Revisiting Fukuyama: The End of History, the Clash of Civilizations, and the Age of Empire

This thesis is devoted to reassessing Fukuyama's End of History, first by correcting some common misconceptions about it, and second by reinventing it through synthesis with Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and Hardt and Negri's Empire. The first objective of this thesis is to unearth as many relevant nuances, qualifications, clarifications, and modifications the authors attach to their paradigms as possible; and to organize these findings clearly enough to articulate the internal logic of the paradigms-to iron out the conceptual wrinkles into a smooth surface. The second objective is to apply those basic findings to accommodate creative syntheses between the paradigms-which will be called the "End of the Clash of Civilizations," the "Beginning of Alter-History," and the "End of Civil Society"-and thereby to distill the oft-unnoticed versatility of Fukuyama's philosophy of history, in adapting to and absorbing Huntington's and Hardt and Negri's paradigms.