The Ends of History: Introduction

It has been more than twenty years since Francis Fukuyama announced, in The End of History and the Last Man, that the fall of Soviet communism meant that “History” had effectively come to a close. Fukuyama did not mean that history would cease to pass—whether in the form of births and deaths, changes in fashion or technology, or even momentous events like wars or revolutions. He simply meant that such particular events were of no consequence to the universal History that, in the era of neoliberalism, had reached its endpoint in determining that “liberal democracy and free markets constitute the best” way possible “of organizing human societies” (“Reflections” 29). Regions and peoples as yet beyond the pale of economic modernization might perhaps linger in this netherworld for quite some time. But their actions would have no impact on History.

This is not the place to detail the many challenges to Fukuyama’s thesis, from its Hegelian conceit of a single-directional History to its isolation of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy from racism, sexism, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, fascism, and, of course, socialism. Yet, all of these presumably finite historical currents emerged from the same crucible that gave us the secular and rationalist versions of market capitalism and liberal democracy that Fukuyama pinpoints as history’s end, and none of them appears to be exiting the world stage any time soon. Inequality becomes just another petit récit in Fukuyama’s account, even though its rise under neoliberalism coincides with such small-bore historical affairs as the rolling back of the welfare state, the deregulation of industry and finance, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This eternalization of neoliberal norms proffers postmodern thought in conservative form: in upholding a present whose future horizon is determined, it makes the past ever more irrelevant, inviting the end to historicity more than history per se. On the other hand, the end-of-history narrative has the potential to wax theistic, returning to its discursive origins in an eschatological end of days.¹

As Victorianists, readers of this special issue will know the challenge of teaching students inured to presentism, and readers will also know the satisfaction of reawakening a sense of why history might matter. As scholars, we often find opportunities to connect our research to a longer durée. Thus, the historian James Vernon has described the field from which this journal takes its name as the product of Cold War-era interest in a culture that “had provided a peaceful, democratic, and capitalist model of modernization” (273). And in a recent essay on Chartist poetry, Pamela K. Gilbert notes that the “end-of-days discourse that we now identify” with right-wing evangelicals “has its antecedents in the extremely progressive and liberal (and profoundly evangelical) discourses” of the nineteenth century, thus providing a link between “Romantic and Revolutionary Europe,” the Victorian era, and “the present” (39–40).

Notwithstanding such signs of a flourishing Victorianist historicity, the editors of this special issue on “The Ends of History”—note the departure from Fukuyama—sought to explore what “historicism” had come to mean to the present generation of scholars. For those who do not share the eschatological conviction of a single end or terminus of “History,” what are the ends or purposes of history—especially as critics seem to have wearied of the historicist vantage points of the 1980s and 1990s? As we noted in our call for papers, under the “New Historicism” literary scholars and historians occupied a relatively integrated conceptual space. More recently, however, literary scholars have turned to form, description, “surface reading,” and “distant reading” to combat a perceived overemphasis on historical context or ideological content. In so doing, some are inspired by the sociologist Bruno Latour, who has written copiously on the pitfalls of a “suspicious” mentality in publications including “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” While Latour’s work is foregrounded by literary critics such as Rita Felski and Heather Love, it has also greatly influenced social science and historical studies.² Our call thus asked contributors...