David Martin Jones and the End of the End of History
A little over a year ago, in April 2024, my long-time friend and writing collaborator David Martin Jones, died. David was a prophetic political scholar, commentator and essayist—arguably one of the most original minds in recent conservative thought, and paradoxically, one of its best-kept secrets. He belonged to no faction or fashion, but wherever you care to position him on the ideological map—right, dissident right, cautionary right (pick your prefix)—he was unmistakably ahead of his time.
In his obituary in the Spectator, D.L. Dusenbury aptly stated that David's insights placed him 'several disastrous decades ahead of most political commentators—and politicians—in the West'. Like many who see too far, too clearly, he paid the usual price: to be studiously ignored in his own time, not for being wrong, but for being right too early. Among his academic contemporaries, he was rarely embraced as a visionary. More often, he was regarded as a troubling presence—someone whose clarity unsettled the comfortable rhythms of collective delusion. In a culture that prefers polite error to inconvenient truth, his gift became a burden, and his brilliance, a kind of exile.
Undeterred and Unfashionably Right
While David was an intellectual force to be reckoned with, the chances are either that you've never heard of him or, if you have, vaguely perceive him as a peripheral figure on the sidelines of mainstream political commentary. It is likely, though, that you've come across the lexicon he helped shape. Terms like 'illiberal democracy', 'surveillance state', 'cyber-caliphate', 'death-cult' and 'franchising' (used to describe the decentralised expansion model of jihadist groups) carry his watermark. And then there was his vast array of laconic aphorisms: 'the culture of you can't say that' to skewer academic evasions; 'neurocracy' to describe the technocratic rule of Singapore; 'Costa Geriatrica' for North Wales; and Costa Bureaucratica' for the devolved government in Cardiff. His humour had the rare distinction of being both intelligent and entertaining—two qualities long since separated in academic writing, presumably on ethical grounds.
We'll return to the curious absence of recognition in due course, but David's significance lies not just in the breadth of his scholarship—which stretched from ancient classical political thought to Chinese history, Southeast Asian regionalism and Islamist terrorism to the slow-motion self-immolation of Western progressivism and the oddly moving saga of Welsh Chartists in Tasmania. He also wrote with undimmed enthusiasm on novels, films and football—because, after all, one must have priorities.
What unified this eclectic body of work—and why I believe David deserves to be counted among the foremost political minds of the early twenty-first century—was his unwavering critique of the so-called 'End of History'. From the early 1990s until his final days, he remained one of its most consistent, incisive and eloquent adversaries. He challenged the utopian delusion that liberal democracy had triumphed, that ideological conflict had dissolved into technocratic consensus, and that the future would consist of little more than policy tinkering and artisanal brunch.
David saw through this post-Cold War fairy tale—this late-modern spell cast over Western elites. With a scholarly precision, wit and foresight he systematically exposed the delusion of what we might call these last magicians of modernity, long before it became fashionable, or even safe, to do so. I can think of no one who pursued this critique with greater range, consistency, or force.
Making Realism Great Again
David began his scholarly life as an authority on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English political thought. He could expound on the heated debates of the Reformation, the English Civil War, and the shadowy manoeuvres of early modern statecraft. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Justus Lipsius—he knew them all. I once asked him which side he would have taken in the English Civil War. Without pause, he replied: the monarchy and the divine right of kings. This surprised me. I'd pegged him as a Parliamentarian, like myself (right but repulsive). But no. David saw himself as a Cavalier—a bon viveur: eloquent, droll, fond of wine, music, and the finer points of royalist absolutism. For him, the restoration of Charles II was not merely a return of a king but the revival of tradition, a return to sanity after the cold, puritanical regime of Cromwell.
In his own roguish way, David would, I'm sure, have seen Donald Trump's re-election as an American restoration: a reclaiming of what had been lost—namely, a sense of groundedness and the unsentimental recognition that politics is something of a rough beast. And in Trump's often humorous belligerence he would have discerned something authentic: rude but recognisably human. He would have seen it also as a blistering rebuke to the utopian daydreams that had drained Western power and purpose for over two decades—a reminder that politics is not group therapy, nor a TED Talk in a button-up shirt, where global problems are blathered into managerialese and a PowerPoint deck.
