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Articles

Francis Fukuyama & the Perils of Identity

Peter Benson critiques a liberal but nationalistic brand of identity politics.

The American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama is still best known for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. It was written in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. Those events, he contended, constituted the triumph of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism over the alternative social model provided by communist totalitarianism. “For a very large part of the world,” he wrote, “there is now no ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy” (p.45).

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