Introduction The effect of scientific knowledge, particularly modern science, provides a mechanism that impacts the evolution of societies through military competition and economic development. The deliberate rejection of technology and a rationalized society has been suggested by any number of groups in modern times. For Fukuyama, it is simply unrealistic to expect people, once they have experienced the consumerism of a technological society, to turn back the clock of economic development. The Mechanism provided by scientific knowledge produces an irreversible directionality to human history, and Fukuyama’s point is that economically this leads to and culminates in modern capitalism. The centralized, state-planned economies of the communist bloc ultimately failed to keep up with the productive power of Western capitalist economies once the latter moved from the age of heavy manufacture into the ‘information age. Today’s ‘post-industrial world thrives on innovation, which requires freedom of thought and individual initiative. Also, ‘the complexity of modern economies proved to be simply beyond the capacities of centralized bureaucracies to manage’, whilst control over prices and the allocation of goods prohibited communist economies ‘from participating in the international division of labour’. Review of Fukuyama’s arguments Fukuyama suggests that ‘it was in the highly complex and dynamic “post-industrial” economic world that Marxism-Leninism as an economic system met it’s Waterloo’, and he observes that ‘by the end of the 1980s China, the Soviet Union, and the countries of Eastern Europe can be seen as having succumbed to the economic logic of advanced industrialization. Countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia ‘demonstrated that late modernizers were actually advantaged relative to more established industrial powers, and were regions such as Latin America have not grown so fast, this is because of complex cultural factors, combined with the fact that ‘capitalism has never worked in Latin America and other parts of the Third World because it has never been seriously tried. Fukuyama admits that ‘the logic of a progressive modern natural science predisposes human societies towards capitalism only to the extent that men can see their own economic self-interest clearly’, but he claims that the empirical experience of regions such as Asia and Eastern Europe should contribute towards ‘a very strong predisposition for all human societies’ to participate in the economic liberalism of globalization. But not only is the ‘mechanism’ of modern science irreversible in its economic effects, progressively bringing countries towards a capitalist economic system. For Fukuyama, it also culminates in capitalism. Conceding that the Mechanism is a kind of Marxist interpretation of history because based on ‘the desire of “man the species-being” to produce and consume a highly elastic desire not limited to so-called ‘natural needs, but ‘whose own horizon of possibilities is constantly being pushed back nevertheless ‘the kind of society that permits people to produce and consume the largest quantity of products on the equal basis is not a communist one, but a capitalist society. And it would appear that Fukuyama, having rejected the historical alternatives to capitalism, cannot conceive of any other economic system which could better fulfil man’s economic drives. As such, then, capitalism is t