By its prevailing utilitarian self-understanding, the west is bound to judge that the end of history is reached when the institutional means to enable everyone to pursue their happiness are secured worldwide. The prevailing self-understanding is no longer utilitarian in the sense of equating happiness with a state of passive pleasures; it even includes liberty of action in the state it considers the highest good. But it is still utilitarian, as it understands life as the pursuit of (multidimensional) happiness rather than as the search for extraordinariness. Moreover, it is oriented to the serving value spheres and neglecting the nonserving ones. No wonder therefore that, when it became obvious that the Soviet empire would collapse, the end of history was declared in the West. Capitalist economy does provide the means to produce a society that satisfies utilitarian standards, if only by “tittytainment.” Already two years before the collapse, Francis Fukuyama produced an interesting argument for the end but at the same time realized that something is wrong with the kind of liberalism that he too conceives in the utilitarian way. He starts with rhetorical questions:

Showing that fascism and communism failed and the cravings of religious fundamentalism can be “successfully satisfied within the sphere of personal life that is permitted in liberal societies,” his answer is in the positive.