The end of history?

Francis Fukuyama

The 1960s were a time of revolutionary utopias and collective optimism. The civil right movement in the US ended with the end of the segregation with the Civil Rights Act signed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964. In France, the Mai 68 protests had an undeniable impact on society.

The post-structuralist movement, which developed during the 1970s in France, was based on the rejection binary oppositions and simplification methods such as phenomenology.Yet, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked a turning point in history because it meant the triumph of democracy and liberalism. In The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Francis Fukuyama wrote:

 

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.

 

The end of history also implies the end of modernity. In order to overcome the “disenchantment of the world” (Weber, 1917), the postmodern alternative was based on the cult of the present and the quest for well-being.