SOURCE: “It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over,” in Commonweal, June 19, 1992, pp. 25-6.

In the following review of The End of History and the Last Man, Deneen provides an overview of Fukuyama's historical postulations and critical reaction to his thesis.

Francis Fukuyama's 1989 article “The End of History?” in The National Interest caused a sensation in both academic and nonacademic circles of a magnitude unprecedented since Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. The resemblance of the sound and the fury is not coincidental: Fukuyama—a former student of Bloom's—veered from the well-worn discursive paths within the field of international relations with as much aplomb as did Bloom in domestic fields. Fukuyama's book—fundamentally a lengthy extension of his original article—should continue to infuriate as well as stimulate debate as the West finds itself somewhat lost in a new but no less frightening international arena.

Fukuyama's...