It is a great honor and pleasure for me to have Francis Fukuyama among us. Yesterday, I recalled that at the end of a seminar on Hegel, when I was a student at the University of Chile, I was convinced that it would be the last time that I would read Hegel. And I believe all my friends held the same thought. Hegel would be read, moreover, in relation to Marx; but the general feeling was that he was a very obscure philosopher and we made several jokes about it. For example, we chose a page from one of the works, we slipped it between another, and it was generally difficult to realize that the page belonged to work B and not to A. This year, at the start of my seminar at the university, a group of students formally requested that Hegel be included in the program of study because they consider him to be one of the most interesting political thinkers. Certainly, the principal agent of that great change in the reception of Hegel between the 70’s and 90’s has been Francis Fukuyama. He has made Hegel now hold a very important place in the interpretation of contemporary events. Here let me remind you of one of the central ideas of thought of Francis Fukuyama. He holds that there is a way to understand the future and that it is related to two significant facts. One of them –which is posed in the article "The end of history?"– is the evolution of natural sciences that leads sooner or later to free market economic system. The second element –which is developed in his book The end of history and the last man– is a certain "need for recognition" that leads to political participation and democracy. These two mobilizing forces converge in this actual stage, which represents, simultaneously, the final political form of the human kind characterized by the free market and political democracy. There may have been delays and very different ways of reaching that final stage but in the end, there is no other radical option but rather merely new responses within those institutions, meaning those of the free market and democracy. In a very succinct way, that is the basic argument of Francis Fukuyama. Starting from this general idea, many interesting subjects naturally arise. For example: how do you explain that an authoritarian regime can be inclined toward a capitalist economic position? What will happen with human values after the end of history? Will we be forced to accept some type of nihilist pragmatism? What will happen with regionalisms, nationalisms and war? Will there again be ideological conflicts? Undoubtedly, the Chilean experience is very interesting to Mr. Fukuyama since ideological conflicts have prevailed in our history, probably more than any other of Latin America. Our political parties have generally had an ideological content and the three presidents prior to the actual head of state, namely Eduardo Frei, Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet, in some way represented ideological trends that could have been relevant in any country in the world. Nowadays, on the other hand, we are living the situation of relative consensus that some might interpret as the end of history. I therefore leave you with Mr. Francis Fukuyama, who will talk for 30 minutes and then answer our questions and comments.
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