<< Fukuyama - who did not, I believe, think that his article would receive quite the publicity it did - meant history in a Hegelian sense, while you mean it in a historian's. To disagree with him, you'd have to point to a coherent alternative that has something to add to liberal democracy - I don't think there is one - whatever changes that it will experience will be internal, not a product of conflict with an incompatible, but still valid, ideology. >>
Except, what makes Hegel right? He was writing in a very high-falutin way, speaking of abstract concepts as if they were physical realities (his thesis-antithesis-synthesis). Marx, at least, tried to talk about physical things, but he reified an abstract, too (class). I know it's popular on this list to talk about "memes", and I understand that it can be hard to the point of near-impossibility to figure out exactly when/where/how certain concepts enter the discourse and how the spread. But ideas are not things in the physical sense (okay, that's my philosophy, I admit it - I'm pretty much a materialist). Yes, I'm speaking as a historian - that's what I am! The thing is, there have been plenty of times and places where people thought they were at the end point of history. They were wrong; and so are we. That I can't imagine a viable alternative to liberal democracy does not mean there isn't one, or that one won't come along after I die. Someone who lived in Weimar Germany and died in, say, 1922 might have thought things were going swell. Fortunately for them, they would have missed the horrors of the next 23 years. Unfortunately for them, they would also have missed the good things of the 50 years after that. Someone who died in the American South in the 1830s could never have conceived the end of slavery. Something none of us can imagine is brewing out there. Mark my words... Tom Beck
