What is the end of history?
Explaining the Concept
Many words have been written on the subject of the ‘end of history’ since Fukuyama’s notable contribution of the term to political rhetoric some quarter-century ago. The great majority of these have very little to do with the original argument at stake, and represent more or less inane empirical claims about social science and opinions on recent political developments rather than serious contributions to the understanding of ‘history’. But what, after all, did Kojève—Fukuyama’s avowed source—originally mean by pronouncing that history had ended? How, in principle, could this claim ever make sense?
There is from the start an obvious problem. Kojève is precise on the question of when history ended: it ended with the Napoleonic empire, in that apocalyptic moment in which Hegel saw Napoleon riding through Jena as the world-spirit manifest. Fukuyama, too, accepts this conclusion (even if his comments on the matter are largely relegated to a footnote in which he rather sheepishly offers that the Code Napoleon was the template for subsequent liberalism).
But we know, of course, as a matter of fact, that the Napoleonic empire was a failure. If it left behind a legacy and a memory that would fatally undermine the restored monarchies of Europe, the universal Napoleonic empire of citizen-soldiers envisaged by Kojève in his Introduction to Hegel did not survive the next decade—to the extent that it had ever empirically materialised at all. And from the perspective of the Vienna system that followed, the outcome of the French Revolution was crystal clear: the challenge to the ancien régime had failed.
It cannot, then, be that the end of history means the end of social change. Wars, social revolution, and political upheaval have hardly been lacking in the two centuries since 1815. Kojève himself is clear that the disciplines of the historian (narrowly construed) and the social scientist have little to offer on the question of the end of history. For Kojève, the ‘history’ that can be ended—History, if we like, with a big ‘H’—is identical with ‘discourse’: it is the history of philosophy, the search for Wisdom, or in other words the history of human thought.
The concept of the end of history amounts to this: There is nothing new that remains to be said.
In that light, it is not just that it is very difficult to intuit the ‘end of history’ from the empirical phenomena of social science: it is simply impossible. The cataloguing of empirical phenomena and the silent domain of quantitative measurements, by definition, have nothing to offer the internal history of human thought. They cannot ever positively demonstrate that the possibilities of discourse have been definitively exhausted. Similarly, the course of empirical events can never prove or disprove that ‘history has ended’. Humanity, having exhausted the possibilities of its own thought, can very well still abolish itself through experiments in artificial intelligence or climate catastrophe, and the empire at the end of history can collapse, just like Napoleon’s, without, for all that, failing to have reached the end. (Indeed, we may follow Kojève in affirming that the capacity for suicide is strictly equivalent to the capacity for discourse.)
Yet the end of history is not, in this sense, a strange idea. The earliest Christians well understood that human thought had been exhausted on the Cross; whatever their differences, no party to the great controversies in the centuries that followed could ever have accepted that they themselves were saying anything new. Cyril of Alexandria refused to underwrite any new ‘creed’ that would clarify his views—since to do so would be to deny the perfect sufficiency of the creed already established, which itself was merely a restatement of Scripture. None of the endless semantic struggles of the first Christian millennium could ever, then, amount to an ‘event’.
And so on further into the past. In earliest Greek philosophy we already find the same concept in the mouth of Parmenides: on the path of the philosopher, ‘It is all one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again’. Kojève comments on this couplet: ‘From the moment that [Parmenides] has retold everything that can be said … Truth alone shall remain: the single, unique Truth that is sooner or later necessarily retold when we say anything at all, provided that we do not stop … by saying only a portion of what can be said.’
We should be precise: to claim that nothing new remains to be stated is far stronger than believing that there is no existing ‘challenger’ or that nothing new appears to exist in a given moment. For Kojève, the various stages in the unfolding of the history of thought extend for centuries or even millennia without, for all that, representing the ‘end of history’. For a certain system (of thought) to represent the definitive end point to all human thought—that is, to rise above the competition of ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ and of mere opinion—it must be capable of recapitulating every possible system within itself, that is, of following and re-following the total circular history of human discourse from start to finish and back again. Such a system that cannot by definition be contradicted is, as Kojève himself argues, (only) one in which it is possible to assert A and not-A without contradiction, which cannot therefore ever be ‘negated’.
For the moment, whether such a total synthesis is possible to begin with is besides the point. A large part of Kojève’s writing, of course, is dedicated to arguing in various ways that it is. For now, we should simply recognise that it is a necessary consequence, or rather the definition, of an ‘end to history’. If it appears impossible—and Kojève will avow that to authentic partisans of liberalism it must appear so, certainly for ‘men of letters’ for whom the belief in their freedom to endlessly speak new thoughts is a treasured part of their existence—then an end of history must likewise be impossible.
To answer the question: the ‘end of history’ is not momentary success, a question of ‘credibility’, and so forth. It is, and indeed must be to have any claim to seriousness at all, the definitive and total accomplishment of all possible independent thought. This has various interesting consequences regarding what we would expect a system of thought at the end of history to look like. (Boris Groys has helped to elucidate many of them.) But we should not, at any rate, delude ourselves as to what it means.