The End of History and the Last Man in the context of "The Clash of Civilizations"

The Clash of Civilizations is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world. The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. It was proposed in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled The Clash of Civilizations?, in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

The phrase itself was earlier used by Albert Camus in 1946, by Girilal Jain in his analysis of the Ayodhya dispute in 1988, by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled The Roots of Muslim Rage and by Mahdi El Mandjra in his book La première guerre civilisationnelle published in 1992. Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews: Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations. This expression derives from clash of cultures, already used during the colonial period and the Belle Époque.

Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (/ˌfuːkuːˈjɑːmə/; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and international relations scholar, best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which the British newspaper The Sunday Times described as one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

In that work, he argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and Western free-market capitalism, as well as the Western lifestyle may represent the final step in humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle, alongside becoming the final form of human government, an assessment meeting with numerous and substantial criticisms.

The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. A variety of authors have argued that a particular system is the "end of history" including Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexandre Kojève, and Francis Fukuyama in the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.