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Nicolas Guilhot but these criticisms largely miss his point. The end of history does not mean that “there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs,” as he pointed out, only that such events, no matter how dramatic they may turn out to be, would not fundamentally alter the foundations of social life, since it had reached its most accomplished form with the ideological dominance of liberal democracy. There was nothing catastrophic about this conclusion, but Fukuyama’s tone was not quite triumphant either. Something was lost in the consummation of history—a sense of possibility, the expectation of future fulfillment, a fundamental striving. Art and philosophy would disappear because there was nothing left to contemplate beyond the here and now and no aspiration to transcend the present. Humanity would have little else to do besides ministering to its material needs. Fukuyama admitted to “the most ambivalent feelings” about such prospects. The end of history would be a long lull in which nothing would happen. The end of history was not an idea that was original to Fukuyama; rather, as befits an age of ideological exhaustion, it was a vintage reissue harking back to an earlier era. The idea was hatched in the rubble of the Second World War and set the tone of intellectual life in the 1950s. Jacques Derrida once reminisced that it was the “daily bread” on which aspiring philosophers were raised back then. Its charismatic impresario was the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Many others, however, came to terms with the idea the way one does with an ominous prognosis. For the German philosopher Karl Löwith, the end of history was primarily a crisis of meaning and purpose regarding the direction of human existence; for Talmudic scholar and charismatic intellectual Jacob Taubes, it was the exhaustion of eschatological hopes, the last of which were vested in Marxism; for the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, the collapse of secular and religious faith; for the theologian Rudolf Bultmann, it meant that the task of finding meaning in human existence had become a purely individual burden; and for the political theorist Judith Shklar, it morphed into an “eschatological consciousness” that “extended from the merely cultural level” to the point where “all mankind is faced with its final hour.” Kojève, however, was upbeat. Building on his idiosyncratic reading of Hegel, he suggested that 36
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The Lul the principles of liberal constitutionalism represented the rational culmination of human history. Henceforth, all of humanity would be gradually absorbed into the “universal and homogeneous State”—what we call today the liberal, rule-based international order—and everything would be just fine, if a bit boring. Kojève’s enthusiasm for liberal internationalism was the latest expression of an evolution that had previously seen him endorse Stalin’s Soviet Union and later Vichy France as the possible terminus ad quem of human history. After the war, he saw in the process of European integration the embryonic outline of the last empire, the emergence of which he proceeded to hasten by working as a high-level official of the French government in the negotiations that eventually established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In claiming that humanity had reached its destination with the emergence of the liberal international order, Kojève was putting a positive spin on what many experienced as the loss of the main bearings of modernity. The postwar years were also a time of anxiety. Auschwitz and Hiroshima had marked the collapse of the great belief systems that projected meaning in history, leaving behind a liberalism premised on the very limitations and finitude of the human condition that it had previously promised to transcend. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberals still believed in the possibility of substantially improving the human lot, their Cold War successors had come to view such expectations as a juvenile mistake that had paved the way to totalitarianism. Liberalism had not only forsaken its earlier claims to progress, but now looked with diffidence, if not hostility, to any perfectionist strivings. It merely “concentrate[d] on damage control,” as Judith Shklar later put it—making it the perfect ideological expression of a life that now took place in the shadow of the apocalypse. Among those who weren’t convinced by Kojève’s highbrow advertising campaign was the German philosopher Günther Anders. Anders remains little known in the Anglophone world, where his major works have yet to be translated. Shortchanged of the fame he deserves for his ideas, he is usually recalled as Hannah Arendt’s first husband or the man who accused Jonathan Schell of plagiarizing him when Schell’s The Fate 37

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Nicolas Guilhot but these criticisms largely miss his point. The end of history does not mean that “there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs,” as he pointed out, only that such events, no matter how dramatic they may turn out to be, would not fundamentally alter the foundations of social life, since it had reached its most accomplished form with the ideological dominance of liberal democracy.

There was nothing catastrophic about this conclusion, but Fukuyama’s tone was not quite triumphant either. Something was lost in the consummation of history—a sense of possibility, the expectation of future fulfillment, a fundamental striving. Art and philosophy would disappear because there was nothing left to contemplate beyond the here and now and no aspiration to transcend the present. Humanity would have little else to do besides ministering to its material needs. Fukuyama admitted to “the most ambivalent feelings” about such prospects. The end of history would be a long lull in which nothing would happen.

The end of history was not an idea that was original to Fukuyama; rather, as befits an age of ideological exhaustion, it was a vintage reissue harking back to an earlier era. The idea was hatched in the rubble of the Second World War and set the tone of intellectual life in the 1950s. Jacques Derrida once reminisced that it was the “daily bread” on which aspiring philosophers were raised back then. Its charismatic impresario was the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Many others, however, came to terms with the idea the way one does with an ominous prognosis. For the German philosopher Karl Löwith, the end of history was primarily a crisis of meaning and purpose regarding the direction of human existence; for Talmudic scholar and charismatic intellectual Jacob Taubes, it was the exhaustion of eschatological hopes, the last of which were vested in Marxism; for the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, the collapse of secular and religious faith; for the theologian Rudolf Bultmann, it meant that the task of finding meaning in human existence had become a purely individual burden; and for the political theorist Judith Shklar, it morphed into an “eschatological consciousness” that “extended from the merely cultural level” to the point where “all mankind is faced with its final hour.” Kojève, however, was upbeat. Building on his idiosyncratic reading of Hegel, he suggested that

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