last-man

Fukuyama__ thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a __erminal beach_ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche__ most prescient pages are those in which he describes the __versaturation of an age with history_. __t leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself_, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, __nd subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism_, in which __osmopolitan fingering_, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche__ Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.