<<Holy Ghost, will you people stop being so illogical? The discussion was whether it was possible to conceive of something sufficiently different than what existed.>>
No it wasn't. The discussion was how evident such a conception would be to the vast majority of contemporaries. Fukuyama was arguing that there is no alternative to the triumph of liberal democracy; in fact, there are alternatives, in a literal sense, but very few of us can conceive of them displacing and replacing liberal capitalist democracy. In the same vein, some people in the 1830s could and did conceive of a world without slavery, but the vast majority of southerners felt that was nonsensical in addition to being abhorrent. For Fukuyama to argue that, because he can see no alternative, there IS no alternative, is a bit short-sighted. It is an example of what is known as the "Whig Interpretation" of history; i.e., that whatever is the dominant culture at the time the writer celebrating it is writing, is in some way the culmination of what history has been striving toward. But just as an Englishman in 1850 could not possibly have imagined that England would someday not be the dominant country and as a southern American in 1830 could not possibly have imagined that slavery would ever be abolished, so Americans on Sept. 10, 2001, could not possibly have imagined that terrorists would attack and destroy the World Trade Center. To argue that maybe someone did imagine any of these things is being excessively literal. <<If one person could conceive of it, and could communicate it to others such that it was recorded for posterity, that is evidence that it IS possible to conceive of something sufficiently different. >> So what? I can imagine a lot of things, few if any of which are likely to happen. All I'm saying is, the fact that most people CAN'T imagine anything different is NOT an indication of "the end of history". And THAT'S what this discussion has been about. Tom Beck
