If History has Ended Where to from Here? - the challenge of exercising moral choice in free markets

AAPAE Conference October 1996

Goethe said “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth”, and as we near the end of the second millennium since the coming of Christ it would seem an appropriate time to look at where we are, where we are heading and, most importantly, are there other alternatives?

Over the course of this century we have seen dramatic and rapid changes in the way our society has structured itself. Indeed there are still people alive today who’s lives have encompassed the rise and fall of communism in eastern Europe, the rise and fall of fascism in Germany, and an extended bipolarisation of the world caused by a cold war standoff between two great global powers.

Now, as we stand at the brink of a new era, some have proposed that there is an end in sight, that history can be understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process. Francis Fukuyama, in his book¹ ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, calls on Marx and Hegel to support the idea that the evolution of human societi…