THE END OF HISTORY, OR HISTORY OVER AGAIN ?

The argument of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man is not a new one. It is even older than Fukuyama allows. In 143 CE a Greek public orator named Aelius Aristides told the Roman emperor, Antoninus Pius, that Rome was the last of all the empires. "Now a clear and universal freedom from all fear has been granted both to the world and those who live in it"; history, he confidently predicated, had finally come to a happy and glorious end. The constitution of Rome represented the final, most perfect political form and would henceforth continue as it was uninterruptedly into the future. As with all such claims, this too turned out to be false. The similarity with Fukuyama's celebrated thesis is not fortuitous. The values of the Roman world of the 2nd century were like the values of the Enlightenment, conceived as universal: the rule of law, citizenship based upon a common human identity, irrespective of race or creed. For the historical origins of modern secular liberal democracy lie not, as Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington suppose, in Christianity, but in what Christianity borrowed from the ancient world. And it was because the values and the kind of scientific inquires they made possible were ancient and secular in origin that it was, in the end, possible to detach them from Christian theology – and the church.

Um novo contributo para a discussão relativa a um novo texto de Fukuyama, já publicado na Formiga Bargante

Texto completo neste LINK