Most of these criticisms were based on a simple misunderstanding of the thesis. I was using the word history in the Hegelian-Marxist sense—that is, the long-term evolutionary story of human institutions that could alternatively be labeled development or modernization. The word end was meant not in the sense of “termination,” but “target” or “objective.” Karl Marx had suggested that the end of history would be a communist utopia, and I was simply suggesting that Hegel’s version, where development resulted in a liberal state linked to a market economy, was the more plausible outcome.4
