Excerpts from The End of History and the Last Man :
The problem of Christianity, however, is that it remains just another slave ideology, that is, it is untrue in certain crucial respects. Christianity posits the realization of human freedom not here on earth but only in the Kingdom of Heaven. Christianity, in other words, had the right concept of freedom, but ended up reconciling real-world slaves to their lack of freedom by telling them not to expect liberation in this life. According to Hegel, the Christian did not realize that God did not create man, but rather that man had created God. He created God as a kind of projection of the idea of freedom, for in the Christian God we see a being who is the perfect master of himself and of nature. But the Christian then proceeded to enslave himself to this God that he himself created. he reconciled himself to a life of slavery on earth in the belief that he would be redeemed later by God, when in fact he could be his own redeemer. Christianity was thus a form of alienation, that is, a new form of slavery where man enslaved himself to something that he himself created, thereby becoming divided against himself. [p.197]
Cultures are not static phenomena like the laws of nature; they are human creations that undergo a continuous process of evolution. They can be modified by economic development, wars and other national traumas, immigration or by conscious choice. Hence, cultural "prerequisites" for democracy, while definitely important, need to be treated with some skepticism. [p.222]
...Joseph Schumpeter, who argued that democratic capitalist societies were markedly un-warlike and anti-imperialistic because they provided other outlets for the energies that formerly fanned wars:
The competitive system absorbs the full energies of most of the people at all economic levels. Constant applications, attention, and concentration of energy are the conditions of survival within it, primarily in the specifically economic professions, but also in other activities organized on their model. There is much less excess energy to be vented in war and conquest than in any precapitalist society. What excess energy there is flows largely into industry itself, accounts for its shining figures -- the type of the captain of industry -- and for the rest is applied to art, science, and the social struggle....A purely capitalist world therefore can offer not fertile soil to imperialist impulses.... [p.260]
Schumpeter -- and I believe Fukuyama himself -- did not foresee the ability of a small group of individuals to make war into an industry of the magnitude that would have shocked even Dwight D. Eisenhower in its influence.
...nations are not a permanent or "natural" sources of attachment for people throughout the ages. [p.270]
7. At this point, we might note a certain convergence between Hegel and Locke on the question of work. For Locke, as for Hegel, there was no positive natural end that was served by work. Men's natural needs were relatively few and easily satisfied; the Lockean man of property who accumulated unlimited amounts of gold and silver did not work for the sake of those needs, but was working to satisfy a constantly changing horizon of new needs. Man's labor was in that sense creative, for it involved the endless setting of newer and more ambitious tasks....Work and the unlimited accumulation of property were undertaken as a means of escaping from the terror of death. The fear of death remained a negative pole away from which all human labor sought to move. Even if a rich man had far more than his natural needs demanded, his obsessive accumulation of wealth was driven in the end by the desire to hedge against bad times and the possible return of poverty that was his natural condition. [Notes, p.372and373]
