Instead of commenting on Fukuyama's a-historical BS, I will let some readers' reviews speak. :-)
Chris _____________________Snippets_from_Readers'_Reviews_____________________ Fukuyama's book is the worst type of post-modern garbage. It is that type which asks us to revel in our trash culture, to breathe in the dizzying fumes of its bloated corpse because hey, it smells so good! If we as a culture and a people allow ideological garbage derivative of Fukuyama's "End of History and the Last Man" to penetrate our Americentric minds any further we will be in serious trouble of becoming the world's largest self-fulfilling prophecy. ==== Long-winded and essentially pointless It takes several hundred pages for Fukuyama to build some kind of pseudo-philosophical model on the course of history and then essentially refute his own thesis in the last paragraph of the book. I can't believe I wasted the time it took to read this book. It's only value is to showcase the arrogance of Western (mainly American, i.e. George Will and his ilk) conservatives who believe that the entire world should adopt the liberal democratic political model. Fukuyama makes a number of questionable claims about global politics and the state of democracy in the world, and the book is too full of contradictions to list here. If you must read this book, then simply read the introducton, since he makes all his main arguments there, and then skip to the last few paragraphs where, as I mentioned, he contradicts his own thesis. Readers would be better off reading the actual works of Hegel, Nietzche, etc. than Fukuyama's sloppy re-hashing and "development" of their ideas. ==== Fukuyama himself had to back-pedal several times to qualify the bubbling optimism he expressed in the early nineties about the final victory of liberal democracy and the "end of History" (he essentially refutes his own thesis in the conclusion to this book). Fukuyama's book is very flawed, and should have been relegated to the dustbin of history (no capital "H") long ago. ==== The Corporate Lovesong of J. Francis Fukuyama Fukuyama, your book's incandescent With male fantasies adolescent. If your thoughts are profound, So is Bugbear, my hound -- I think Hegel would find it putrescent. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit Will probably think you're astute. No one ever went broke here Giving Karl Marx a poke, dear, Or licking Das Kapital's boot. Hurrah for the Rand Corporation Who pay the best minds of our nation To think in their tank Of Weltgeist and WeltBank, And ignore corporate depredation. ==== To Be Frank - A Load Of Old Rubbish Fukuyama's far fetched and frankly irrelevant theories bore me, I'm afraid to say. This was the book that introduced me to that way of thinking - it's basically written by a wealthy American academic (who has spent most of his life employed by the US government), claiming that the American capitalist system has conquered all political alternatives, surpassing even that of democracy and especially that of communism. Capitalism is, for Fukuyama, the end of the evolution of man and the start of an eternal status quo. This idea is laughable in concept and is further ridiculed by his over-selective choice of material which is already outdated. ==== Fukuyama, a coddled, Washington beltway "think-tank" elitist --long on theory unsupported by empirical data and short on practical experience of the real world-- proclaims American global Capitalism of the Reagan era (this came out just on the cusp of our current dizzying hi-tech computer decade) to be the "best of all possible worlds" Folks, this is written FOR the layperson BY a layperson! Fukuyama, like all political hacks, selectively chooses the data that supports his theories and ignores everything else that would embarrass them. He is considered a laughable hack by all serious Historians and current affairs global analysts. His writing is the apotheosis of comfortable, elite, armchair detachment that the ignorant, conformist "gray flannel dwarves" love to eat up to placate their gnawing insecurities that the future of the planet cannot, perhaps, be so neatly and cleanly understood. Fukuyama has never been hungry, underpaid, unappreciated, or exploited, has never worked on a production line for subsitance wages, has never likely gotten dirt or grease under the finger nails of his finely manicured soft white hands out of necessity (but perhaps to amuse himself Sunday afternoon in the rose garden). Neitzsche was dead on target about guys like this. The "best of all possible worlds" that Fukiyama envisions--and even claims is here already--is absolute death for anyone with a soul. ==== .... reading this book is a lot of work for a little insight ... [hmm, any similarity to Keith's writings is merely accidental ;-) ] ==== In the end, however, the fundamental premise is unbelievable, and the facts he presents do not appear to support the conclusion. His argument that liberal democracy will win out is based on history since about 1970. Extrapolating a grand historical drama from 20 or 30 years worth of data is unconvincing. ====
