Derrida and the End of History

Communism in Europe had disintegrated, yes, but did that necessarily entail that liberal democracy, and its attendant capitalist economic system, had won? More pertinently, did all of us want liberal democratic capitalism to win – or even think it desirable that it did so? As the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ to Derrida’s Specters put it, ‘many of us felt a vague sense of foreboding’ about the changes likely to come about after the apparent victory of free market economics; a fear that such changes might prove to be at least as ‘malign . . . as benign’.7 The task Derrida sets himself in Specters (the fruit of an international colloquium on the