(FORTUNE Magazine) – Essays on the philosophy of history don't usually cause much of a stir among politicians and journalists. But when Francis Fukuyama's article ''The End of History?'' appeared in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, it quickly had Democrats, Republicans, and much of the rest of the world debating its thesis. In Argentina this enthusiasm even got a label: Fukuyamismo. Now Fukuyama is back with a book-length version of his argument, titled The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press: $24.95). Happily, it's even better than the original article. True, readers with an abiding aversion to the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel won't care to explore these intellectual waters too deeply. But plenty of others will. The End of History is appearing almost simultaneously in 13 other languages. Its full argument is a spreading oak, but here's the acorn: By ''end of history,'' Fukuyama means something like the ideal social system toward which human beings are struggling. He does not mean heaven on earth or utopia, but some institutional arrangement that allows people a decent prosperity and reasonable liberty to act as they choose. (Isn't it amazing how few systems have achieved these two simple goals?) The notion that the human race has one destiny, Fukuyama notes, can be traced back to Judaism and Christianity: ''Hegel believed that Christianity paved the way for the French Revolution by establishing the principle of the equality of all men on the basis of their capacity for moral choice.'' But by the early 1800s, leading European intellectuals had stopped taking Judaism and Christianity seriously. Enter Herr Hegel, whose immodest ambition was to give a thoroughly secular interpretation of human destiny. A century and a half later, young Fukuyama, 39, graduate of Cornell and Harvard, schooled in practical political analysis by the Rand Corp. and the policy planning staff of the U.S. State Department, resumes Hegel's ambitious project -- and at a very good moment too. The old order of the world has just broken up, and communism has joined fascism in the dustbin of history. Fukuyama begins by contrasting the strong sense of progress in the 19th century with the pessimism and relativism that rule today. Who on a modern college campus is willing to say that such Western ideas as liberal democracy are the ideals toward which the world is turning? That one culture is better than another? After the slaughter of the world wars and the Holocaust, who still believes in progress through science, reason, and modernity? Fukuyama does. And through 31 chapters, he marshals his argument that no other vision of political economy except capitalist democracy is cherished today as fully legitimate. Each chapter invites heavy fire, but together they maintain an impressive battle line. He begins by arguing that the cumulative growth of science as a body of knowledge and a way of viewing the world, by slowly gaining acceptance in all cultures, demonstrates that human history has at least one central story line. What reinforces this line of progress is its practical effects -- it increases military power and raises standards of living. Second, he maintains, the free market has clearly emerged as the most / efficient way of encouraging invention and distributing goods. The power of science and markets obliges one nation after another, like covered wagons seeking the shortest path out of the desert of ignorance and destitution, to reshape themselves and join the wagon train. But science and capitalism don't explain the most crucial part of the story, Fukuyama argues. As powerful as the human desire for material well-being and control over nature is a quality that Plato identified as thymos. Thymos, as Fukuyama defines it, is ''something like an innate human sense of justice . . . the psychological seat of all the noble virtues like selflessness, idealism, morality, self-sacrifice, courage, and honorability.'' To slake their thirst for a system that grants dignity to individuals, people want democracy too. This universal story is what's now unfolding in nondemocratic regimes everywhere, both the totalitarian societies of fascism and communism and the former dictatorships of Greece, Portugal, Argentina, and other nations of Latin America. Those in the West who thought that the twin dreams of prosperity and democracy merely reflected Western ethnocentrism or was ''beyond'' some peoples (the Russians, say) owe those folk an apology, Fukuyama asserts. In his view, the greatest threat to liberal democracy arises not on the political left, which is bankrupt, but from those on the right, who judge that it bleaches greatness out of the human spirit by making humans content with material comforts. He has in mind Nietzsche and other German philosophers who expressed contempt for Anglo-Saxon pragmatism and the human type it would engender: ''the last man,'' ''men without chests'' -- in other words, humans without thymos. ''Man does not strive after happiness,'' Nietzsche wrote. ''Only the Englishman does that.'' THIS RICH BOOK is not without flaws. Islam, for one, barely figures in its analysis, and ironically, Fukuyama, like the Germans he cites, can be too dismissive of unthymotic, garden variety virtues, such as reliability and ''bourgeois'' unflappability. At times he emphasizes, as Tocqueville did, that religion and other sources of community are primary institutions, quite necessary to capitalism and democracy. They are needed, I would add, to ground the human being's sense of personal dignity and to energize thymos. They might also show Fukuyama how to cope with the human capacity for irrationality, malice, and pure evil, which he barely treats. In this respect, the founder of | the philosophy of history -- Saint Augustine -- was deeper and wiser than Hegel. Still, we should be grateful for how far Francis Fukuyama has pressed his argument. The power of his thesis will likely push more of the world to debate his striking vision of the human story as one long struggle toward universal freedom.

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EXCERPT: ''Following Nietzsche's line of thought we are compelled to ask the following: Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the 'peace and prosperity' of contemporary liberal democracy?''