Fukuyama, Deneen and Gray read the same crisis three ways. The philosopher behind all three saw it coming, and misjudged what it would mean. This analysis builds on the critical bibliography of Kojève’s works; the dates and editions cited here are set out in full there.
I. The bureaucrat of the absolute
Before the end of history became a Washington slogan in 1989, it was a Parisian joke and a Brussels job description. Alexandre Kojève told his seminar in the 1930s that history had ended at Jena in 1806, and then spent the second half of his life making sure the paperwork was in order. From 1945 until his death he worked inside France’s external-economic-relations directorate, the DREE, negotiating tariffs, commodity agreements and the architecture of the European Communities. He died in Brussels in June 1968, during a meeting connected with those Communities, while the students of Paris were trying to restart history in the streets. Asked why a philosopher would become a civil servant, he answered, in effect, that once history is over there is nothing left to do but administer it.
Any honest account of liberalism’s present crisis begins with that irony. The order now said to be decaying — open trade, supranational law, the European Union, a world governed by rules rather than wars — is the closest thing modernity has produced to what Kojève called the “universal and homogeneous state.” He did not merely predict it. He helped draft it. The question for 2026 is therefore not whether Kojève was right in the abstract. It is what the revolt against his post-history tells us about the human beings he assumed it would satisfy.
He is worth taking seriously as more than a commentator, because he was more than one. The posthumous corpus — the theory of right, the treatise on authority, the atheism manuscript, the Stalinist Sophia that reached print only in 2025 — reveals a Russian émigré who built his end of history out of four materials, not three. Hegel gave him the dialectic of recognition; Marx gave him labour and the priority of the slave; Heidegger gave him finitude and being-toward-death; and the Russian religious tradition of Solovyov gave him the eschatological form — a humanity that becomes God through history, the divine-human synthesis with God struck out. This is why his end of history has the shape of a secular Second Coming, and why its collapse feels less like a refuted forecast than like a theology losing its congregation.
II. Kojève’s wager
Strip away the Hegelian apparatus and Kojève made three claims.
First, what distinguishes humans from animals is the desire for recognition: we want to be desired as free, and will risk death for it. Second, history is the long working-out of the master–slave relation, until a state arises that recognises everyone equally as a citizen. Third, once that state exists, nothing essential remains to fight about. War gives way to administration, philosophy to wisdom, and politics to the satisfaction of needs.
The wager hid a melancholy that Fukuyama would later make famous. If man is negativity — struggle, and the transformation of the given — then the end of history is also the end of man. In the 1947 edition Kojève predicted that post-historical humans would lapse into clever animality. In the 1962 edition, after a trip to Japan, he changed his mind. Post-historical humanity would live instead through “snobbery”: formal rituals emptied of historical content, the tea ceremony, the Noh stage, ritual suicide, ikebana. Since “no animal can be a snob,” a Japanised post-history would remain specifically human, and he predicted “a ‘Japanization’ of the Westerners (including the Russians).”
Read that line in an age of curated feeds, lifestyle identity, branded authenticity and political performance staged for an audience, and it stops looking eccentric. The end of history, for Kojève, was never one thesis fixed in 1806. He moved its date from Jena to Stalin, to the American way of life, to Japan. The movement is the most interesting thing about it.
III. Fukuyama: the defender who now concedes a cycle
The strongest version of Francis Fukuyama’s argument was never the cartoon in which “nothing happens anymore.” His 1989 essay asked whether liberal democracy might be “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” — the last coherent idea, not the last event. The End of History and the Last Man (1992) translated Kojève’s recognition into Plato’s thymos, the spirited part of the soul, and split it: isothymia, the demand to be recognised as an equal, and megalothymia, the demand to be recognised as superior. Liberal democracy satisfies the first better than any rival; its danger is that it starves the second and breeds Nietzsche’s last man, comfortable and chestless.
The book’s final chapters carry a warning Fukuyama now quotes against his own critics. If people cannot struggle for a just cause because it has already won, “they will struggle against the just cause… for the sake of struggle… out of a certain boredom.” (The fuller reading of how that argument runs across his whole corpus is set out in the companion study of Fukuyama.)
