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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...l3nB9USvUo
EXCERPTS: In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events. Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination.
According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society. With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited. Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.
To see how that judgment is holding up, just look at the kinds of titles that political theorists are producing these days [...] Across the West, the far right and the far left are on the rise, and the one thing they agree on is their contempt for liberalism.
[...] Now that the liberal triumphalism of the post–Cold War era is dying, what can replace it? The answer may lie in another important essay written in 1989—one that received much less attention than Fukuyama’s, but enjoys a cult reputation among keepers of the liberal flame. “The Liberalism of Fear,” by Judith Shklar...
[...] Liberalism doesn’t offer a vision of a perfect world—one where injustice is abolished, or where a particular nation reigns supreme. Instead, it is rooted in a justified fear of the real world, where people with power often use it to oppress, torture, and kill. “Liberalism’s deepest grounding,” Shklar writes, is the belief “that cruelty is an absolute evil.” (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events. Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination.
According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society. With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited. Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.
To see how that judgment is holding up, just look at the kinds of titles that political theorists are producing these days [...] Across the West, the far right and the far left are on the rise, and the one thing they agree on is their contempt for liberalism.
[...] Now that the liberal triumphalism of the post–Cold War era is dying, what can replace it? The answer may lie in another important essay written in 1989—one that received much less attention than Fukuyama’s, but enjoys a cult reputation among keepers of the liberal flame. “The Liberalism of Fear,” by Judith Shklar...
[...] Liberalism doesn’t offer a vision of a perfect world—one where injustice is abolished, or where a particular nation reigns supreme. Instead, it is rooted in a justified fear of the real world, where people with power often use it to oppress, torture, and kill. “Liberalism’s deepest grounding,” Shklar writes, is the belief “that cruelty is an absolute evil.” (MORE - details)
