This has been on my mind for a while but it doesn’t really merit a full-fledged post, so I’m just going to write a few lines about it in this open thread intro…..
Why is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History considered to be so great? I understand that there’s an important idea there, that the world may tend towards some stable capitalist-democratic system, but that also seems to me to be an obvious idea. I remember having conversations with friends about this possibility as a teen-ager and I’m certainly no student of world affairs. So what’s the big deal? Did he somehow use footnotes to prove that it would happen?