Since then he has revised the mechanics while defending the direction. The Political Order volumes added the state, the rule of law, and the concept of decay — institutions captured by elites, a vetocracy that cannot act. Identity (2018) argued that the thymotic energy he had underrated returns as identity politics on left and right. Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022) defended a humane liberalism against neoliberal economics on one flank and progressive identitarianism on the other.
Then, in 2026, the retreat became explicit. His memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, opens: “We have been living in the realm of the Last Man for some time now,” and concedes that “the peace and prosperity brought about by the liberal order based on equal recognition is not enough for many people.” In interviews around its publication he admitted that his 1992 assumption — that a figure like Trump would be satisfied by wealth rather than power — was a misjudgement, and that both the neoconservative faith in spreading democracy by force and the faith in self-regulating markets had “turned out to be complete nonsense.” Most strikingly, he suggested that humanity may be trapped in a cycle: liberal democracy brings peace and prosperity; people grow bored and destroy it; after authoritarianism and war, they return. “The ‘end of history’ is going to be a sort of cyclical thing.”
That move matters philosophically. A cyclical history is not Hegel’s, and not Kojève’s. It is Polybius’s. Fukuyama keeps the normative claim — liberal democracy is the only regime that recognises everyone — while abandoning the teleological one, that history converges on it. That is a retreat from Kojève’s metaphysics toward something closer to Strauss’s classical view, and it is the honest position.
It is also the position The Liberation Trap reaches by a different road. If every emancipation creates the thing the next emancipation must undo — if there is no final freedom, only a succession of liberations and the enslavements they breed — then the end of history was always a category error. The last man is not the terminus of the story. He is one turn of a wheel that Ibn Khaldun, not Hegel, described best: solidarity hardens into comfort, comfort into decay, decay into the next conquest. Fukuyama’s “cyclical thing” is Kojève’s eschatology collapsing back into the older, grimmer law.
The weakness of the whole account is that thymos does too much work. It explains the triumph of liberalism and its collapse with equal ease, which means it explains neither until the institutions are specified. Fukuyama’s later political science has been more persuasive than his philosophy of history for exactly this reason.
IV. Deneen: liberalism succeeded, which is why it failed
Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) turns Kojève inside out. Its central claim — that liberalism failed because it succeeded — is a Kojèvean claim with the valuation reversed. Liberalism’s anthropology of the autonomous, choosing individual, freed from nature, place and inherited obligation, has been realised; and its realisation produced exactly what Kojève described: a homogeneous, administered, market-integrated world in which local attachments dissolve. Kojève called this the satisfaction of man. Deneen calls it the destruction of family, religion, community and the dignity of work, and the rise of a managerial elite whose meritocracy is a new aristocracy without obligation.
Regime Change (2023) moves from diagnosis to prescription — a “common-good conservatism,” a mixed constitution in which a reformed elite serves the many’s interest in stability, family and work, using state power where it must. Here the American postliberal movement converges: Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism (2022), the Postliberal Order circle around Deneen, Vermeule, Gladden Pappin and Chad Pecknold, and a Vice President, JD Vance, who blurbed Regime Change and has called himself a postliberal. The movement’s proximity to power is now a matter of record rather than speculation.
Then came the empirical test. On 12 April 2026 Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year rule, handing Péter Magyar’s Tisza party a two-thirds majority on the highest turnout since 1990. Vance had travelled to Budapest days before the vote to support Orbán. The model state of the “illiberal democracy” Orbán proclaimed in 2014 was removed by liberal-democratic means. That is not a refutation of postliberal theory. It is a refutation of its claim to speak for “the people” against the elites.
The strongest version of Deneen is his account of how liberalism’s procedural neutrality conceals a substantive anthropology that remakes society in its image. Even sympathetic liberals concede the point. The strongest objections are three. His genealogy makes liberalism responsible for everything modern — capitalism, technology, secularisation — which renders it unfalsifiable. His remedy requires an elite of virtue whose selection he never explains. And his means sit uneasily close to Machiavellian ones. For readers formed by Iran’s experience there is a fourth, sharper worry: a “common good” defined by those who hold the state and enforced in the name of religion and family is not a hypothesis. It is a country we have lived inside.
