This thesis is a critical examination of Fukuyama's "end of history" version of liberalism, in which he announces the triumphant emergence of liberal democracy as a universal form of governance. The thesis seeks to investigate Francis Fukuyama's notion of liberal democracy and his arguments for it, in order to assess the normative impact of market driven political and economic outcomes on the human context or life satisfaction, especially recognition. This is contrasted with Amartya Sen's notion of well-being in order to show that Fukuyama does not pay attention to some of the basic moral demands of human life. The thesis is comprised of an introduction and six chapters. The contents of these chapters can be presented briefly as follows: • The first chapter looks at how Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant use the theory of social contract to explain the genesis and justification of the state. Featuring prominently in all their versions of social contract are the values of freedom, equality, and independence of the individual, the process of consensus, the primacy of self-preservation and the necessity of the state. Together these laid the basis for a philosophically reasoned and progressive theory of politics. This chapter also looks at the theory of laissez-faire, which paved the way for a free market economy. This doctrine was developed in the thought of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Mill and Bentham. For Fukuyama these thinkers inaugurated a tradition of political thought that ultimately led to liberalism and democracy. • The second chapter discusses the teleological view of history underlying the philosophical theories of history advanced by Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Each of these thinkers assumes that history is moving towards an end point or goal. It is from these philosophers that Fukuyama appropriates the idea of universality to envisage the universality of liberal democracy. • The third chapter analyzes Fukuyama's "end of history" claim and his arguments for it. When communism finally collapsed, liberal democracy was the only remaining option, he claims. Drawing on Kant's idea of universal history, Hegel's notion of a universal and homogeneous state and Marx's materialist interpretation of history, Fukuyama envisages a global order that will be ushered in by the universal and homogeneous liberal state which is the ultimate goal of liberal democracy. It is the duty of the liberal state to ensure equal and mutual recognition and affirmation of its citizens' freedom. • The fourth chapter stages a debate between Fukuyama and Sen in which the question of life satisfaction and its achievability is addressed. Fukuyama claims that human-beings desire recognition, and can best satisfy this desire through liberal democracy. Sen for his part claims that people need well-being, and can only achieve it through democracy, which he views as a universal value. The discussion shows that although Fukuyama and Sen may share similar political values they differ ideologically and in historical vision. • The fifth chapter deals with the critical evaluation of liberal democracy. Several issues present major problems for liberal democracy. These issues are liberal individualism as the central focus of liberalism and liberal democracy; the global trend against gender bias; the political and cultural homogenization of the world; the problem of parallel histories versus a single inclusive history; desire-satisfaction versus need-satisfaction, and the cultural preconditions of liberal democracy. • The sixth chapter recapitulates the preceding chapters and spells out the conclusion reached in the course of the thesis. The findings on the notion of the "end of history" show that Fukuyama wishes the equal and mutual recognition of the freedom and dignity of all individuals as well as the affirmation of their individual rights. This concern for the individual is laudable. However, excessive individualism threatens the fabric of every society, and Fukuyama realizes that this threat is especially strong in liberal democracy. His suggested solution is to cultivate social capital in the form of trust. This thesis concludes that Fukuyama's medicine is no match for the disease; the whole thrust of the intellectual tradition leading to liberal democracy - and of much else in Western culture since Hobbes - is in the direction of excessive individualism and the withering of community. Moreover, where Fukuyama sees isothymia - the desire for equal recognition, the psychological truth is probably that people desire to be recognized as superior - mega/othymia, again making individualism intrinsically more threatening to a sense of community than Fukuyama seems to realize. Fukuyama suggests that an international consensus in favour of liberal democracy is emerging. But it appears that such a consensus is unlikely to arise nation- states fear disenfranchisement and assimilation and thus insist on their sovereignty, effectively blocking any shift from the nation-state to a homogeneous and universal liberal state. It is difficult to generate the consensus needed to receive it as a universal system, because not all people subscribe to its cultural preconditions. The satisfaction of human desire of any kind cannot be universalized since human existence is centrally characterized by diversity of context, culture, and perception. Any attempt to impose cultural or ideological homogeneity requires conquest - cultural or military imperialism. The triumphant emergence of liberal democracy cannot be the ultimate end of the whole of human history. If this were the case, it would no longer be worth trying to increase human knowledge, since knowledge always points to an open future in terms of how it will be used for further advancement. Due to its internal contradictions, such as the tension between excessive individualism and community, liberal democracy has unintended negative consequences. Liberal democracy is not yet the final ideology leading to human satisfaction at a global level for this generation and generations to come as long as human thought evolves. This will remain the case as long as Fukuyama's admission that liberal democracy only works where its cultural preconditions are met, remains true. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2003.

