Laocoon. An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. With remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art

Indeed it was recently argued, in a controversial essay and book by conservative historian Francis Fukuyama, that the History that the Waverley Novels so indelibly and anxiously premised has come to an end. In a 1989 essay amplified in a 1991 book, The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama returned to the question whether there is a universal and directional human history leading toward Liberal Democracy, broadly conceived, and argued that there is, looking not only at contemporary South America and Eastern Europe but at the macropolitics of the last four hundred years, and working from contemporary versions of the definition of "human nature" found in classic philosophical literature. For Fukuyama, History bears, is bearing out, Liberal Democracy's claim to exercise in wholeness the Platonically conceived threefold nature of man-his Reason, his Desire, and his "Thymos," the latter a complex element of the spirit, which requires that the self stand forth, alone and/or in company with a community or a community's significant values, as most valuable, that it stand forth in worth-full identity, be recognized ...»