Harvey Mansfield:

It is a pleasure to comment again on Fukuyama's remarkable article of ten years ago. I continue to think "The End of History" to be an overinterpretation of the fall of communism, but I also still wonder at the ingenuity and breadth of the author. Fukuyama, with his knowledge of philosophy, easily surpasses the political science theorists who possess nothing but second-hand Kant, or misread snippets from Thucydides, and whose constructions remind one of an immense suburban development of small houses, all built to be at once the same and different. He also seems to have read The Economist for the past several centuries, and remembered it. The best I can do, by contrast, is to speak from above the facts and arguments he marshals.

As Fukuyama says, his article and book on the end of history have been relentlessly criticized, but he is too modest to add that they have been universally read. The reason they cannot be ignored or dismissed is that they embody our hopes as well as our doubts, both of which Fukuyama has brilliantly expressed. The "end of history" makes sense of our belief in progress because progress, if it goes toward a better life, must have an end in perfect life. A society that is perfectible must have a perfection. Without an end to history we could never know whether history was going forward, as we believe, or going backward.

Yet an end of history also makes us uncomfortable. It leaves us with nothing interesting to do. Moreover, the path of progress was to have been a way around any set definition of the perfect life, any metaphysical or religious summum bonum. To acknowledge a perfect life at the end of history seems to reinstate the authorities claiming to know that life from which modernity wished to liberate us. When Francis Bacon said that the end of modern science was the "relief of man's estate", he did not tell us what man's estate was. But now, when science does so much for man, we need to know what man is, so that we can tell whether his estate has been relieved or aggravated. It does not matter that we did not start with a notion of the perfect life. We need one now as we approach the destination.

Fukuyama seems to me quite equivocal about the perfection of human life at the end of history. On the one hand he says that the perfect life, with its two elements of economics and esteem--the perfection of the body and the perfection of the soul--has been achieved in liberal democracy. (I exaggerate his words but not his claims.) The fall of communism confirms this truth and events since 1989 do not bring it into doubt. But on the other, he agrees with Nietzsche that humanity is close upon the Last Man--meaning not the best but the disappearance of the best. In this view the idea of progress has led us to disaster. Instead of attaining the perfect life we have lost sight of it.

Fukuyama concentrates his doubts on new developments in biotechnology, particularly on two new drugs, Ritalin and Prozac, illustrating the scary character of modern science. Such drugs may seem capable of creating a "new type of human being." But in fact they simply help to constitute the Last Man, whose definition has been available at least since the early writings of Marx. Ritalin tempers the high spirits of boys, and Prozac raises the low spirits of women. The result is that we will no longer be troubled by psychic sexual differences and all will be equally capable of the same equanimity. Anyway, why would we want to be troubled if, life being perfect, there is nothing to be troubled about?

Fukuyama can see that these drugs contribute to the belittlement, not the esteem, of man. Men are belittled when they do not feel joy or despair, even though, or precisely because, such sentiments are often mistaken or excessive. Nothing great is gained for us if nothing important can be lost. The modern project for reducing risk can be seen at work not only in economics but even in the element of esteem, where it moves us to equalize our chances and to smooth out life's ups and downs. Fukuyama rightly wonders whether, when you take such drugs or other soothing therapy, you are still yourself; or have you given your self away to keep it safe?

The situation gets worse if one were to push Fukuyama to decide whether esteem is really recognition in the Hegelian manner. Hegel conceived that recognition is equal because in recognizing what is other, one recognizes oneself. But if the other is always the alienated self, there is nothing in the universe except the self. Then what are we to say of a life devoted to finding the self that is always ready to abandon the self, that vacillates between desiring recognition and settling for prudent submission?
We know that the modern, well-adjusted self belittles man because we know from religions and philosophies wiser than Hegel that it cannot satisfy human nature. Men cannot be satisfied if there is nothing above them to admire and strive for. At the end of history we may decide to rob ourselves of our humanity, and indeed the most telling charge against American education today is that it gives our children nothing to look up to. But if we do that, it will have been our delusion and our fault.

Harvey Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard University.

