After the fall of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama's thesis "The End of History" was much hailed. It was claimed therein that mankind was moving in a rather teleological manner towards the "universal" values of market democracies. Then, 9/11 put spotlight on Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" and made Fukuyama's hypothesis seem naive to the dangers of political Islam to some. Moreover, the financial crisis as well as the rise of state capitalism in authoritarian China and Russia further seemed to have postponed, if not muddled, the end of history. At the very least, it seemed that any historicist synthesis towards free-market capitalism and liberal, democratic republics would go through a very slow thesis of radical revolutionaries (socialist or religious) and a violent antithesis of the establishment's inevitable backlash.
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