David didn't live to see Trump's return, but had he done so, I'm sure he would have regarded it as the final proof that the 'End of History' had, in fact, reached its proper conclusion. He would have embraced Trump's resurgence for what it symbolised: the unmistakable, thunderous return of political realism.
A Brief History of the End of History
The so-called End of History era was an ironically short-lived one in Western politics—beginning at the Cold War's curtain call and heralded most famously by Francis Fukuyama, first in an article in The National Interest in 1989, then at greater length in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. In this work, Fukuyama proposed that 'History is being driven in a coherent direction by rational desire and rational recognition'—and that liberal democracy was, in effect, the final form of government, the ultimate answer to humanity's political questions.
What began as a hypothesis soon calcified into a creed that the West was advancing, inexorably, toward a secular, borderless, cosmopolitan horizon—where free markets would rule, identities would dissolve and liberal values would reign unchallenged. By the mid-1990s, this secular scripture—one part vision, nine parts wishful thinking—had taken deep root in the minds of politicians, pundits, CEOs and academics alike. It promised an end to history but in fact delivered an amnesia of it—a forgetting not only of the origins of conflict, but of complexity, tragedy and the limits of human design.
Among its most ardent apostles was British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Recounting in his 2010 autobiography, A Journey, Blair summed up the mood in his characteristically policy-speak prose: 'After 1989, the West set the agenda to which others reacted. Some supported us, some opposed us, but the globe's direction, the very path of history, seemed chosen by us'.
Fast-forward thirty years, and the starry-eyed vision of a liberal international order founded on open borders, shared norms and airy declarations of social justice lies in ruins, a casualty of its own complacency and the inconvenient persistence of actual history.
When Did 'The End of History' End?
A central question, then, is precisely when did the 'End of History' come to an end? Was it with Donald Trump's re-election in 2025 and his trade tariffs, accompanied by pronouncements from figures such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Singapore's Lawrence Wong declaring the death of globalisation? Or was the turning point the October 2023 outbreak of war in Gaza? Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022? The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021? The response to COVID-19 in 2020? Brexit and Trump's first victory in 2016? The collapse of the Arab Spring and the consequences of regime change in Libya in 2011? The world financial crisis in 2008? Or, further back, the disintegration of post-war optimism in the sands of Iraq after 2003—or even the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001?
There is no shortage of dates, but the pattern is unmistakable. The unravelling was long underway before it was named, echoing Ernest Hemingway's observation about bankruptcy: it happens gradually, then suddenly. So, it is with heroic fantasies. The 'End of History', as conceived in the early 1990s, now appears less like a final destination and more like a shimmering illusion that recedes with every step. Perhaps, at its most generous, spanned a single, fragile, decade from 1991 to 2001, kept alive less thereafter less by the weight of historical evidence than by the momentum of a story too comforting to abandon.
And like many grand ideas in retreat, it has not gone quietly. The lingering faith in liberal teleology continued well into the 2020s, sustained by a certain class of technocrats, media commentators and policy entrepreneurs who believed that the right mixture of markets, elections and multilateralism could tame the world's more unruly impulses.
For me, the final undoing of this fantasy was symbolised not on a battlefield, but in a February 2025 interview when Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's chief spin doctor who helped sell the Iraq war as a moral crusade, and the well-meaning post-imperial straggler, Rory Stewart, sat down with Syria's newly installed president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, for The Rest Is Politics podcast. The symbolism was hard to ignore. Two representatives of the End of History order—liberal interventionists of different stripes—interviewing a man whose rise had been facilitated by forces that made a mockery of their idealism.