Ce mémoire explore la possibilité d'une parenté insoupçonnée entre deux penseurs des Relations Internationales, Raymond Aron et Francis Fukuyama. Traditionnellement associées aux écoles libérale et réaliste, leurs idées pouvaient effectivement apparaître comme parfaitement inconciliables. Or, les deux grandes sections de notre texte essaient plutôt de montrer, qu'en dépit de certaines différences, l'argumentation des deux auteurs se rejoint sur plusieurs questions. En ce qui concerne leurs conceptions de l'histoire, nous verrons qu'Aron et Fukuyama adhéraient au principe de «rationalisation du monde» cher à différents sociologues occidentaux, et particulièrement à Max Weber. L'analyse du parcours universitaire de l'auteur français permettra de repérer des influences phénoménologique ou néokantienne sur le plan épistémologique et wébérienne sur le plan ontologique. Nous nous pencherons également sur le passage de Francis Fukuyama à l'Université Cornell où il fit la connaissance d'Allan Bloom. C'est par l'intermédiaire de ce dernier que l'auteur nippo-américain entra en contact avec Alexandre Kojève, Léo Strauss et Raymond Aron. Une fois ces éclaircissements faits, il sera question du rôle joué par le concept wébérien de rationalisation du monde dans la philosophie fukuyamienne de l'histoire. Par la suite, nous verrons comment ces philosophies de l'histoire déterminent la vision des Relations Internationales des deux auteurs. Plus précisément, nous nous attarderons sur les changements que la société industrielle sont susceptibles d'amener dans les rapports que les États entretiennent entre eux. Tant chez Fukuyama qu'Aron, on pourra constater que les notions de guerre ou de paix se transforment radicalement à partir du Traité de Vienne. Nous consacrerons la dernière section à la praxéologie des deux auteurs, ou à la politique étrangère idéale qu'ils proposent aux nations occidentales. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Raymond Aron, Francis Fukuyama, Relations Internationales, Philosophie de l'Histoire.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Filosofía mención en Metafísica / El problema principal de esta Tesis, y sobre el cual girarán todo el resto, está planteado desde ya, en el mismo título: el nihilismo. Abordaremos el concepto de nihilismo desde el significado que tiene para nuestra época, como reflejo de un síndrome generalizado. Para cumplir nuestra misión expositiva, nos apoyaremos básicamente, en un autor, tan profético como polémico, que vaticinó el nihilismo y declamó la decadencia de nuestra cultura Occidental. No cien por ciento filósofo, cosa que dejó siempre bien en claro. Un psicólogo, más bien, como solía auto catalogarse. Escritor, por necesidad fisiológica y espiritual. Personificó una declaración de guerra a la moral cristiana y cargó con todo el peso de la cruz social, que le acarreó el definirse como anticristiano. Discípulo de Dionisos, maestro del aforismo, padre literario de Zaratustra, fundador de la “Doctrina del eterno retorno”; y quien, se calificara a sí mismo como, el anticristo.

Este trabalho propõe o estudo da ideia de “fim da História”, conforme apresentada pelo cientista político norte-americano Francis Fukuyama. Em um primeiro momento, delimitamos seu conceito de “fim da História” a partir do artigo original The End of History?, de 1989, e de suas publicações seguintes, até o livro The End of History and the Last Man, de 1992. Na segunda parte, após contrastar a ideia ao paradigma de “choque de civilizações”, de Samuel Huntington, aproximamos a estrutura conceitual proposta por Fukuyama de tópicos da teoria da história e história da historiografia relacionados ao conceito moderno de História e sua eventual exaustão identificada por diversos autores. No terceiro momento, o trabalho aborda o percurso da obra de Fukuyama após a repercussão inicial de sua proposta de “fim da História”, até os dias de hoje, buscando eventuais novidades à estrutura conceitual delimitada anteriormente. A título de conclusão, abordamos o cenário atual dos debates da historiografia para especular acerca do futuro do campo do conhecimento e do ofício do historiador. / This work proposes the study of the idea of the “end of History“, as it is presented by the North American political scientist Francis Fukuyama. At first, we delimit the concept from his original article The End of History?, published in 1989, and from his following publications, up to his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. In the second part, after contrasting Fukuyama’s idea to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm, we put the conceptual structure proposed by Fukuyama alongside topics regarding theory of history and history of historiography related to the modern concept of History and its eventual exhaustion, already signaled by several authors. The third part approaches the long course of Fukuyama’s work regarding “the end of History”, after the repercussion of his initial article up until the present days, looking for eventual innovations in the conceptual structure previously designed. For the sake of conclusion, we approach the current debates around the topic, to speculate about the future of the field of knowledge and the role attributed to the professional historian.

