Ende der Geschichte? Post-histoire und Dritte Welt
In: Peripherie: Politik, Ökonomie, Kultur, Band 11, Heft 43-44, S. 21-30
ISSN: 0173-184X
After a critical review of Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" (The National Interest, 1989, 16, summer), Arnold Gehlen's "Die Rolle des Lebensstandards in der heutigen Gesellschaft" ([The Role of Living Standards in Contemporary Society] in Gesamtausgabe [Collected Works], Frankfurt/Main, 1989), & Jean Baudrillard's Das Jahr 2000 findet nicht statt ([The Year 2000 Will Not Take Place] Berlin, 1990), attention is focused on the new school of thought called the "end of history." The new theory has some merit in view of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe; however, the ambivalence between the belated construction of a civil society & the spread of welfare-privatism cannot be repeated in Asia or the Third World. The 1991 Gulf war shows that the resentments founded in the objective poverty of the Third World will keep history alive there in spite of claims about the end of history. Adapted from the source document.