Much of the media had celebrated the overthrow of the former regime of Bashar al-Assad as some kind of moral victory, welcoming al-Sharaa as a 'moderate' Islamist. Within a week, factions of al-Sharaa's ruling coalition—drawn from the Islamist group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham—resumed what they did best, massacring their religious opponents, underscoring, with almost theatrical precision, the gulf between well-intentioned discourse and political reality. In that moment, the collision between liberal aspiration and the brute realities of power was complete.
If the End of History was ever a coherent period, its ending was certainly not. But its final moments were captured—not in the fall of a regime or the signing of a treaty—but in the quiet absurdity of two naive Western commentators earnestly extending the benefit of the doubt to a man whose rule would, inevitably, reflect the very forces their worldview could never quite reckon with.
So ends the End of History—not with a bang, but with a podcast.
From Asian Economic Miracles to Historical Uncertainty
What became increasingly obvious—through each inflection point of failure in the End of History narrative—was that it had been a flawed conceit from the beginning. In truth, it never existed as a coherent project outside the imaginations of enthusiasts like Campbell and Stewart.
It was precisely this hubris, the smug certainties and lazy assumptions baked into the vision, that David and I came to suspect would disrupt societies both at home and abroad. Initially, we were living in Southeast Asia, having met as lecturers at the National University of Singapore in 1992. We were united by a shared scepticism of ruling orthodoxies and an iconoclastic streak that rather enjoyed taking a crowbar to the ornamental pretensions of fashionable opinion.
We were fascinated by how the End of History was playing out in this region. From the early 1990s, we set about interrogating its faulty premises, beginning with the much-trumpeted 'Asian economic miracle', which on the surface, appeared to validate the End of History thesis: burgeoning economic growth, glistening skylines in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, all under the watchful eye of a benign American hegemony.
But beneath the glossy façades and the boosterish noise from regional elites and their Western cheerleaders, we saw something else. Much of the so-called miracle, we thought, was powered less by sound economics than by property speculation and opaque government-business entanglements. And bubbling beneath that surface, we noticed an emerging reaction to Western triumphalism—a pushback embodied in the 'Asian values' debate, which upheld tradition, family and communitarian order as correctives to Western individualism.
More telling still was the quiet resurgence of ethno-religious identity, most notably the growing piety and cultural assertiveness among Muslim populations. To write about this in the late 1990s was to part ways with the prevailing academic consensus—a consensus that saw the region as a harmonious stepping stone to a post-historical epoch. We saw something messier, more volatile, and far more interesting.
How We Learned to Stop Trusting the Narrative
Going against the grain did not mean we were always right. Like everyone else, we were products of history—shaped by the Cold War that had informed our lives up to that point. It was the dominant interpretive framework that structured thinking about geopolitics. While not persuaded by the self-congratulatory rhetoric at the Cold War's end, we were not immune to its gravitational pull. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait—these were, by any measure, seismic events. They carried with them a sense of historical acceleration and, for a time, lent credibility to the notion that a more orderly and humane international system might emerge under Western stewardship.
Even the more troubling episodes appeared to support this cautious optimism. Western interventions in the Balkans, though morally fraught and often strategically incoherent, at times seemed to prevent worse outcomes. Elsewhere, in East Timor in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000, Western military interventions were—unusually—successful, reinforcing the seductive idea that limited, well-intentioned uses of force could yield humanitarian dividends. In retrospect, such examples were exceptions mistaken for rules.
It was under the influence of this belief that we trusted too much the justifications offered by neo-conservative interventionists in the US administration of George W. Bush, along with his British supporters, Tony Blair, and of course his ideological enforcer, Alastair Campbell. We assumed—naively, and with excessive deference to the office rather than the evidence—that no democratic government would deliberately mislead its population about weapons of mass destruction, and that both had given serious thought to the post-invasion reconstruction of Iraq. Our assumptions, of course, proved hopelessly misplaced.