Este trabalho propõe o estudo da ideia de “fim da História”, conforme apresentada pelo cientista político norte-americano Francis Fukuyama. Em um primeiro momento, delimitamos seu conceito de “fim da História” a partir do artigo original The End of History?, de 1989, e de suas publicações seguintes, até o livro The End of History and the Last Man, de 1992. Na segunda parte, após contrastar a ideia ao paradigma de “choque de civilizações”, de Samuel Huntington, aproximamos a estrutura conceitual proposta por Fukuyama de tópicos da teoria da história e história da historiografia relacionados ao conceito moderno de História e sua eventual exaustão identificada por diversos autores. No terceiro momento, o trabalho aborda o percurso da obra de Fukuyama após a repercussão inicial de sua proposta de “fim da História”, até os dias de hoje, buscando eventuais novidades à estrutura conceitual delimitada anteriormente. A título de conclusão, abordamos o cenário atual dos debates da historiografia para especular acerca do futuro do campo do conhecimento e do ofício do historiador. / This work proposes the study of the idea of the “end of History“, as it is presented by the North American political scientist Francis Fukuyama. At first, we delimit the concept from his original article The End of History?, published in 1989, and from his following publications, up to his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. In the second part, after contrasting Fukuyama’s idea to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm, we put the conceptual structure proposed by Fukuyama alongside topics regarding theory of history and history of historiography related to the modern concept of History and its eventual exhaustion, already signaled by several authors. The third part approaches the long course of Fukuyama’s work regarding “the end of History”, after the repercussion of his initial article up until the present days, looking for eventual innovations in the conceptual structure previously designed. For the sake of conclusion, we approach the current debates around the topic, to speculate about the future of the field of knowledge and the role attributed to the professional historian.

Este trabalho propõe o estudo da ideia de “fim da História”, conforme apresentada pelo cientista político norte-americano Francis Fukuyama. Em um primeiro momento, delimitamos seu conceito de “fim da História” a partir do artigo original The End of History?, de 1989, e de suas publicações seguintes, até o livro The End of History and the Last Man, de 1992. Na segunda parte, após contrastar a ideia ao paradigma de “choque de civilizações”, de Samuel Huntington, aproximamos a estrutura conceitual proposta por Fukuyama de tópicos da teoria da história e história da historiografia relacionados ao conceito moderno de História e sua eventual exaustão identificada por diversos autores. No terceiro momento, o trabalho aborda o percurso da obra de Fukuyama após a repercussão inicial de sua proposta de “fim da História”, até os dias de hoje, buscando eventuais novidades à estrutura conceitual delimitada anteriormente. A título de conclusão, abordamos o cenário atual dos debates da historiografia para especular acerca do futuro do campo do conhecimento e do ofício do historiador. / This work proposes the study of the idea of the “end of History“, as it is presented by the North American political scientist Francis Fukuyama. At first, we delimit the concept from his original article The End of History?, published in 1989, and from his following publications, up to his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. In the second part, after contrasting Fukuyama’s idea to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm, we put the conceptual structure proposed by Fukuyama alongside topics regarding theory of history and history of historiography related to the modern concept of History and its eventual exhaustion, already signaled by several authors. The third part approaches the long course of Fukuyama’s work regarding “the end of History”, after the repercussion of his initial article up until the present days, looking for eventual innovations in the conceptual structure previously designed. For the sake of conclusion, we approach the current debates around the topic, to speculate about the future of the field of knowledge and the role attributed to the professional historian.

This dissertation deploys theories of spatiotemporal experience and organization, most prominently Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope,” to set contemporary literature, film, and music into dialogue with theories of post-Wende social and political experiences and possibility that speak, with Francis Fukuyama, as the contemporary as the “End of History.” Where these interlocutors of Fukuyama generally affirm or intensify his view of the contemporary as a time where historical progress slows to a halt, historical memory recedes from view, and the conditions of subjecthood are rephrased from participation in a struggle for progress to mindless consumption and technocratic tinkering, I engage contemporary artwork to flesh out and ultimately peer beyond the boundaries of the real and the possible these social theories articulate. Through a series of close readings of German films, music albums, and novels published between 1995 and 2021, I examine how German authors, filmmakers, and musicians pursue depictions of the malaises of the End of History while also resolutely pointing to the fissures in liberal capitalist hegemony where history—its past and its future—again becomes visible. