Hacker News Reader

In a thread about Russian expansion and the resumption in full flower of the cold war, you're asking which part of The End of History has proven to be flawed?

View on HN

That's exactly my point. Fukuyama is extremely misunderstood in popular media, he never said that the fall of the soviet union implied continued existence of liberal democracy. If you had actually read the book (and specifically the last chapter) you would know that he wrote that the threat of authoritarianism will always be present and (some) democracies will (at times) fall back into autocratic states from time to time.

Honestly, I think you were just waiting for an opportunity to tell someone they hadn't read the book, or had read it incorrectly. It's a service I am happy to provide any time this subject comes up.

Nonetheless, the book's thesis is hard to reckon with:

> What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

And it is always possible that Putin himself has not read (or, like so many of us, merely misunderstood) Fukuyama's work as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com