SOURCE: “What Is Fukuyama Saying?,” in New York Times Magazine, October 22, 1989, pp. 38-40, 42, 54-5.

In the following essay, Atlas provides an overview of Fukuyama's professional background, historical perspective, and critical controversy surrounding “The End of History?”

The year 2000 fast approaches, and millennial doom is in the air. Global warming, nuclear proliferation, chaos in Eastern Europe. Even the notion of post is over. Post-modernism, post-history, post-culture (to borrow the critic George Steiner's term)—we're beyond that now. “The sun is about to set on the post-industrial era,” declares the economist Lester C. Thurow in The New York Times.

What follows post? Samuel P. Huntington, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, has a name for the latest eschatological craze: “endism.” The critic Arthur C. Danto theorizes on “the end of art.” Bill McKibben, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, issues a dire report on “The...