man) initially reads as a summary of the Kojévian interpretation of Hegel’s observation of the end of History. Fukuyama sees in the collapse of the Soviet order in eastern Europe as not just a victory of western liberal democracy, but as a showcase of this western system as the ultimate goal of human society entirely. This view of History ending seems to have been thoroughly debunked in our popular consciousness, to the point of simply naming the concept in my international relations class elicits chuckles across the lecture hall, and academic scholars praise Finland for “never [believing] that history ended in 1989”¹. I have not read Fukuyama’s larger coverage of his thinking on this subject, only his initial article titled The End of History? as well as the original sources of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Kojéve’s lectures on it. In some regards Fukuyama has already faced much of this criticism preëmtively², but somehow misconceptions still abound. I agree wholeheartedly with Kojéve’s experience:

The Philosophical Impacts of Nuclear Weapons

Similarly to this earlier post, this was written as an examination at the Swedish Defence University. It was written for the course Nuclear Weapons in International Security and as such is also available as a .pdf here.