Disabused of these illusions, we began to question not merely the tactics but the entire strategic and moral architecture underpinning Western military interventions. We regretted not having paid closer attention to more sceptical voices—particularly that of Owen Harries, the veteran Australian commentator we knew in passing, who foresaw with remarkable clarity how disastrously these ventures would unfold. Though our influence was negligible, we nonetheless felt remorse for having contributed, however insignificantly, to the intellectual climate in which such policies, and the human catastrophes they summoned, could be defended. It was a chastening experience—humbling but ultimately instructive.
Error, in this case, proved formative. From that point onward, we absorbed Harries's unflinching realism as a necessary prophylactic against any tendency towards wishful thinking and demanded that consequences, not intentions, serve as the measure of policy.
Once you've seen optimism weaponised, you never look at it quite the same way again.
The Consolations of Exile and the Politics of Polite Damnation
As we drifted away from the luminous uplands of academic optimism and into the more bracing terrain of hard-nosed realism, David and I found ourselves even more at odds with the reigning clichés of the age. We rejected naive European and Australasian visions of Southeast Asian regionalism, so full of sunny integrationist delusions. In its place: a sobering landscape shaped by post-9/11 Islamist networks, jihadist insurgencies, economic crises and the enduring fallout of Western military adventurism.
More generally we refuted the idea that geopolitics had disappeared from the global scene or that the nation-state would dissolve into a miasma of post-national constellations like the EU, ASEAN or the UN. Along the way, we grew increasingly estranged from what now passes for contemporary academia, which, rather than grappling with complexity, curled itself into a cocoon of progressivist certainties.
David felt the sting of this estrangement more acutely than I did. For him, being excluded from the table of 'respectable' discourse was not merely inconvenient—it was hurtful. For me, dissent was sport. I cared little for right-thinking respectability and had never possessed any desire to be accepted into polite society. The disruptive, troublemaking outsider was my preferred idiom. David, by contrast, had an ego—not of the vulgar, attention-seeking variety, but enough to appreciate recognition. And yet, to his immense credit, he refused to trade integrity for applause. He wanted to be taken seriously but not at the cost of self-respect. If the price of admission was to mouth fashionable nonsense, David preferred exile.
Exile in the academic sense comes in a particular form. Dissent is rarely met with open rebuttal; far more common is the practice of curated silence. Here, inconvenient voices are not debated but simply omitted, as if intellectual legitimacy were determined by absence from the guest list. This is not censorship in its crude form, but something more refined: polite damnation, in which exclusion wears the mask of professional discretion. One is not muzzled or gagged as such—merely passed over, as though irrelevance were a natural consequence of deviation. The result is erasure without accusation, banishment without drama, and a consensus that appears unchallenged only because the challengers have been airbrushed into the margins.
And in that respect, David was braver. He had something to lose and chose to lose it. He could have conformed—smiled at the right conferences, adopted the necessary shibboleths, published the predictable and the banal—but he didn't. He remained loyal to the deeper task: understanding why the West had so eagerly bought into the utopian drift of the End of History, and why that grand deception was buckling under the weight of its own contradictions.
The Last Magicians of Modernity
For David that journey meant, in his words, 'walking backwards into history, not stumbling blindly forwards into a wishful dream world of biblical towers that crack the sky', where each brick is inscribed with universal rights and global norms, while 'the incomprehensible babblings of hubristic elites' filled the air with sound and no meaning.
In this he was invoking the spirit of his intellectual mentors at the LSE, particularly Michael Oakeshott. It was Oakeshott who warned against the seductive simplicity of neat historical endings. 'A single homogeneous line of development', he noted, 'is to be found in history only if history is made a dummy upon which to practice the skill of the ventriloquist': a characteristically sharp jab at the tendency to impose rigid, teleological constructions on the past.
Breaking down Oakeshott's analogy, those who claim history moves in a unified, inevitable direction—from darkness to light, feudalism to liberal democracy or primitivism to progress—aren't interpreting history because this is not how history works. Such coherence only appears if we treat history as a puppet, something passive and voiceless, onto which we project our own ideological preferences. The 'ventriloquist' is the theorist, or ideologue who pretends to let history 'speak', while actually putting words into its mouth. When this happens, we're not listening to history, we're speaking through it.
