Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

Allen Lane

3/5 stars

Three years after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the neoconservative American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man. This book declared that liberal democracy was triumphing all over the world and would become the final form of human government, bringing history to an end.

Its success would be driven by the inevitable victory of market capitalism, then sweeping across the former socialist economies of Russia and eastern Europe. Contrary to what some of Fukuyama’s critics maintained, the model for a post-historical world was not the United States but the European Union, largely because it represented the triumph of law on a transnational basis, subjecting individual states to a higher principle of reason. Read more

Source: South China Morning Post