If ever a writer was the victim of his own success, it is Francis Fukuyama. In 1989, with Soviet power on the retreat in Eastern Europe and democratic activists filling Tiananmen Square, Mr. Fukuyama published an essay in The National Interest titled “The End of History?” In it, he proposed that the collapse of communism had left liberal democracy as the only viable form of government in the world. If History, with a philosophical capital H, was the story of mankind’s progress towards a final state of freedom and happiness, then that progress was finished. All that remained was for the rest of the world to catch up to the end-point the West had happily reached. Three years later, when Mr. Fukuyama expanded his essay into a book, the tentative question mark was dropped: now he wrote of “The End of History and the Last Man.” There is “a coherent and directional History of mankind,” he insisted, “that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy.”

Talk about giving hostages to fortune. In the two decades since Mr. Fukuyama announced the end of history, he has been declared wrong countless times. Every time a war, a revolution, or a massacre demonstrated that history was still going on — that the world was not headed in the “right” direction — some headline-writer somewhere would rebuke Mr. Fukuyama by announcing “the end of the end of history.” The Zapatista revolt in Chiapas, Mexico; the anti-globalization movement; above all, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 — all have been said to mark “the end of the end of history.”

Most recently, the Russian invasion of Georgia has been used to rebut Mr. Fukuyama’s optimistic thesis. To observers who saw Vladimir Putin’s act of aggression as a revival of the Cold War, or a dictatorship’s attack on a budding democracy, or simply a demonstration of atavistic nationalism, the Russian invasion offered proof positive that history was not over.

Recently, however, Mr. Fukuyama took to the editorial page of the Washington Post to defend his trademark theory. Despite appearances to the contrary — despite the authoritarian Mr. Putin in Russia, and the theocrat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, and the communist-populist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela — Mr. Fukuyama insisted that “while bullies can still throw their weight around, democracy and capitalism still have no real competitors.”

If we take Mr. Fukuyama on his own terms, he is entirely right to claim that his “end of history” thesis has not been refuted by history. When pundits point out that, after all, things keep happening — even great, terrible, world-changing things — they are saying nothing that Mr. Fukuyama himself did not know when he first proposed his theory. Reading “The End of History” today, in fact, it is remarkable how many of our current challenges Mr. Fukuyama predicted 16 years ago.

He warned that “in parts of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, we are likely to see Marxist-Leninists replaced by a variety of dictators, nationalists, and colonels” — like Mr. Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. He described “fundamentalist Islam” as a “totalistic religion” that tries to “regulate every aspect of human life, both public and private, including the realm of politics” — as with Mr. Ahmadinejad or Osama bin Laden. He even recognized, long before September 11, that “Islamic fundamentalism bears a more than superficial resemblance to European fascism.”

Mr. Fukuyama knows full well, in other words, that ours is still a world teeming with threats to liberal democracy, in which billions of people still live in fear and want, and nourish dreams of hate and violence. Yet he still insists that we have reached the end of history. To make sense of this apparent contradiction, you have to look closely at what he means when he says that freedom has “no real competitors.”

Real, for Mr. Fukuyama, means the opposite of what it means in everyday language. Nothing could be more real, in the practical sense, than Russia’s tanks: they are real enough to cause thousands of deaths. But to Mr. Fukuyama, writing out of the Hegelian tradition, “real” actually means something more like “ideal”: a nation or government can only have a real existence if it has an idea behind it. More, that idea has to be compatible with humanity’s current stage of historical development. Because Mr. Putin’s authoritarianism, or what passes for communism in today’s China, are not as “up-to-date” as democracy — because they exist in fact without being validated in theory — they are not “real” challenges. As Mr. Fukuyama says in his recent op-ed, they do not present “a serious challenge to the United States’ animating — and winning — ideas.”

The way to argue against Mr. Fukuyama, then, is not to point to current events, but to point out the moral and philosophical dangers of his definition of “reality.” To read him, you would never know that the greatest political thinkers of the postwar era, like Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, devoted themselves to attacking the dangerous idea that only what is “progressive” and “up-to-date” is really real. This way of thinking, invented by Hegel and popularized by Marx, is what allowed the totalitarians of the 20th century to annihilate millions of lives, on the grounds that such lives did not “really” matter, or even exist, on the scale of History. That is why postwar thinkers — and poets and novelists, too — have tried to remind us of the uniqueness of every life, the way each birth represents a wholly new beginning for humanity.

Mr. Fukuyama is a defender of liberal democracy, but his method of thinking and arguing is a throwback to a dangerous Hegelian mindset. You can see this when he writes, in “The End of History,” that “the Universal Historian must be ready to discard even entire peoples and times as essentially pre- or non-historical, because they do not bear on the central ‘plot’ of his or her story.” His response to current world crises is the same: we should intellectually “discard” current challenges to democracy because they are “essentially non-historical.” The problem, as the 20th century should have taught us, is that once you start to discard people intellectually, the temptation arises to discard them literally. Only a liberalism that recognizes the sacredness of each individual life is worthy of the name.

akirsch@nysun.com