AMONG THE PRIZES at stake in the endless war of politics is history itself. The battle for power is always a battle to determine who gets remembered, how they will be recalled, where and in what forms their memories will be preserved. In this battle, there is no room for neutral parties: every history and counter-history must fight and scrap and claw and spread and lodge itself in the world, lest it be forgotten or forcibly erased. All history, in this sense, is the history of empire—a bid for control of that greatest expanse of territory, the past.
The greatest act of empire, of course, is to declare the whole messy, brutal process finished, to climb to the top of the trash heap and trumpet one’s reign as the culmination of all history. The greatest act of history, on the other hand, is to reveal such declarations to be always premature. Seneca’s Pax Romana announced a history stilled by the glorious rise of Augustus, the “sun that never set” shone on the image of time frozen at the height of the British Empire—and the world spun madly on.
Nearly thirty years ago, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously called the ball game once more. In a 1989 essay, which he expandedinto the 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama prophesied that the fall of communism signaled “the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”