E.O. Wilson:

In On Human Nature (1978) I also introduced the theme with which Professor Fukuyama closes his essay, and in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) developed it in some detail. I am pleased that a political scientist of Fukuyama's caliber has now arrived independently at the same perception.

But there are differences, and my overall conclusion is a great deal more conservative. In On Human Nature I recognized three successive dilemmas encountered during the growth of scientific materialism. The first dilemma is the sapping of religious and ideological authority, leaving no clear transcendent alternative. The second is the choice to be made among the elements of newly understood human nature--which to constrain and which to enhance. The third dilemma is the one that Professor Fukuyama now recognizes, the choices that will be imposed by volitional evolution of the genetic basis of human nature.

To address the question of volitional evolution, which is on the near horizon of technical capability, it is necessary to define human nature. Fukuyama goes partway when he speaks of the statistical preponderance of hereditary temperament and ability, which is open to genetic fine-tuning. But human nature as newly revealed by cognitive neuroscience and anthropology is something much deeper and more interesting.

In a nutshell, human nature is not the genes that prescribe it. Nor is it the cultural universals, such as incest taboos and rites of passage, which are its products. Rather, human nature is the epigenetic rules, the highly diverse inherited regularities of development in mental traits and their physiological modulators. These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make. In ways that are beginning to come into focus at the physiological and in a few cases even the genetic level, the epigenetic rules alter the way we see and linguistically classify color. They cause us to evaluate in idiosyncratically human ways the aesthetics of artistic design according to elementary abstract shapes and degree of complexity. They lead us differentially to acquire fears and phobias concerning dangers in the environment (as from snakes and heights), to communicate with certain facial expressions and forms of body language, to bond with infants, to bond conjugally, and so on across a wide range of categories in behavior and thought. Most epigenetic rules are evidently very ancient, dating back millions of years in mammalian ancestry. Others, like the stages of linguistic development in children, are uniquely human and probably only hundreds of thousands of years old. For immense periods of time, they have channeled cultural evolution.

An instructive example of an epigenetic rule is the Westermarck effect, which underlies the instinct to avoid incest. When two people live in close domestic proximity during the first thirty months in the life of either one, both are desensitized to later close sexual attraction and bonding. The Westermarck effect has been well documented in anthropological studies, although the genetic prescription and neurobiological mechanics underlying it remain to be studied. What makes the human evidence the more convincing is that all of the non-human primate species whose sexual behavior has been closely studied also display the Westermarck effect. The rule is thus not just human-specific but primate-specific, and it therefore appears probable that the trait prevailed in the human ancestral line millions of years before the origin of Homo sapiens, our present-day species.

Other examples of epigenetic rules I have cited most recently in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge illustrate the complexity and depth of human nature as now biologically defined. It may be, as Fukuyama suggests, that in the new world of liberal democracies, free global markets and universal communication, and with genomic technology at their disposal, people will proceed to alter the causal webwork between genes and culture. But red flags are already flying. Let me suggest the risks and provide what I perceive to be the main ethical argument for genetic conservatism.

As the era of volitional evolution approaches, geneticists will warn of fundamental properties in inheritance that greatly complicate the interaction of genes and the environment. One is polygenic inheritance, the control of a single trait by multiple genes at different chromosome sites. While it is true that mutations in one or a small set of master genes have large effects, many other genes have additive effects as well. Some of these effects are epistatic, not just adding to the contribution of others but altering their expression. And finally, there is the near universal occurrence of pleiotropy, the contribution of a single gene to more than one trait.

In sum, in heredity as in the environment, you cannot do just one thing. When a gene is changed by mutation or replaced by another gene, unexpected and possibly unpleasant side effects are likely to follow. Although a complete base pair sequencing and then gene mapping are expected to be completed within a decade, we are probably generations away from a complete genomics--the genetic maps plus all the molecular steps by which the code is read out in final phenotypic traits.

