The new consensus: I. The Fukuyama thesis

Abstract

Fukuyama's argument that we have recently reached “The End of History”; is defended against writers who fail to appreciate the Hegelian meaning of Fukuyama's “Endism,”; but is criticized for using simplistic dichotomies that evade the economic and ideological convergence of East and West. Against Fukuyama, the economic critique of socialism, revisionist scholarship on early Soviet economic history, and the history of the libertarian ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx are deployed to show that history “ended”; years ago: the creeds of the First and Second Worlds sprang from common assumptions; and even before Eastern European reform movements, both sides of the Iron Curtain had moved to economies that are neither capitalist nor socialist.