Book Review: The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Hochuli,George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe

The world system is in flux. Protests across the political spectrum continue unabated, and populists of various stripes have emerged to answer the rage of the masses. Despite this, many remain unsatisfied with the siren songs of populists, who repeatedly crash our collective boat ashore the blunt rocks of a deteriorating world system. What are the determinants behind the rise of these protests and populist leaders, and how do they relate to other political trends, such as technocratic liberalism and jingoistic nationalism? Enter Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe’s timely book, The End of the End of History.

Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe (henceforth HHC) provide a roadmap to help us understand how the current political situation emerged, how it is going, and where it might go in the years ahead. As the book title suggests, HHC believe it is time to revisit Francis Fukuyama’s (1989) proclamation that we approached the ‘end of history’, with the hitherto great ideo-political struggles of history receding in a post-Cold War era. They argue that we are living through world-historical critical juncture, where renewed struggles over ideology and politics may give us a chance to restart our historical motor, moving toward an exciting or scary new world order.

The key argument of Hochuli et al. (2021) can be summarized as follows: ‘History ended in 1989. In 2008, the economic order was shaken. The political reckoning arrived in 2016. By 2020, the End of History was over’ (p. 6). This claim is back up with a compelling argument that traces political events across the United States and Europe, and occasionally Latin America. By the early 2000s, Hochuli et al. (2021) identify political protest and its corresponding cultural moment as carnivalesque, where ‘protest and dance both provided little more than a release valve’ (p. 9). People would take to the streets, shake their fist at ‘the system’, have fleeting moments of faux-resistance euphoria, and quickly reintegrate into the mainstream milieu of the era—that of ‘consumerism and nihilism’ (p. 9).

These events were all embedded within an era of post-politics, ‘a form of government that tries to foreclose political contestation by emphasizing consensus, eradicating ideology and ruling through managerial technocracy’ (Hochuli et al., 2021: 45). Mass engagement in politics by the working class was foreclosed during the end of history era—circa 1989–2015—and the ‘management of society’ by neoliberal technocrats lead to the depoliticizing of politics itself. The political spectrum narrowed to scarcely allow for new visions of social organization, and voting once every 4 years was seen as the epitome of formal political participation. HHC’s build from the insights of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher (2009), who dubbed this the era of capitalist realism, where we could no longer conceptualize what an anti-capitalist post-Cold War world might look like.

After 25 years of post-political governance in the core of the world system, HHC locate 2016 as a key break, signaling the end of the end of history. Offering us a clear illustration on the historical unfolding of these events, Hochuli et al. (2021) argue, ‘post-politics breeds an angry reaction: the institutions of formal politics come to be rejected by citizens. At the End of the End of History, anti-politics becomes the predominant force’ (p. 57). Thus, we see the rejection of post-politics by the masses, and occasionally a wholesale rejection of politics itself. HHC analyze Right and Left populists and their varied attempts to break the cycle of neoliberal technocracy in the post-2016 era, from Trump (the United States) and Bolsonaro (Brazil), to Corbyn (Britain) and Sanders (the United States). Crucially, this populism often hinges on ‘anti-corruption’ and vague moralist discourse which, as Hochuli et al. (2021) document, ‘have borne no fruit [for the Left], and in some cases, such as Brazil, has led to disaster’ (p. 90).

With Left and Right populists emerging to engage with infuriated masses through anti-politics, the neoliberal ideological, political, and economic program that ordered the prior several decades was in shambles. Here, HHC offer a wonderfully pithy heuristic to understand this trend, which they call ‘neoliberal order breakdown syndrome’—NOBS, for short. This theory is not only descriptive of the present moment, but offers researchers a scaffolding for conducting future research on the crumbling technocratic neoliberal order. NOBS has three key pillars (Hochuli et al., 2021: 73), all of which afflict the liberal establishment:

One could easily think of ways to apply NOBS theory to analyze key political events in the world system. For scholars studying the United States, the following come to mind: (1) The neoliberal Democratic party’s inability to accept the legitimacy of key popular demands such as universal healthcare, a job guarantee program, or a socially just program to address the climate catastrophe; (2) nostalgia for the recent past on both sides of the political order, witnessed with the ongoing rehabilitation of George Bush as a ‘compassionate painter’, or the Obama-era nostalgia that took off during the Trump presidency; (3) the seemingly bi-partisan consensus to attack Joe Biden for withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan, where claims of morality are invoked to stay in Afghanistan, despite there being widespread support among the public for troop withdrawal, and a 20-year legacy of destruction wrought upon the region by the US military (Mueller, 2021).

This leads me to comment on the broader scope of HHC’s book. As they point out, their diagnosis of the crumbling world order ‘isn’t an exhaustive account of global politics today’ (Hochuli et al., 2021: 14). Their book generally covers regions in the core to semi-periphery of the world system, including the United States, Britain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain (see Mahutga and Smith, 2011). It would be interesting to explore the potential impact of NOBS in the periphery of the world system, and how this may be relationally tied to changes coming from the core. For example, how might NOBS in the core manifest in the domain of foreign policy toward the periphery, as it relates to propping up regimes that allow for easy core capital penetration? Furthermore, how do anti-systemic movements and political actors in the periphery make sense of the breaking-down world order, and map their path forward? Might it lead to renewed collective efforts and transnational collaboration, or attempts to ‘delink’ from the system?

Another key observation within this book is its outline of the current limitations of Left-political strategizing, which generally views the working class as an object of politics to be herded into an allegedly benevolent social-democratic platform. What is missing is the belief that the working class can be viewed ‘as the subject of politics, with the goal of working-class self-government held as the defining aim of politics and class struggle’ (Hochuli et al., 2021: 138). This is a critical observation, and speaks to the larger and ongoing inability of the Left to engage in cognitive mapping. Cognitive mapping is the ability for people to understand their location within the larger web of global capitalism, the prospects for anti-systemic change, and how to envision and strategize a path forward (Jameson, 1988; Mueller and McCollum, 2021). In other words, it not only helps you understand where you are, but how you might get to where you want to end up.

HHC not only engage in their own style of cognitive mapping, but offer the public useful tools to do so themselves. Chapter 8, titled ‘ideologies of the near future’, maps three plausible routes that may unfold in the coming decade. It highlights the continually marginal role that Left politics plays in offering a real ideo-political alternative to world-systemic capitalism, and provokes us by declaring: ‘the mainstream Right will innovate, while the Left will stagnate’ (Hochuli et al., 2021: 141). However, rather than ending on such a somber note, HHC highlight that the recent vanquishing of Left horizontalism and populism does not guarantee there to be no chance for a socially just future. They conclude by stating ‘now that the older models have failed, perhaps there is an opening’ for something fresh to emerge (Hochuli et al., 2021: 154).

The End of the End of History makes a valuable contribution to debates on politics, populism, and social change. It not only offers a way to understand and theorize the present, but a way to map a path forward, as we collectively deal with the breakdown of the neoliberal world system.