The End of History

By Deane Barker • •

This is the idea or belief that the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism was the last great threat to basic democracy, and what would flourish in its place was democracy all over the world. “History” has been a long period of the evolution of political ideas, which have finally culminated in the establishment of democracy as the “correct” form of human government.

The term has been in various uses since the 1800s, but was popularized in a 1989 essay called The End of History (PDF) by Francis Fukuyama.

Why I Looked It Up

It came up a couple of times in The Narrative Age.

Links from this – The Narrative Age: How leaders can inspire change in a polarized world March 2, 2025
My boss wrote this – well, one of the founders of the company I work at. They had a stack of these books at the New York office, so I took one. I fully expected a vanity title, but it was quite good. To the point where I bought it on Kindle so I could read it again on a road trip, and highlight it....