By the time the treacherous waters of possible genomic intervention and replacement are charted, I suspect a moral argument will keep Homo sapiens from traveling there except for gene therapy and minor enhancement. The epigenetic rules--human nature--are not just the algorithms by which individuals are assembled. They are the essence of humanity, the product of millions of years of adaptation to this unique, life-giving planet. They are all we have that separates us from carbon-based all-purpose computers, or transformation into jerrybuilt artifacts. It is one thing to evolve toward taller, brighter, more sociable beings; it is quite another to change or even lose our humanity. In my opinion, human beings will never choose to become posthuman. Professor Fukuyama got it right the first time.

E.O. Wilson is university research professor and honorary curator in entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.

Gertrude Himmelfarb:

I suffer from the professional deformation of the historian. Philosophers can see the eternal verities that transcend history. Political scientists can see the abstract processes that underlie history. Historians can only see history itself, the "epiphenomena" of history, it might be said pejoratively - the messy, unpredictable, contradictory, transitory, yet ineluctable facts of history.

Yet even historians can be seduced by grand theories. As a freshman in college, shortly after the beginning of the Second World War, I was privileged to hear a lecture by a distinguished historian, an expert on nationalism who happened to be a refugee from Germany. What we were witnessing, he assured us, was the last gasp of nationalism, an ideology in its death throes. That ideology was a vestige of nineteenth-century romanticism, which had barely survived the First World War and would surely come to an end in the Second, together with those other obsolete ideas, the nation-state and capitalism.

Shortly thereafter, another great historian, Fernand Braudel, found himself in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, and took the opportunity of his enforced leisure to write his monumental book on the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, a work designed to illustrate his theory of la longue duree - that history was shaped not by the interests, passions or ideas of men but by the "inanimate forces", the "deeper realities", of geography, demography and economy. The book, he later explained, was a "direct existential response to the tragic times" he was living through.

All those occurrences which poured in upon us from the radio and the newspapers of our enemies. . . . I had to outdistance, reject, deny them. Down with occurrences, especially vexing ones! I had to believe that history, destiny, was written at a much more profound level.

"Vexing occurrences" - Nazism, communism, the Second World War, the Holocaust!

Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" is in the grand tradition of these grand theorists of history. Revisiting that theory ten years later, he continues to "outdistance" himself from, if not quite to "reject" or "deny", such vexing occurrences as the bloody nationalism in the Balkans, the unregenerate fundamentalism in the Middle East, the economic and political immaturity of much of Africa, the precarious state of the Russian polity and economy, the threat of terrorism (including nuclear and chemical terrorism) on the part of rogue states or rebel factions. Nor is he troubled by dramatic occurrences of another order, the sexual revolution, for example, or the breakdown of the traditional family, both of which have taken place not in remote or backward parts of the world but in the most civilized and advanced parts.

All of these seem not to impinge on what Fukuyama sees as the deeper reality of history, its "fundamental directionality and progressive character." Propelled by two "motors" - the first driving history toward a modern, market-oriented society, the second toward the "struggle for recognition" culminating in the "equal dignity" and "universal rights" of all human beings - history inexorably moves toward its end, the universal establishment of liberal, capitalist democracy.

The grand perspective has one great advantage: it opens up large and dramatic vistas that may not be otherwise discernible. If Fukuyama is not deterred by the kind of evidence that gives pause to a pedestrian historian - if the resurgence of nationalism, fundamentalism and the rest appear to him as mere blips on the screen of history, momentary lapses or regressions to an earlier stage of civilization - he is impressed by other events that clearly take us well into the future. Thus he faults himself for not having anticipated the effects of the extraordinary technological and scientific discoveries of the past few years, discoveries that, as he recognizes, may make liberal democracy itself irrelevant or obsolete. And here he provides not only an important corrective to his original thesis but also a valuable analysis in its own right.

The biotechnological revolution, Fukuyama says, is a revolution of unprecedented character, not the kind of incremental accretion of knowledge that conquers disease or provides us with the amenities of life, but one that is qualitatively different from anything we have ever experienced. Like the technological revolution, it is difficult to resist or control, in part because it acquires a momentum of its own, but also because its immediate benefits may override any consideration of its ultimate potentialities. And those potentialities are awesome indeed. For genetic engineering presents us with nothing less than the specter, as Fukuyama says, of a "new type of human being." And this is a far more radical vision than Hegel's "end of history" or Nietzsche's Last Man. It is, indeed, nothing less than the "end of man", the transcendence of human nature (and of nature itself).

