End of history
The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. A variety of authors have argued that a particular system is the "end of history" including Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexandre Kojève,[1] and Francis Fukuyama in the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.[2]
For other uses, see End of history (disambiguation).The concept of an end of history differs from ideas of an end of the world as expressed in various religions, which may forecast a complete destruction of the Earth or of life on Earth, and the end of the human race. The end of history instead proposes a state in which human life continues indefinitely into the future without any further major changes in society, system of governance, or economics.
History[edit]
The phrase the end of history was first used by French philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1861 "to refer to the end of the historical dynamic with the perfection of civil society".[3] Arnold Gehlen adopted it in 1952 and it has been taken up more recently by Heidegger and Vattimo.[3]
The formal development of an idea of an "end of history" is most closely associated with Hegel, although Hegel discussed the idea in ambiguous terms, making it unclear whether he thought such a thing was a certainty or a mere possibility.[4] The goal of Hegel's philosophy on history was to show that history is a process of realization of reason, for which he does not name a definite endpoint. Hegel believes that it is on the one hand the task of history to show that there is essentially reason in the development over time, while on the other hand history itself also has the task of developing reason over time. The realization of history is thus something that one can observe, but also something that is an active task.[5]
Quantification[edit]
A 2022 research article published by the Royal Society Open Science models the transition between political regimes as a Markov process and, using a Bayesian inference approach, it estimates the transition probabilities between political regimes from time-series data describing the evolution of political regimes from 1800 to 2018. The author then computes the steady state for this Markov process which represents a mathematical abstraction of the End of history and predicts that approximately 46% of countries will be full democracies. Furthermore, he finds that, under his model, the fraction of autocracies in the world is expected to increase for the next half-century before it declines. Using random-walk theory, he then estimates survival curves of different types of regimes and characteristic lifetimes of democracies and autocracies of 244 years and 69 years, respectively. He argues there is no statistical evidence that the End of history constitutes a fixed, complete omnipresence of democratic regimes.[10]