The End of History and the Last man, By Francis Fukuyama

The End of History and the Last Man (1992), or the original National Interest essay, "The End of History?" (1989)

Since the End of History is so important to Western political thought, it is good to read the argument in its original form. Fukuyama is a far better thinker than his reputation suggests, and despite its triumphant overtones he himself notes that the End of History will be a sad time. My quarrel is not that he called the future wrongly, but that the position was never intellectually available in the first place: institutions either evolve or they decay, and there is no third option. This is the argument my book is written against, so it is the natural first stop. The essay is twenty pages and contains everything.

Read it asking: Is this a claim that institutional development has ended, or only that the argument about its destination has been settled?