In the meantime, we are caught between the vise of the old and the new - an old human nature that has given us all the goods that Fukuyama properly associates with liberal democracy, but also those "irrationalities" and "primitive passions" that liberal democracy was supposed to have subdued (but so conspicuously did not); and a new human nature that transcends, for good and bad, not only liberal democracy but any recognizable polity, society or history.

Gertrude Himmelfarb is professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. Her book, One Nation, Two Cultures, will be published by Knopf later this year.

Robin Fox:

My comments will be confined to the use of the Hegel-Kojève theory of history by Fukuyama, and the contradictions and weaknesses entailed in its use.

As a way in, let me examine a major contradiction. In his original article, Fukuyama announced quite clearly that in the Hegelian view, man was "the product of his concrete historical and social environment" and this was deliberately opposed to "earlier natural right theorists" who would have man "a collection of more or less fixed 'natural' attributes." It was, in other words, essential to the Hegelian view that "human nature" was malleable and changed as the successive eras changed. However, in this retrospective Fukuyama argues that the Hegelian theory must be "underpinned by reference to human nature"--indeed by a "fixed natural attribute" which is the Platonic thymos, the "struggle of the soul for recognition." In other words, people by their very natures crave status and recognition and this must be recognized along with the socio-economic and science arguments if we are to understand why history must end in universal liberal democracy. This is eating one's intellectual cake and having it: if we are to produce liberal democrats then "human nature" must be infinitely variable and a product of dialectically engineered historical contingencies; but we cannot have this result without human nature having a fixed element of thymos. This obviously opens up a Pandora's box of possibilities for equally determinative "natural attributes."

"Earlier natural right theorists" posited "fixed 'natural' attributes" existing, usually, in a "state of nature." But this state of nature was not an actual description of man before civilization (even Rousseau's "savages" were largely creatures of his imagination); it was a description of fixed natural attributes that suited the theory (usually a social contract theory) of the philosopher in question. This has been the case from Hobbes to Rawls: from the "war of all against all" to the "original position." Hegel claimed his share of the state of nature with his thymos and the antics of the "first man", another retroactive figure drawn from the logical requirements of his theory, not from natural history. The status struggles of the first man supposedly produced the "master-slave" relationship. But as we shall see, this came incredibly late in human history--almost yesterday.

Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel were pre-Darwinian and pre-scientific. They did not know the time scale on which man was operating. They thought five thousand years a huge expanse of time and could not have even contemplated the necessary five million. Rawls, Fukuyama and other contemporary thinkers do not have that excuse. We do not have to theorize about "first men" or the "state of nature" any more. We can locate them in time and place, and with the help of archaeology, ethnography, paleontology, ethology and genetics, we can establish some of their main socio-behavioral characteristics. Any theory about our contemporary situation that only evokes one attribute, however important thymos may be, is seriously neglecting the long list of "natural attributes" that we can now establish. And even the "struggle for status"--as Fukuyama recognizes, but only in passing--is not exclusively human: our nearest relatives the chimpanzees have it. In fact all sexually reproducing organisms that indulge in mating competition have it, and a lot else. Man inherited this baggage and put his own twist on it during what Fukuyama recognizes as the "Era of Evolutionary Adaptation." (He means the "Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation" or EEA--the period during which the defining characteristics of a species evolve: for man the late Pleistocene or Upper Paleolithic.)

This brings us to the weakness of the theory, and indeed to all "philosophies of history." Fukuyama only recognizes one "correct" criticism, which is that he did not allow for seismic changes in science. In effect this is a special case of Popper's general refutation of all historicism: that one cannot predict changes in the conditions of change. But there is another weakness that I pointed out in the pages of this journal in direct criticism of Fukuyama (Winter 1992/93). I shall repeat the essence of it here: The fatal error of all concepts of "history" so far is that they take their definitions of the time period of "history" entirely for granted, and treat these arbitrary periods as wholly self-contained.

