ALL OVER BUT THE CRYING:

The genesis of the 1992 book was a 1989 essay, titled simply "The End of History," that Fukuyama published in The National Interest. The essay and book appeared at a time of great promise: the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and China was opening to capitalism and experiencing internal demands for greater liberalization--until Tiananmen Square in 1989.

All this led Fukuyama to observe in The End of History that both "authoritarian states of the Right" and "totalitarian governments of the Left" had failed. With the democratization of many countries in the last part of the 20th century, he saw only capitalism and democracy as the triumphant forms of economic and political organization. It seemed that the whole of human history pointed in the direction of liberal democracy as the only regime consistent with "the nature of man as man."

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