Anirudh Pai

“Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground–what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?”

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

The Beginning of Economic History

1989 saw the first set of GPS satellites in space; it also encompassed the fall of the Berlin Wall and Woodstock ’89. As time has passed however, it looks as if Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 brief, written in the National Interest, on the liberalized democratic society as the end of history remains an even more powerful concept today than ever before.

What was yet to be seen in 1989 was how accurate Francis Fukuyama’s piece on the End of History? would be. America’s future in 1989 seemed endless and certain – it was going to climb Olympus and take its mantle as the lead superpower of the world. But, 2016 ushered in critiques from elites that Fukuyama was wrong: we were undoubtedly heading back into the global abyss of nationalism and to a level not seen since the 1930s.

Fortunately, they haven’t been proven right thus far. Fukuyama’s critics miss the crucial fact that he hasn’t been quite proven wrong: a return to nationalism doesn’t imply that we have found a better alternative to the liberal democratic system that the West has adopted since WW2.