CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 32 of 120

Correct — A, Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama first made the argument in an essay called ‘The End of History?’ in the summer 1989 issue of The National Interest, months before the Berlin Wall came down, and expanded it into the 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. His claim was never that events would stop happening. It was that the long argument about which principles should organise a modern state had run out of serious contenders: with the collapse of communism, Western liberal democracy stood as “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. The second half of the title comes from the other side of his own case — the ‘last man’ is Nietzsche's figure, borrowed to ask whether people whose recognition and material wants are satisfied will still find life worth striving in. Fukuyama built the framework on Hegel as read through Alexandre Kojève, which is why the thesis is about the direction of history rather than about any particular election.

• (b)Daniel Bell — The near-miss the question is built on. Daniel Bell wrote The End of Ideology (1960), arguing that the great nineteenth-century political creeds had exhausted themselves in the West, and later The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). The titles rhyme and the themes overlap, but the 1989 essay and the 1992 book are not his.
• (c)Abraham Lincoln — Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States from 1861 to 1865 and left speeches, not works of late twentieth-century political theory. He is in the list as an obvious outlier to be struck out first.
• (d)Anthony Giddens — Anthony Giddens is a British sociologist known for structuration theory, for his writing on modernity and globalisation, and for The Third Way (1998), which supplied the vocabulary of centre-left politics in the Blair years. He argued about how liberal democracies should be run, not that the argument about them had ended.

The end-of-history thesis is a claim about ideological competition, not about events. Writing as the Soviet bloc dissolved, Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy paired with a market economy had outlasted monarchy, fascism and communism and that no rival principle of legitimacy was left standing. The book adds a second, gloomier question: what happens to human striving once recognition has been won.

Author-and-title items are memory questions, but they are usually beatable by pairing each name with the phrase it actually owns. Here the pairing is tight — end of history goes with Fukuyama, end of ideology with Daniel Bell, third way with Giddens, and clash of civilizations with Samuel Huntington, who wrote it in 1993 as the standing reply to Fukuyama. Anchored to the 2021 exam, the thesis was already three decades old and heavily contested; Fukuyama himself has since written at length on institutional decay, in Political Order and Political Decay (2014) and afterwards, and the democratic backsliding of the 2010s and 2020s is routinely cited against the original claim.

• ‘The End of History?’ appeared in The National Interest in the summer of 1989; the book The End of History and the Last Man followed in 1992.
• The thesis is that liberal democracy is the end point of ideological evolution and the final form of human government, not that events cease.
• The ‘last man’ of the title is a Nietzschean figure, used to ask what motivates people once their wants and their need for recognition are met.
• Samuel P. Huntington's ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ (1993 essay, 1996 book) was written as the direct counter-argument.
• Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960) is the earlier and separate book that the wrong option trades on.

• Reading the title as a prediction that nothing more would happen in the world.
• Swapping Fukuyama and Daniel Bell because both titles begin with ‘The End of’.
• Assuming Huntington and Fukuyama were making the same argument — the clash thesis was written against the end-of-history thesis.

As a straight book-to-author match, occasionally reversed into a thinker-to-idea matching list.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, written as a reply to the end-of-history thesis, was authored by

  • (a)Francis Fukuyama
  • (b)Samuel P. Huntington
  • (c)Joseph Nye
  • (d)Edward Said

  Answer(b) Samuel P. Huntington — his 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs, expanded into a book in 1996, argued that future conflict would follow cultural rather than ideological fault lines.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The book The End of Ideology, published in 1960, was written by

  • (a)Anthony Giddens
  • (b)Daniel Bell
  • (c)Francis Fukuyama
  • (d)Herbert Marcuse

  Answer(b) Daniel Bell — he argued that the older political creeds had exhausted their appeal in the industrial West, a separate and earlier claim from Fukuyama's.