I am one of those few people who have an opinion about Francis Fukuyama’s book “The End of History and the Last Man” and have also actually read the book. The book is a superb philosophical work, and I think it is correct.

Wikipedia has an excellent article summarizing the book and its related controversy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

Mostly, Fukuyama’s book is a reflection on the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s ideas about how to understand major historical developments. Since Karl Marx made much use of Hegel’s ideas, many people imagine mistakenly that Hegel was some kind of pre-Marxist and have dismissed him. Fukuyama has re-established Hegel into Hegel’s proper place in the history of philosophy.

Many people imagine mistakenly also that Fukuyama argues that because Communism has collapsed, there will be no more military conflicts and no more intellectual challenges to liberal democracy. In fact, however, he does not make that argument.

Rather, he argues that liberal democracy (with the word “liberal” understood in the sense of tolerating free communication) is an inevitable mature stage of political development. Some societies already have reached that stage, and some societies are still far away and perhaps even moving in a different direction right now. For many reasons, liberal democracy is the most humanly reasonable kind of society, and so eventually all human societies will make their ways to that destination.

I think that an excellent current example of Fukuyama’s thesis being realized is the country of Iraq, which is moving slowly but surely toward liberal democracy, because the Iraqi people as a whole recognize that it is the most reasonable and effective path toward social progress. Now that the US military intervention has opened that path, the Iraq people will seize its opportunity and move as far forward in that direction as it can in its circumstances.