V. Gray: there was never an end to come
John Gray rejects the question outright. Across False Dawn, Two Faces of Liberalism, Straw Dogs, Black Mass and The New Leviathans (2023), he has argued that the idea of history as a progressive story with a destination is a secularised Christian eschatology. Marxism, neoconservatism, free-market utopianism and Fukuyama’s end of history are, for Gray, variants of apocalyptic millenarianism dressed as social science. Kojève — the Solovyov scholar who turned Godmanhood into the universal state — is almost too perfect a specimen for him.
His positive position has been steady since Two Faces of Liberalism. There are two liberalisms. One seeks rational consensus on the best way of life and becomes universalist, missionary and finally intolerant. The other is a modus vivendi, a set of institutions for peaceful coexistence among people who will never agree. Only the second is worth defending. The New Leviathans reads the 2020s through Hobbes: twenty-first-century states are becoming Leviathans that offer shelter against chaos rather than guarantees against tyranny, and Western “hyper-liberalism” is itself a Leviathan of soul-engineering. In “Why I am not a post-liberal” (New Statesman, October 2025) he turned the same severity on the right: postliberal visions of a seamless social order “have proved as illusory, and in practice as divisive, as the progressive hyper-liberalism that has led us to our present pass.”
The strongest version of Gray is his warning against every politics of final redemption — against the liberals who thought 1989 was the last chapter and the postliberals who think 2016 or 2024 was the first chapter of the restoration. The strongest objection is that his pluralism of regimes can slide into indifference to what those regimes do to their own people. “Regional orders adapted to their cultures” is a fine phrase until one asks the women of Tehran what their regime’s adaptation has meant.
VI. Five connections the debate usually misses
1. Brussels is the real Kojèvean experiment, not Washington. Fukuyama’s end of history was American. Kojève’s was European, legal and bureaucratic — a customs union, a court and a commission; a polity that recognises citizens through law and replaces war with regulation. His “Latin Empire” memorandum of 1945 had already declared the nation-state obsolete and the future a matter of blocs. Read in 2026, that document anticipates both the EU and its rivals: a world of civilisational states and spheres of influence. Today’s multipolarity looks less like history’s return than like Kojève’s “epoch of empires.”
2. Recognition politics is post-history’s main business, not its refutation. Kojève and Fukuyama assumed that once equal legal recognition was granted, the desire for it would quiet. The recognition theorists since Axel Honneth have argued the opposite: recognition has several spheres — love, rights, social esteem — and legal equality leaves the third unsatisfied. Identity politics, left and right, is the struggle for esteem in a world where rights are already formally equal. That is Fukuyama’s megalothymia, democratised. It confirms Kojève’s anthropology and refutes his institutional optimism.
3. Snobbery is the post-historical style. The 1959 Japan note is the most prophetic page Kojève wrote. A world without historical stakes produces ritualised identity, performance, and the aesthetics of empty form. Political tribes that compete less over policy than over signs fit the description, as does a culture in which authenticity itself is curated. Boredom and snobbery are the two faces of the last man.
4. Iran is the anti-Kojèvean counter-history, and its own crisis. The 1979 revolution was, among other things, the century’s most deliberate refusal of the universal homogeneous state — an attempt to restart history in the name of transcendence, against both the American and Soviet ways of life Kojève had declared equivalent. For forty-seven years the Islamic Republic was the strongest evidence against Fukuyama’s claim that no coherent alternative remained. And yet the counter-history has been caught in Kojève’s logic. The regime’s legitimacy has collapsed into a demand for recognition — “Woman, Life, Freedom” in 2022, the economic protests that followed. We draw no triumphalist moral from the war and the strikes of 2026: bombs dropped in the name of a liberal world order are not recognition, and many Iranians who loathe the regime also reject foreign war. But the Iranian case marks the limit of all three authors. Fukuyama underestimated the endurance of a theocratic alternative; Deneen’s common-good-enforced-by-a-religious-elite has an Iranian precedent he will not engage; Gray’s “regional orders” leave Iranian citizens to their Leviathan. The demand Iranians have actually made, in the streets, is the most Kojèvean demand imaginable: to be recognised as free.
