The End of History and the Last Man

“Despite the changing vocabulary that has been used to describe the phenomenon of thymos or the desire for recognition, it should be very clear that this “third part” of the soul has been a central concern of the philosophical tradition that stretches from Plato to Nietzsche. It suggests a very different way of reading the historical process, not as the story of the unfolding of modern natural science or of the logic of economic development, but rather as the emergence, growth, and eventual decline of megalothymia. Indeed, the modern economic world could only emerge after desire had been liberated, so to speak, at the expense of thymos. The historical process that begins with the master’s bloody battle ends in some sense with the modern bourgeois inhabitant of contemporary liberal democracies, who pursues material gain rather than glory,” p. 189

-Francis Fukuyama

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