The Brooks

Brian Walsh isn’t a fan of Francis Fukuyama. In Subversive Christianity, Walsh takes one of the ideological big shots for neoconservatism to task on a number of points.

First, the background. Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. It was based on a 1989 essay published in The National Interest called “The End of History?” The context is the end of the Cold War.

The thesis?

… the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started … to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.

For Fukuyama, history witnessed the goal of history with the fall of the Soviet Union. The victory of liberal democratic capitalism marks

The end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s democratic ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

This is pure Hegel. Ideas are the driving force of history. And the idea of capitalism has won.

I’ll post Walsh’s critique and assess it tomorrow.