The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, First Edition. Edited by Michael T. Gibbons. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0352 Fall of Communism and End of History Timothy W. Burns The end of history is a concept developed by G. W. F. Hegel, according to whom the unplanned struggles of history have produced a progress of human consciousness that culminates in the final, rational state of humanity. The notion of such a historical progression of consciousness was adopted by Karl Marx, who however attributed progress to the economic history of humans. With the fall of the (Marxist) Soviet Union, the Hegelian notion was revived by Francis Fukuyama. Under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, the USSR was formed in 1917 as the start of an anticipated worldwide revo- lution against capitalism, as predicted and called for by Marx; it became after a short time an effort to build socialism and then communism “in one country,” always in anticipation of an international revolution. It was to bring about the “end of history” in this sense: history had been, according to Marx, a history of dialectical class struggle by human beings alienated from their labor – from their productive activity and its fruits over and against a hostile nature – and hence alienated from themselves and other human beings. All human problems were thought to be traceable to this fundamental (economic) alienation, and to have their corresponding solution in the workers’ collective control of the forces of production and abolition of private property. The revolution, it was believed, would move human beings from the “realm of necessity” into the “realm of freedom,” as the forces that had hindered human flourish- ing and repressed talent were cast off, and an unprecedented human consciousness of equality in freedom came to direct human life. The revolution would show that authentic history had not ended but was just beginning. The living reality under Bolshevik Party rule was totalitarian tyranny, as the promised new consciousness never arrived, and the unlimited power of the state to own and redis- tribute goods and services proved to be the means to brutal suppression of dissent from the ever-failing Marxist vision of the Party. Its tyrannical nature and imperial, ideolog- ical challenge to western liberal-democratic (“bourgeois capitalist”) domination of the globe was the cause, after World War II, of the Cold War between it and other officially Marxist countries, on one hand, and, on the other, the USA and other western liberal democracies, which had been founded on the doctrine of individual natural rights. When the late attempt to “restructure” the Soviet economy in the 1980s met with resistance from an entrenched bureaucratic elite, President Mikhail Gorbachev instituted a policy of “openness,” but the resulting criticisms and frank airing of longstanding grievances and dissatisfaction caused the regime to lose all legitimacy and collapse. In an effort to explain the significance of the west’s victory in the Cold War, and the concomitant increase in liberal democracies around the globe, Francis Fukuyama pub- lished first an essay (Fukuyama 1989) and then a book (1992), in which he made the case that history as a dialectical process had indeed reached its end, in the manner described not by Marx but by his teacher, Hegel, as inter- preted by the famous Hegelian Alexandre Kojève. (Fukuyama was a student of Allan Bloom and hence of Leo Strauss, the latter of whom had become friends with Kojève, had intended to coauthor a book with him on Hegel, and had engaged him in a serious public debate about the nature of political philosophy, ancient and modern.) Contrary