POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Islamic Fundamentalism, Liberal Democracy, Berlin Wall
Document Summary
If you don"t participate in it, others will. The point of social science is to try to make sense of the world we live in. Conceit, arrogance -> less scary by understanding in a scholarly way. Simplifying, focusing on what matters, ignoring what doesn"t. Based on hegel (1806) -> the chopping bench of history. No other ideas have come to challenge the big idea. Hegel looked out his office window in 1806 and saw napoleon"s troops. He believed it to be the victory of liberty, equality, and fraternity . Too often the unyielding attention on the narrow, the irrelevant, the vapid is the preoccupation of the human mind" hegel. Fukuyama believed hegel was right, but a bit off -> nazism/communism. Therefore not end of history in 1806, but rather in 1989. Big challengers to liberal democracy were defeated in the realm of ideas -> the real realm. Yes, communism still exists, but it is a powerless idea.