Fukuyama, for example, occasionally wonders if periods of history might simply be "blips" on the total scale. But what if the period he and others arbitrarily call "history" is itself merely a blip on the scale of "man's historical and social environment"? For that environment is not the five thousand years of the historian and the philosopher, but stretches back at least three and a half million years (to the first tools), and possibly up to five million or more and our break with the chimpanzees. To ignore this huge stretch of human history ("evolution" is simply history over long stretches of time when significant genetic changes occur) and to give privileged treatment to a mere few thousand years of good weather in a particularly warm interglacial, is to make an arbitrary cut-off as to where "history" begins--as well as to where it ends. For even if liberal democracy is indeed some kind of terminal point of this brief period, evolution will not come to a halt.

"History" in other words must be treated as problematic. It cannot just be assumed. Any accounting of the "inevitable" unfolding of history has to include all of what is now contemptuously dismissed as "pre-history" by the historians and philosophers. And in this perspective the whole of "recorded history" is indeed itself less than a blip, and the "triumph of liberal democracy" less than a flicker. The "fixed natural attributes" move to center stage, and even discussions of monumental scientific changes such as Fukuyama envisages will have to take place in their context, for it is with them that we are tinkering, and we should figure out what we are tinkering with before we again succumb to the hubris of thinking we can do anything.

The detailed implications obviously cannot be spelled out here. They are out there in my and other people's work that assumes the evolutionary context. But unless the utterly myopic social sciences, including history, take the whole human period into account, we shall never know whether "history" as they see it is anything more than a series of aberrations--including liberal democracy--that characterizes the brief and unusual interglacial in which we are trapped and which must soon (in geological time) come to its end.

Robin Fox is University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers University. Two of his books that bear most directly on these issues are The Red Lamp of Incest: A Study of the Origins of Mind and Society (1980) and The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality (1989). 

Robert J. Samuelson:

History is not an exam question. It's chaotic, contradictory and immensely complicated. Even in retrospect, it's often unfathomable. As for the future, finding a framework is - in my view virtually impossible. Francis Fukuyama's original essay and the ten-year retrospective dispute this. In many ways, these essays are dazzling. But because they attempt the impossible, I do not find them very useful as a guide to the future or a roadmap for policy.

There is, of course, a real void to be filled. For more than four decades, the Cold War imposed a framework on American thinking, providing us both with a threat and moral purpose. The post-Cold War quest has been to discover some similar formula to fuse national interests and ideals. In this sense, Fukuyama's original thesis aimed to fill the void. For all its apparent originality, it followed recent American tradition as exemplified by, say, the Marshall Plan and Henry Luce's essay "The American Century." Americans have always hoped that material prosperity would be a liberating and democratizing influence.

Fukuyama's new twist was to argue that what we wanted to happen had acquired a large element of inevitability. Peoples and societies whose histories and cultures were hostile to market economies and liberal politics had suddenly become converts - or were showing signs of becoming so. The implication for policy (it seemed) was that we should use our immense economic and political power to hasten the process. And this has been, I think, a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy for much of the past decade. We have promoted freer markets and faster global economic growth through more trade and international investment on the theory that this would advance both our interests and ideals. For his part, Fukuyama glimpsed - again, in his original essay - a future in which historically dissimilar societies would, through the triumph of market economics and liberal politics, have more and more in common. As a result, the world would grow more peaceful and stable. Indeed, it might be bland and boring. Where are we? Well, a decade is not very long. Perhaps a century from now Fukuyama's essay will be seen as brilliantly prophetic. The world will be bland and boring. I hope so. But I doubt it. One obvious problem with his theory is whether Fukuyama's world is stable on its own terms. The answer may be "no." What we call a "market" is simply an arena in which buyers and sellers, savers and investors, can engage in routine transactions. When these occur mainly within one society, market transactions flourish on a foundation of common laws, culture, language and customs. The more these transactions occur across borders - "globalization", a term that is virtually absent in the original essay but dominates the second - the more the foundation must be constructed.