Oakeshott here is issuing a warning: beware of any chronicling of history that seems too smooth, too unified, too convenient, or too neatly resolved. That usually means someone has doctored the past to suit their present agenda. History only walks in a straight line when it is shackled, scripted, and told exactly where to march. This wasn't just a critique of method. It was also a quiet assertion of pluralism and a defence of contingency. History is messy and multi-threaded. There is no singular direction; only many voices, events and interpretations, none of which should be forcibly muted to serve a storyline.
Notions like the End of History are, in that sense, rationalist projects, as Fukuyama's thesis explicitly acknowledged. And for Oakeshott rationalism was a 'relic of a belief in magic'. Here he was pointing to a deep irony: that the rationalist—with all his charts, systems and how-to guides—is not as dispassionate or scientific as he likes to think. Instead, he's inherited the illusion that mastery over life can be achieved through formulae, much in the way that ancient superstitions held that they could control nature by invoking the right spells.
The rationalist believes that life, politics and society can be governed by technical knowledge—by abstract principles detached from tradition, custom and practice. This belief, far from being modern and rational, is actually a mutation of a very old magical temperament: the idea that if we just know the right method, the right incantation, we can bend the world to our will. So, the magician waves a wand and says the magic words, while the rationalist waves a blueprint and cites the universal principle.
Both assume that knowledge is explicit, complete and transferable—that the world will obediently follow when the 'right' instructions are issued, the memo is passed along and the spell caste. Like Oakeshott, David found this view hopelessly naive. For David, practical knowledge—tradition, tacit understanding, the accumulated wisdom of experience—is not just residue; it's essential. Rationalism tries to strip all that away, leaving behind a hollow shell of technique. In short: rationalism is magic without the mystery. And that is the ultimate flaw in the End of History: it sells an ideology, a system of chronological determinacy, not a tradition or a civilisation.
Virtue Without Borders: The Empire of Morality
In his final sole-authored work, History's Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics, published in 2020, David set out to expose the modern cult of liberal idealism for what it was: a secular theology. He cut through the mountains of jargon and the fog of unfalsifiable theory to reveal that End of History thinking was less a triumph of liberal democratic insight than a shrine to wishful supposition—built, precariously, on a scaffold of 'oughts' inferred from the Cold War's end.
Economically, the gospel of the End of History declared that states would flourish only by obeying neo-liberal commandments—free markets, deregulation and privatisation—enforced by the invisible hand of the 'electronic herd', that faceless, globe-trotting financial priesthood. Even authoritarian states, it was claimed, would eventually be tamed and democratised by capital's relentless logic. At the same time, progressive economists and financiers like Joseph Stiglitz and George Soros called for a gentler, more inclusive globalisation. Third Way leaders like Clinton and Blair promised to balance market dynamism with social justice. Nevertheless, the underlying assumption remained: the future belonged to those who played by the rules of the End of History game.
Meanwhile, brewing away in the academy for over 30 years, a variety of idealistic and post-structuralist thought—ranging from liberal egalitarianism to Frankfurt School cultural Marxism—was explosively configured to burst forth after 1991. With the Cold War over and realism out of fashion, Western intellectuals recast international relations not as an analytical inquiry but as a moral project. Theory, David observed, turned ethical. And ethics replaced strategy and geopolitical sentience. Justice, equality and inclusion were no longer political aspirations—they were imperatives. Post-structuralist and critical theory approaches did not so much re-enchant the world as replace explanation with sanctimony, substituting old hierarchies of power and truth with newer, more decorous ones, usually administered via academic seminars and bureaucratically managed pieties. The aim was less to understand international politics than to morally sculpt it.
