In his hugely influential 1992 bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man , the political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously asserted that “history” as the German philosophers Hegel and Marx understood it—that is, the evolution of human societies—had come to its conclusion. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, although they might never be adopted in every country, represented the end point of millennia of ideological development and transformation. Fukuyama called the United