The simplest explanation of the "Asian economic crisis" is that lenders and investors (mainly from the United States, Europe and Japan) on the one hand, and the recipients of loans and investments (mainly from "emerging" market countries) on the other, operated on different assumptions and goals - and misunderstood and exploited each other. As Fukuyama points out, there are formidable obstacles to the development of open markets within traditional societies. The same is true of cross-border markets. The possibilities for miscommunication and miscalculation are greater than within national markets, and they may be unmediated by governmental institutions. In the United States, we have the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (deposit insurance), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (securities disclosure and trading regulations), to name a few. There are no international institutions with comparable power to oversee global markets.

Some free-market advocates regard this as an advantage, noting - correctly - that regulatory agencies routinely blunder and are often "captured" by the "special interests" they are supposed to regulate. But on balance - at least in the United States - the benefits of these agencies have outweighed the costs. They often help create market rules, establish political legitimacy and compensate for crises (particularly true of the Federal Reserve in financial crises). The international economic institutions we have - most prominently, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization - have performed fairly well, but their future is hardly certain. They face three obvious problems:

1) If global markets expand, the power and responsibilities of these agencies may also need to expand - that is, they may have to wrest more power from national governments in setting rules for commerce, overseeing financial markets and intervening during crises. But there may be no consensus about precisely what should be done or whether it should be allowed.

2) Until now, these agencies - particularly the IMG and World Bank - have functioned in a fairly undemocratic way, with most power vested in unelected bureaucrats and the representatives of a few big countries (mainly, the United States). These arrangements could break down as more countries (particularly China, India and, possibly, Russia) become fully engaged with the world economy.

3) Countries accepted the authority of these institutions on the assumption that the global economy would grow rapidly - that benefits would ultimately outweigh the costs. But suppose that today's slow global economic growth were to be a harbinger of the future? What happens then?

In short, the global marketplace may be less benign than Fukuyama supposes. Technology also threatens its stability. Fukuyama depicts technology mainly as a force for good, lifting living standards and creating the economic and social conditions for a liberal political order. But modern technological societies are interconnected in ever more intricate ways that create mutual vulnerabilities. We may be exposed to cyber attacks, terrorism or simple breakdowns in other countries' computer systems. Large countries have, until now, enjoyed some protection by their sheer size. But spreading technology (including lower costs of acquiring weapons of mass destruction) may make global conflict more democratic.

These issues - and many more, including the durability of historic ethnic and cultural conflicts - raise doubts that history will end in blandness and boredom. The main drama, if we are to believe Fukuyama, will be whether the liberal democratic state triumphs. But the main story may lie somewhere else entirely. Here is one possibility: Fukuyama assumes that democratic societies will, on the whole, be stable. Perhaps they will. But they may also face internal pressures that alter the way they operate or even threaten their existence. For example, most European countries, Japan and the United States face rapidly aging populations that will compel them to reduce welfare benefits sharply for their elderly or face the prospect of much higher taxes or budget deficits - developments that could endanger their economies. How will societies cope with these stresses?

I can't predict; neither can Fukuyama. He seems to recognize the futility of his original exercise and, in this retrospective, acts like a man searching for some ingenious way to acknowledge its futility without agreeing with his critics or completely repudiating his original argument. How else to explain his excursion into science and biotechnology? It's fascinating, but it seems thoroughly disconnected from the rest of the argument. And that, of course, is the point. He contends that the future of science is indeterminate and that "History cannot come to an end as long as modern natural science has no end." True enough, though a lot of other things are equally indeterminate. But if it's good enough for Fukuyama, it's good enough for me.

Robert J. Samuelson is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group and Newsweek. He is author of The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945-1995 (Vintage Books, 1995).

Joseph S. Nye:

As someone who always found Hegel (not to mention Kojeve) impenetrable, I will leave others to judge the adequacy of Fukuyama's version of history in its Hegelian-Marxist sense of the progressive evolution of human institutions, as well as his speculations about biotechnology changing human nature. Instead, I will focus on his views of how economic modernization and technological change - particularly the information revolution - are transforming international politics.

