The Entropia at the End of History: Fukuyama and the Legacy of the Last Man

• In Event: Utopias/Dystopias: More to Orwell to Fukuyama

Abstract

Given this conference’s theme is devoted at least in part to the potential retrenchment and regression of liberal democratic institutions, it seems a fine time to return to that peculiarly utopian anti-utopianism of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis. Fukuyama is most often remembered for his infamous 1989 declaration that the impending collapse of the Soviet Union and the gradual spread of democracy and liberalism throughout Asia marked “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (“History?” 4). In hindsight, Fukuyama might seem hopelessly naive, but a closer look at his work reveals a recurring acknowledgment of – one might even say a haunting anxiety towards – the inherent fragility of the liberal democratic state, threatened as it might be by “some kind of internal rot” (History 288). Fukuyama’s argument, in both his original article of 1989 and his extended monograph of 1992, is less the celebration of an ideological victory than it is the lament of a Tragic hero, whose Oedipus-esque downfall is inherent in the very achievement of his goal. In this way, Fukuyama’s invocation of the “Last Man” to characterize liberal democracy’s inner fragility is in fact far more apt than the author may have realized, for while his direct reference is to Nietzsche’s use of the theme, Fukuyama’s narrative of History (for it is, at base, a narrative) is premised on the same entropic plotting found in nineteenth-century European Last Man literature. Exploring this similarity, I argue in this paper that Fukuyama’s conception of an End of History follows in the legacy of the nineteenth-century Last Man novel by adopting an anti-utopian politico-narrative form that I call “Entropia.”

It is almost a truism to state that the nineteenth century was rife with utopian hopes and the belief in societal progress; yet, it was also a century that saw the creation and early life of the Last Man, one of literature’s most lonesome figures. Since its earliest appearance, the Last Man has been a complex and multivalent figure. As I argue in the larger work from which this paper stems, the Last Man is a topos with three interpretive axes: Last Man qua “endling” or the solitary final member of the human species; Last Man qua “New Adam” or the last fertile human male charged with the procreative task of restarting the human race; and Last Man qua Nietzschean “old age of mankind” or human civilization on the decline. In works stretching across the long nineteenth-century, examples of the figure embodying this topos can be found strolling aimlessly amongst the empty remains of what had been utopian pinnacles of societal progress. Notably, in many of these examples – such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Camille Flammarion’s Omega: The Last Days of the World (1893) – the decline of civilization does not begin until a utopian stage has been reached, after which civilization ceases its progressive move “forward” and slips “backward” along an entropic path towards its “old age.” Even in those texts where the Last Man takes on the procreative role of the “New Adam,” the potential regeneration of humankind often proves to be but an atavistic return to barbarism (as in Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man (1805)) or a symptom of a greater arc towards entropic decline (as in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895)). Fukuyama follows suit, modeling the same paradoxically degenerate and atavistic renewal of history in his concern (or is it hope?) that a dissatisfaction with liberal democracy and the fear of becoming “secure and self-absorbed last men” will inspire some to become “bestial first men” once again with the “potential to restart history” (History 328, 334-335). Thus, both for Fukuyama and for the authors of the nineteenth-century texts considered here, the Last Man is indicative of a fatalistic “ebb of [the] great flood” of human achievement (Nietzsche, Zarathustra 5), of the belief in the entropic propensity for progress to bring about its very opposite – in sum, of Entropia.


Works Cited

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16, 1989, 3-18.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. The Free Press, 1992.
Flammarion, Camille. Omega: The Last Days of the World. 1893. Read & Co. Classics, 2020.
Grainville, Jean-Baptiste François Xavier. The Last Man. 1805. Translated by I. F. Clarke and M. Clarke, Wesleyan UP, 2002.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. 1883-1885. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, translated by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge UP, 2006.
Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. 1826. Edited by Anne McWhir, Broadview, 1996.
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. 1895. Edited and introduced by Nicholas Ruddick, Broadview Press, 2001.

Author

• Michael Cameron