5. AI and the posthuman are where Kojève becomes literal. He described post-historical humans as satisfied animals, or snobs, freed from labour and struggle. A civilisation now automating cognitive work faces his question in literal form: what remains of the human when negation, labour, risk and struggle are no longer required? The pressing problems of 2026 — AI governance, climate, pandemics — are global but not recognitional. They are problems of coordination, not of dignity, and Kojève’s administrative state was built precisely for them. Whether it can solve them without democratic consent is the question his technocracy never answered.
VII. Does liberalism’s decay refute Kojève?
It confirms half of him and refutes the other half.
It confirms his anthropology. Human beings want to be recognised, will choose struggle over boredom, and will invent a struggle when none is given. Fukuyama’s 1992 warning and his 2026 memoir both rest on that insight; so does Deneen’s critique of homogenisation, and Gray’s observation that liberals keep re-enacting their own apocalypses.
It refutes his institutional eschatology — the assumption that a state of equal legal recognition, a customs union and a professional administration would quiet the desire that produced them. The last man did not settle into contentment. He grew restless, resentful and theatrical, and in many countries he voted for leaders who promised to make him master again. Hungary in April 2026 shows that he can also vote them out.
The lesson is not Fukuyama’s chastened liberalism, nor Deneen’s restorationist common good, nor Gray’s Hobbesian stoicism alone. It is Kojève’s own question, sharpened by his failures: what would a polity have to provide, beyond rights and prosperity, for free people to recognise it as theirs? Liberalism’s crisis is the failure to answer that question. Postliberalism answers it with an authority that does not need consent. Gray answers it by lowering expectations. The work of the next generation is to answer it without either.
Recommended reading
Kojève. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Bloom/Nichols, 1969) — the long note on the end of history and its 1962 addendum on Japan. On Tyranny (Gourevitch–Roth, corrected ed. 2013) — Strauss and Kojève on whether the universal state is tyranny. Outline of a Phenomenology of Right (2000) — the legal theory of the universal state. “Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy” (the Latin Empire), Policy Review 126 (2004). Full editions and dates are in the bibliography.
Fukuyama. “The End of History?” (1989); The End of History and the Last Man (1992), especially Part V; Identity (2018); In the Realm of the Last Man (2026). See also the companion reading of the corpus.
Deneen and the postliberals. Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023); Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism (2022).
Gray. Two Faces of Liberalism (2000); Black Mass (2007); The New Leviathans (2023); “Why I am not a post-liberal” (2025).
The corrective. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition (1995) — the indispensable answer to Kojève’s agonistic, death-centred account of recognition.
A note on sources and verification
The scholarship on Kojève’s own life and works is standard record and is set out, with editions and dates, in the critical bibliography. The reading of his end of history as a secularised Russian eschatology follows the Studies in East European Thought special issue on Kojève and Russian philosophy (vol. 76, no. 1, March 2024; several articles online in 2023).
The near-contemporary claims carry the usual caution. Fukuyama’s 2026 memoir and his remarks around its publication are drawn from the book and from interview reporting, not from a single verified transcript, and the “cyclical” formulation should be checked against the original before it is quoted as settled. The DST espionage allegation against Kojève is unproven and is treated as an allegation throughout. The 2026 Hungarian result and the Iran war of 2026 are described from reporting through mid-to-late 2026; the Iranian settlement remains unresolved at the time of writing. The three-way framework, and all judgements in sections VI and VII, are this analysis’s synthesis, not claims made by Fukuyama, Deneen or Gray.
The Post-Liberal Series — read across the arc:
- Alexandre Kojève: A Critical Bibliography — the works behind this analysis, dated and assessed.
- Universal Nexuspolis — the foundational philosophy: the commons before the holding, the bond before the right, nature with a voice.
- The Constitutional Floor — the liberal floor beneath the city of the bond: one law, the right of exit, contestable guardianship.
- Beyond Liberalism Without Leaving It — Kvangraven and Gray read against Nexuspolis; the case for a thick-commons liberalism.
- Destroying the Rights of Man — energy, might, and the selective universalism of liberal rights.