This shift, David noted, was not merely theoretical. It was doctrinal. The conjunction of liberal certitudes and Marxist influenced critical theory evolved into a new political religion—advancing an abstract global morality while discarding traditional loyalties to nation, religion, or culture as redundant artefacts of a benighted past. Individual-based liberalism gave way to identity-based communitarianism, where justice meant group recognition and moral reparations. Citizenship was no longer equal; it was contingent on grievance. The liberal state, once the guarantor of civic equality, became an arbitrator of identity claims—often arbitrarily. Minority rights supplanted shared civic norms. Traditions were pathologised unless sanctified by historical victimhood. The result was a paradox: a cosmopolitan liberalism that preached universality while practicing division.
Among the Ruins of the Universal
By the 2000s, as David and I came to know all too well, this progressive creed had captured Western academia and policy elites, espousing ethical activism, global citizenship and performative reflexivity. But it overlooked a fatal flaw: the world's stubborn refusal to conform. Cultural, religious and political divisions remained impervious to those professionally certain of their virtue. The universal norms touted by theorists collided with a reality full of competing truths and intractable identities.
This moral hegemony bred resentment. Progressives increasingly cast themselves as enlightened tutors to an unwashed public in need of ethical instruction, widening the gulf between cosmopolitan elites and national majorities. Preaching equality, they exercised privilege; extolling diversity, they imposed conformity. Their sermons on justice masked a deeper appetite for control.
In the end, the post-historical dream dissolved into the very tensions it had promised to transcend. It was a vision that, in typical liberal fashion, imagined itself immune to the very forces it had long since dismissed. The multiculturalism it lauded proved unmanageable, while its globalising economic prescriptions paved the way for financial crises and widespread economic fallout.
Gradually, then suddenly, the liberal order crumbled, overtaken by the very forces it had once relegated to the past: nationalism, populism and old-fashioned geopolitical rivalry. Brexit, Trump, the fracturing of the EU, the Russia-Ukraine War, conflict in the Middle East—each event a stark reminder that sovereignty, identity and political realism weren't so much dead as undergoing a vigorous renaissance. As David presciently observed: 'Post-modern elites believe their own universalist myths, even as the world around them loudly reasserts its particularities with guns, gods, and flags'.
Who Calls It the End Shall Be the Next Beginning
Utopian temporal dreams have consequences. The End of History thesis was emblematic of a particularly opulent strain of post–Cold War optimism and thus a supreme example of deluxe wishful thinking. The ideological comfort it provided masked the fragility of is precarious foundations. Yet the collapse of this Empire of Assumptions has exacted a considerable toll, both human and institutional, the burden of which has not fallen on its architects but on the broader societies they sought to re-shape.
Post-modern elites, in their fervent quest to escape political realities, found themselves ensnared by the very consequences of their attempted escape. Their flight from reality has left a trail of destruction in its wake: states fracturing, societies teetering and regions from North Africa to the Middle East mired in perpetual chaos. Western credibility has evaporated, deterrence has faltered, and borders—both physical and social—have grown ever more porous. De-industrialisation, rising inequalities between social classes, shattered communities and the shift from multicultural idealism to intercommunal anxiety—these are not random disruptions, but the inevitable punishment of systemic miscalculations. This is what the End of History hath wrought.
The effort to instrumentalise moral ideals in political projects always risks substituting grand illusions for genuine self-understanding. As David perceived, like the doomed attempt to build a tower to heaven, post-modern progressivism mistakenly assumes that life's difficulties can be bypassed through historical determinism. In believing that history has already ordained the correct path, they have, indeed, become history's fools.
Had David still been with us in this life, he would no doubt have reminded us that you can never get an ought from an is and that human beings are not passengers of destiny, but agents within it. The human condition is not a fixed trajectory but an open question—and therein lies both its burden and its possibility. From age to age, though, human destiny, while not written in the stars, is invariably contested in the ruins. And if history has a direction at all, it is one we invent—and often regret.
M.L.R. Smith is a writer and academic based in Canberra, he is editor of A Front Row Seat at the End of History:
The Untimely Essays of David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, 1999-2024 (Foreword by Jo Cohen Jones) (London: Bruges Group, 2025).