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, a text’s unified expression of space and time, is central to my method of analysis. In tracing the chronotopic contours of contemporary works of music, film, and literature, I argue, we—as readers, viewers, and listeners—are engaged to think and act alongside the forms and figures that populate the worlds their authors create. In doing so, we ultimately uncover forceful accusations, resolute alternatives, and even hopeful antidotes to the deficiencies of our present that help us both to soberly contemplate the implications the pessimistic formulations of contemporary theory have on our lives, communities, and futures but also to formulate possibilities for them that lie beyond their analytical purview.In a series of close readings of my literary, filmic, and musical primary texts, I engage theorists of the post-Cold War, post-Wende contemporary who write about the political order and social conditions emerging out of the triumph of neoliberalism and market capitalism over socialist, communist, and fascist alternatives. The dissertation begins by establishing a wide view of the contemporary, tracing in its first chapter chronotopic resonances of Hartmut Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis—which locates the aimlessness and alienation of contemporary society within the accelerationist logic of market capitalist modes of production—across the full temporal arc of the contemporary. Pairing Christian Kracht’s Faserland (1995) with Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen (2017), I argue that the futilities and frustrations of the modern subject, as foretold in Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay and fleshed out in Rosa’s writings on social acceleration, find resonance not only in the wealthy, educated, white protagonist of Faserland’s 1990s, but also in the impoverished, undereducated, Turkish-Kurdish protagonist of Ellbogen some twenty years later. What connects these two accounts across decades and differences in identities, I demonstrate, is not merely a shared sense of alienation and despair, but a shared, underlying chronotopic characterization of the contemporary. These commonalities appear, I demonstrate, when we connect Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis to diegetic chronotopes of perpetual motion that depict modern subjects’ inability to avail themselves of the ostensibly liberatory potential of liberal capitalism’s accelerated lifeworld. Chapter 2 then considers Byung-Chul Han’s theory of auto-exploitation and the dilemma of the music novel at a time where the rebellion of punk against social integration has been thoroughly incorporated into capitalism. Reading Marc Degens’ Fuckin Sushi (2015), I examine the novel’s concept of “Abrentnern” as a model for personal and communal fulfillment for those who turn to art as a means self-determination in the age of auto-exploitation. Unlike Kracht and Aydemir, however, Degens sees the closing off of historical possibilities for the good life enjoyed by his punk forbears—here, self-determination through transgressive artistic praxis—not as the contemporary subject’s damnation to cyclical patterns of despair but as a challenge to conceive of the good life anew. Working humorously through its hapless protagonist Niels’ repeated attempts to escape the seemingly inevitable for-profit co-option of his sincere artistic efforts, the novel serves to unveil the persistence of blind spots in this regime of totalizing exploitation. What results is an account of the double-edged logic of capitalist productivity’s ostensible totalization of labor-time. Capitalism, Niels unwittingly discovers, is a logic of production so overwhelming that it continuously drives subjects towards the discovery of new alterities that, for a brief time at least, allow subjects once again to slip between the cracks. The third chapter explores a similar phenomenon of halting resistance to the conditions of the capitalist present through the lens of futurity. Here, I push back against Mark Fisher’s theory of the dominance of “Capitalist Realism” in the contemporary aesthetic imagination, identifying and developing the notion of “subtle futurity”—the modest, yet resolute rephrasing of future possibility beyond the “way things are” of the present—in Leif Randt’s Schimmernder Dunst über CobyCounty (2011) In this light, I argue, Randt’s gestures towards a different future, however halting, mark a significant effort to imagine a benevolent form of future possibility within the context of an era often suspected to have been exhausted of its utopian sentiment. The final two chapters turn to past-minded works that more forcefully repudiate notions of the present as static or closed off from the movement of history. Chapter Four considers W.G. Sebald’s 1995 novel, Die Ringe des Saturn, and The Caretaker’s 2012 album, Patience (After Sebald), developing an account of the chronotopic means by which these works revisit materials of the past within the present. Chronotopic motifs of paraphrase—techniques of sampling in The Caretaker and narrative polyphony in Sebald—come together within macro-level chronotopic frameworks of peripatetic movement—looping repetition in The Caretaker and the retracing of bygone journeys in Sebald—to testify to the unanswered questions and unfinished work of history over and against notions of the present as a time where the past has been relegated to mere museum content or nostalgia for bygone ways of living. Where Chapter Four speaks primarily to the formal mechanisms by which the present rediscovers the past, Chapter Five examines two specific chronotopic innovations for thematically engaging constellations of past-present inter-temporality. Both Sharon Dodua Otoo’s 2021 novel, Adas Raum, and Christian Petzold’s 2018 film, Transit, develop chronotopes wherein past and present are intermingled in increasingly inseparable ways. Adas Raum, I demonstrate, is organized spatiotemporally as a nexus of coiled loops—pasts and presents intertwine, heaven and earth are tangled together, and the fates of human beings and even non-human objects follow spatial and temporal trajectories that weave in and out of conventional linear understandings of space and time. In similar fashion, past and present become inseparable in Petzold’s film, an adaptation of the Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, through thematic and formal approaches of blurring that blend the plight of refugees of Seghers’ era with those of Petzold’s present day. History, then, appears remarkably robust in these texts, unfolding accounts of how human beings living through their present might take guidance from the generations that preceded them in the struggle for a better world.