SOURCE: “The ‘End of History’ or a Portal to the Future: Does Anything Lie Beyond Late Modernity?,” in After History?: Francis Fukuyama and His Critics, Rowman and Littlefield, 1994, pp. 1-21.

In the following essay, Smith provides an overview of Fukuyama's “end of history” thesis and examines the sources of its critical controversy. Smith contends that “the End of History debate” is more properly an “End of Modernity debate.”

This is a significantly enlarged and transformed version of an essay that initially appeared in Perspectives on Political Science, Vol. 22, Fall 1993, under the title “Endings, Transitions or Beginnings.”

Rarely does one see so many take so much trouble responding to the arrival of a new book—and what for many was a new idea—as with the release of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, especially in light of the almost universally critical, occasionally hyperbolic, nature...