In the long history of the West we have reached the moment at which the sense of crisis has become acute but no one seems ready to accept defeat. Panic, anger and recrimination are still much more common than a genuine reckoning with the possibility that civilisations, just like human beings, may well be mortal. We still think like Francis Fukuyama, even as we mock his comical arguments and conclusions. We think like Fukuyama because Fukuyama thinks like Hegel, Rousseau and Locke.