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10:35

(In »The free and open Internet versus the ecological apocalypse«)

Among other things this is why the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama shoots himself in the foot when, with a great hullabaloo, he proclaims the death of history in the early 1990s. It is namely not history as such that has died – not even in some kind of metaphorical sense of any interest whatsoever: it is merely a kind of writing of history that has reached its conclusion, namely Fukuyama’s personal favourite narrative of the individual and the atom in liberal democracy’s linear history. However, metahistory, the history of the writing of history per se, teaches us that when a certain narrative has reached the end of the road, this immediately opens the door to a completely new kind of narrative. This applies in particular at a paradigm shift, when one type of writing of history loses its social relevance only to be immediately replaced by another. Metahistory is quite simply a relay race that never ends.