Despite some worries in 1998, Fukuyama's ideas still look viable a decade later. There is no longer one single competitor to liberal capitalism as an overarching ideology. The major response and competitor to liberal capitalism is a diverse set of subnational, national and transnational identities loosely labeled "nationalism." Globalization and the information revolution are changing the environment of the interstate system, with both transnational integration and subnational fragmentation occurring simultaneously. Fukuyama's bet is that the integrative and democratizing forces will prevail in the race.

Other things being equal, he is probably right. The decentralizing effects of the internet will probably reinforce the trends he describes. Not all democracies are leaders in the information revolution, but many are. This is no accident. Their societies are familiar with the free exchange of information, and their systems of governance are not threatened by it. They can shape information because they can also take it. Authoritarian states, typically among the laggards, have more trouble. Governments such as China's can still limit their citizens' access to the internet by controlling service providers and monitoring the relatively small number of users. Singapore has thus far been able to reconcile its political controls with an increasing role for the internet.

But as societies such as Singapore reach higher levels of development, where more citizens want fewer restrictions on access to the internet, they run the risk of losing the people who are their key resource for competing in the information economy. Thus Singapore is wrestling with the dilemma of reshaping its educational system to encourage the individual creativity that the information revolution will demand, while maintaining social controls over the flow of information.

Another reason why closed societies will become more costly is that it is risky for foreigners to invest funds in a country where key decisions are made in an opaque fashion. Transparency is becoming a key asset for countries seeking investments. The ability to hoard information, which once seemed so valuable to authoritarian states, undermines the credibility and transparency necessary to attract investment on globally competitive terms.

Geographical communities still matter most, but governments that want rapid development will have to give up some of the barriers to information flows that have protected officials from outside scrutiny. No longer will governments that want high levels of development be able to afford the luxury of keeping their financial and political situations a secret.

From a business standpoint, the information revolution has vastly increased the marketability and value of commercial information by reducing costs of transmission and the transaction costs of charging information users. As Adam Smith would have recognized, the value of information increases when the costs of transmitting it decline, just as the value of a good increases when transportation costs fall, increasing demand by giving its makers a larger market.

Politically, however, the most important shift has concerned free information. The ability to disseminate information increases the potential for persuasion in world politics. NGOs and states can more readily influence the beliefs of people in other jurisdictions. If one actor can persuade others to adopt similar values and agendas, that is soft power.

Free information and soft power can, if sufficiently persuasive, change perceptions of self-interest and thereby alter how hard power is used. If governments are to take advantage of the information revolution, they will have to establish reputations for credibility amid the white noise of the information revolution. Democracies will do better than authoritarian states, but at the price of increased confusion. Cheap flows of information have created an enormous increase of channels of contact across state borders. Democratic states are more easily penetrated, and political leaders will find it more difficult to maintain a coherent ordering of foreign policy issues.

Even though there is evidence to support these effects of the information revolution and globalization, it would be a mistake to believe that such effects are irreversible. Technology is only one factor in a complex set of social causes. We should also ask what conditions these trends depend upon, and what it would take to slow, derail or reverse them. For example, would a strong and prolonged economic downturn lead to demands for government response that would alter marketization and globalization? Would "grand terrorism" or the equivalent of a domestic Pearl Harbor lead to a demand for intrusive government, even at the cost of civil liberties? Would the increasing power of states such as China, India or a revived Russia - particularly if accompanied by an expansionist ideology - transform the international system so that the defense functions of government would return to the Cold War model? Could ecological trends such as global warming become so clear and alarming that the public would demand much stronger governmental action?

Such scenarios are worth exploring both as contingencies as well as counterfactual thought experiments to check our reasoning about the strength of the practical rather than the philosophical causes that underlie Fukuyama's argument. So far so good on his central trends, but long before biotechnology changes human nature something unexpected may break the bottle. For non-Hegelians, there is no end of surprises in history.

Joseph S. Nye is dean of The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.