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Comment by borepop | Hacker News Reader

Also Francis Fukuyama: history ended in 1992.

Well, it kinda did though, didn't it? Being charitable for a second, I suspect it's more that history is "on pause" than ended, but I do get a feeling of almost timeless stasis.

In comparison to the scale of ideological, political, economic, and social changes for the 19th and 20th centuries, essentially nothing has happened since 1992. No major nation has had a revolution. There have been no major wars between nation-states. No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down. Nothing historical has happened -- so the end of history.

From what I've read, a lot of people felt similarly in the late era of the Pax Britannia. (Which is a big part of why I think it's just "on pause".)

Are you aware that he admitted that he was wrong? I believe he wrote a book on it.

Yes, it's pretty clear he was falsified. (China didn't go liberal! Shocker.) Doesn't mean his ideas weren't thought-provoking. But it's probably best to think of such political science as political philosophy.

> Yes, it's pretty clear he was falsified.

Okay, it wasn't clear to me that was your view from your comment.

> political science as political philosophy

I think he stepped out of that realm when he tried to make a prediction and justify it as correct.

I think there is just not a shared definition for "history" among people who here that line in a vacuum, vs more Marxisty type people. "history" is a very particular thing for Marxists. even in his book you are talking about, it is talked about on those lines, not in an everyday concept of history.

I don't understand why this comment is here. It's a good thing to point out to people that don't know what he meant, but within his own framework he was incorrect, which he admitted. The social relations we see today are not the ones he originally predicted and there's absolutely no guarantee that it won't get "worse" or go in a completely different direction.

> In comparison to the scale of ideological, political, economic, and social changes for the 19th and 20th centuries, essentially nothing has happened since 1992. No major nation has had a revolution. There have been no major wars between nation-states. No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down. Nothing historical has happened -- so the end of history.

The period since 1992 was relatively peaceful, that's right. But that's not what Fukuyama's thesis was about, especially since he couldn't know in 1992 what would happen in the next 30 years.

Fukuyama's theory was that mankind has reached its optimal, stable state and that that the further historical changes are very unlikely, because why would people want to mess with perfection :) It was basically very naive optimism, I guess he was still in euphoria after Soviet Union collapse...

Since then we had "war on terrorism" and PATRIOT act, big financial crisis of 2008, rise of social media and surveillance state, and now COVID pandemic. Plenty of historical changes, most of them for worse.

> Since then we had "war on terrorism" and PATRIOT act, big financial crisis of 2008, rise of social media and surveillance state, and now COVID pandemic.

Don't forget rising authoritarianism again, which was one of the characteristics of Fukuyama's notion of the end of history, the fall of totalitarianism with the USSR.

Eric Li, from China has a big take on that: the West thinkers, including Fukuyama, stopped thinking since they assumed history was written. No more authoritarian state would outperform a liberal one. Apparently history is still being written.

> essentially nothing has happened since 1992.

Oh yeah, the web changed nothing. /s

> No major nation has had a revolution.

You are disrespecting Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, Turkey... and of course Yugoslavia, which started breaking up in 1991 (Fukuyama started his ramblings in 1989) and didn't end until 2001 - if you can consider the current fragile peace an end, which it really isn't. Plus, most South American countries continue to "tweak" their constitutions every few years, one way or the other. And if you go to Africa, well, have I got news for you...

> There have been no major wars between nation-states.

The US literally invaded and occupied two sovereign countries since then, in both cases continuing major operations for more than a decade. But if we consider "nation-states" only Western states or superpowers, there has been no such war in the 30 years before 1992 either. That's because conventional "top-quality" nation-state conflicts have been made impractical by nuclear weapons and MAD, well before 1992. What we have now is asymmetrical warfare (superpower vs minnow) or proxy warfare. That doesn't mean these conflicts don't make history or don't change things significantly - they very much do.

> No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down.

The techno-utopianism that the internet generated is an ideology in itself, and the backlash has only just started. Same for conspiracy-theorism as a way of life, climate change, identity politics... just because they don't make people wear the same shirt and march in the streets, it doesn't mean they are not deeply-ideological movements. You can argue that they were "invented" before 1992, but 1) inevitably these things take time, 2) they didn't really have that much traction until the '00s.

> Nothing historical has happened

That's such a sheltered viewpoint. I'm sure quite a few people in Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, Brazil, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Ukraine, Tunisia, Lybia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Rwanda, Sudan, Chad, Congo, Somalia, Algeria, Liberia, Mali, etc etc, would have something to say.

History is very much grinding all around us, it's just a question of whether we actually want to look at it or we'd rather pretend it didn't exist.

all of those sound quite mildly incremental though. Note how many of these wars achieved nothing and basically circled back to where they began, the same old conflicts returned ... with the addition of china

A take that didn't make it past the title.

To be fair, by “end” he meant “telos,” or “ideal,” following Hegel. He did not mean that there would be no more history. Of course, his thesis is still wrong.

EDIT: the original essay also had a question mark at the end of the title.

Yeah, not sure I'm going to give much serious eartime to an academic who is most famous for predicting democratic neoliberalism was going to sweep the globe, pre-9/11 and the ascendancy of China.

Well his history ended in 1992. The guy spent a life becoming an expert on Soviet imperialism and in a few days most of his knowledge became obsolete. I could see how he could say something like that.

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