“Was it because Karl could conceive of no possible further development, or that he simply wanted communism to be the ultimate state and chose a pompous and pretentious argument to make it appear inevitable?”

Steve –
I was recently reading author David Watkins’ comments on 20th century architectural attitudes
that coinicide with your observation on Marx.

Therories of the “zeitgeist” were (and are) popular table-pounding tools for positions touting “inevitiablilty”…
you are “behind the times”,”out of it”,”passe’ “,etc. and easily dismissed by the *bien pensant* if you don’t support the party-line,
which is of course,in complete harmony with the *zeitgeist*,which is inevitable…until it isn’t.

Watkin pointed oput how this
was the hand-maiden of moral-relativism,since what was forbidden in one “age” could be permitted in the next,depending not on
eternal values,but those of the zeitgeist.

Traditional/conservative viewpoints
tend not to follow the “all is permitted/ends justify the means”
worldview…Marx on the other hand was one of it’s main,nihilist
“creators”.

David Watkin – Morality and Architecture,1977, Oxford University Press http://tinyurl.com/5onbhv

One tenet of conservatism is that human nature has no history, i.e. that human nature, despite changes in currently held attitudes, does not change. So even though today we all agree (at least within the US) that slavery is an unmitigated evil and is never justifiable, we forget that for most of human history slavery was considered a perfectly natural state, and questioning its legitimacy would have been nonsensical. Likewise, I cannot conceive of any circumstance under which I would surrender my autonomy to a king or tsar or other autocrat, yet my loathing of autocracy is my own and dies with me – it won’t be passed into the air and water to live on as an immutable truth after my passing.

To one who realizes this, there’s no guarantee that we can’t slide backwards into barbarism again, or for that matter to conditions and attitudes prevalent only a short century ago. So most of us who identified as conservatives instinctively knew Fukuyama was full of it, even if we did not articulate why we felt so. I had the same reaction when I first read Marx in high school and wondered how Marx could be certain that the Hegelian dialectic would come to a screeching halt once the revolution was established. Was it because Karl could conceive of no possible further development, or that he simply wanted communism to be the ultimate state and chose a pompous and pretentious argument to make it appear inevitable?

Did Fukuyama like democracy so much that he wanted to cement it as the pinnacle of human social evolution, or did he sincerely believe that he had demonstrated with Marx’s faux “scientific precision” it was so?