Ebook: The Future of 'History'

Policy Review, No. 113 (June and July 2002), 14p.
This is Samuel P. Huntington’s moment. The world of cultural and religious strife anticipated by Huntington in his much-discussed (and widely excoriated) book, The Clash of Civilizations, has unquestionably arrived. Yet whether we might also someday see an alternative world — the global triumph of democracy envisioned in Francis Fukuyama’s brilliant work, The End of History and the Last Man — is also a question that seems very much before us as we contemplate what it would mean to win the war in which we are engaged. The question of our time may now be whether Huntington’s culture clash or Fukuyama’s pax democratia is the world’s most plausible future.