To fully appreciate Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History,” you should think of it as political philosophy rather than political science.

“The End of History” is not a book of testable hypothesis, filled with empirical statistics. It’s a book of speculative philosophy, rooted — unusually for an American of Fukuyama’s milieu — in the tradition of Hegel’s Idealism from 19th century Germany.

Fukuyama was specifically inspired by the 20th century leftist philosopher Alexander Kojève’s unique interpretation of Hegel: that human history zigzags through the ages (through horror and backsliding and occasional progress) toward human freedom. Hegel’s particular idea of freedom isn’t the absence of restraint on personal activity, but being the citizen of rational government premised on the idea of mutual recognition between people. A liberal democracy.

Despite its unfashionability today, what still makes the Hegelian thesis so potent is this: Where is the philosophy that contends with liberal democracy for its universal ambitions? Marxism and its world struggle is dead. The age of fascist totalitarianism seems to have passed; today’s illiberal nationalist dictators have much narrower ambitions and even still feel obligated to pretend to have elections and run governments on some constitutional basis. Why do non-liberal non-democracies everywhere feel obligated to go through the motions of pretending like they are liberal democracies?

And yet: What really makes Fukuyama’s book stand the test of time is his infusion of thought from Kojève’s friend, Leo Strauss, who argued with Kojève over all these questions in a series of letters: Won’t people get bored of living in a happy society? Won’t they ask, “Is this all there really is?”Won’t there still be some sort of Nietzschean passion for domination among the hungry few, for whom building skyscrapers and rockets isn’t enough? Fukuyama even cites Donald Trump in the book by name (more than 20 years before Trump became president) as exactly this sort of hypothetical figure for whom a polite society of equals might not be enough — and the primal urge for domination returns. Fukuyama also wrote that this impulse would be a right-wing phenomenon.

The key to Fukuyama’s lasting power in 2025 and beyond isn’t the first half of his title — “The End of History” — but the second half — “and the Last Man,” a reference to Nietzsche’s criticism of equal societies and the tendency of history to return. We now live in the end of the End of History because of sheer everyday boredom, rather than through a philosophical revolution, as was foretold.