Welcome to the End of the End of History

The past 12 months have been bewildering, at least for those who assumed after 1989 that the world could look forward to a future of unequaled prosperity. Protests, often led by middle classes, erupted or intensified not only in economically damaged countries such as Greece, Spain and Thailand. They rattled relatively competent stewards of globalized economies in Chile, Brazil and Turkey.

Slowing growth in India and China, the poster countries of globalization, fueled creeping authoritarianism and different, but equally anachronistic, Maoist revivals. Toward the end of the year, the president of the richest country in the world called economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time” and the pope, denouncing a “deified” free market, emerged as the most prominent critic of contemporary capitalism.