GOVT 60.26 Democracy after the End of History

The scholar Francis Fukuyama suggested in 1989 that the West had arrived at the “end of history” – the telos at which history aims, with a political and economic regime so satisfying to corporal needs and wants that existential yearnings would be suffocated and, lounging in tubs of butter, modern citizens would want no change. And yet: here we are, when in India, Europe, South America, and the U.S., populist movements – uprisings? –destroy the political and economic consensus that defined the end of history, a consensus instantiated in free markets and representative democracy. Why did Fukuyama (and Hegel) think history might end? Were they wrong? What animates politics after the end of history? The class will investigate these questions by engaging the history of political thought, ancient and modern, and the circumstances of contemporary American politics.

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Dist:TMV; WCult:W

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Government