But What Does He Mean By History With A Capital 'h'? Fukuyama Subscribes To

But what does he mean by History with a capital 'H'? Fukuyama subscribes to an Enlightenment notion of history that posits history as a continuous evolution of human potential. This evolution is generated by the use of reason and our rational faculties. Certain political regimes display this use of reason in various forms. Tyranny is the subjection of public reason to human self-interest while liberal democracy offers us a glimpse of the highest possible embodiment of reason in political organization. In short, Fukuyama reasserts the controversial Enlightenment thesis about human progress. We will see later that this is an argument that sits uneasily with certain interpretations of globalization. For now, we need to ask what evidence Fukuyama musters to support his claim about progressive human development.
Overall the empirical evidence is very patchy. Fukuyama make several references to natural science, the quintessential model of progressive human understanding of the world (Fukuyama 1992: XV), but this argument remains an analogy or works by inference rather than working conceptually or analytically. By drawing a comparison between natural science and human social evolution, Fukuyama only gets so far. The crux of his conceptual work rests on the social theories of Marx and Hegel.
For Fukuyama, Hegel correctly identified the main motivator of human progress when he pointed to the ongoing struggle for recognition (Fukuyama 1992: 143-208). The highly abstract notion introduces a certain inevitability into the path of human development leading from lower forms of social organizations that comprise social and political hierarchies to higher forms of human association in which subjugation in any form is ideally eradicated. For Hegel, and likewise for Fukuyama, any human state of affairs that contains elements of inequality is necessarily contradictory in nature and lead to their own downfall. Since humans seek above all recognition for themselves, any form of hierarchy that enshrines notions of higher and lower worth of individuals deprives both those at the top of the hierarchy as well as those at the bottom of the opportunity to receive appropriate recognition for themselves. By subordinating others, the masters deprive themselves of the chance to receive recognition from another human beings; their notion of slaves as embodying less human value than themselves, rules them out as resource for recognition. The slaves are being denied recognition in any case.
The struggle for recognition therefore leads to a dilemma that can only be resolved if any types of hierarchical structure are removed and the equal worth of any human being is recognized. For Hegel, and Fukuyama adopts his argument, human societies therefore exhibit a natural drive towards the ideals of equality and social justice.