Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?

German historian Niethammer's erudite critique demolishes the notion that we are nearing the ``end of history,'' a theme popularized by such writers as Francis Fukayama and Jean Baudrillard. Beginning with Oswald Spengler's 1918-1922 Decline of the West, Niethammer tracks ``end of history'' echoes in French technocratic philosopher Antone Cournot, Nietzschean novelist Ernst Junger, psychoanalytic apostle Norman O. Brown, ecotopian Jeremy Rifkin and others. The author shows how, in the early 1950s, German philosopher Arnold Gehlen, apologist for Hitler's Third Reich, promulgated the idea that history was winding down, and how, before his death in 1968, Alexandre Kojeve, a Russian leftist exile in Germany, proclaimed the Japanization of the West as the way to avoid a slide into posthistory. The resoluteness of German thinker Walter Benjamin, who upheld the power of people to make and transform history, contrasts with the fatalism of ``posthistorians.'' Their vision of a future devoid of meaning or struggle, in Niethammer's analysis, represents a pessimistic inversion of the optimism of progress. (Jan.)