In 1989, in its summer issue, The National Interest, an American conservative journal, published an essay entitled "The End of History?" by a previously obscure State Department policy wonk named Francis Fukuyama. A couple of months later, on November 9, the East German government opened the Berlin Wall.
Communism had been peacefully defeated by the forces of liberal democratic capitalism. But this wasn't just a victory - it was, that wonk claimed, the victory.
"What we may be witnessing," he wrote, "is not just the end of the cold war, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Three years later, The End of History, now shorn of that tentative question mark, appeared as a book. Intellectually, at least, the wonk chinos were replaced by Superman's tights. Fukuyama became the global go-to man on how we did it and what it meant.
Since then, of course, history has refused to lie down and die. Illiberal, undemocratic capitalism has flourished in China, Islamic fundamentalism has persuaded millions of the virtues of oppressive theocracy and, last year, capitalism imploded. So, Frank, does the old "E of H" argument stand up? Does it need modifying?
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"I think", he tells me, "it both stands up and needs modifying. The basic theory was a very simple one. The End of History was based on the view that our political evolution was directional and, for the 150 years before the Berlin Wall, very many people around the world believed that the direction would end in some form of communist or socialist utopia.
"All I was saying in the article was that it didn't look like we would get there; that we would exit this train not at communism but at the station Marxists call bourgeois democracy. I think nothing that has happened in the past 20 years has changed that. I don't think many people worldwide want to get off at the station labelled Islamic fundamentalism. Some might want to get off at the one labelled Chinese authoritarianism."
So could communism come back? It doesn't seem entirely implausible in the wake of capitalism's recent near-death experience.
"I don't think it will return as a universal doctrine of the sort that existed at the start of the 20th century. But it can come back in a more spasmodic and unsystematic form. A lot of what Hugo Chavez is trying to do in Venezuela is like that. The impulse is not dead; it's driven by class inequality and exclusion in the same way that historical communism was."
The modification of the E of H is not theoretical but practical. Fukuyama admits he underestimated the difficulty of spreading democratic institutions. Yet he points out that, over the past 30 years, the number of democratic states has risen from 80 to 130. History is still ending, but slowly.
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However, even if his theory is intact, Fukuyama's political position has undergone revolutionary change. When he first put on the tights, he was a card-carrying neoconservative. But, horrified by Iraq and the multiple incompetences of the Bush administration, he turned against the new antiintellectual thuggishness of the American right and, last year, voted for Barack Obama. A lot of old friends were left behind. Was it a wrench?
"It was personally difficult because a lot of the time the reason you believe things is very much connected with your social relationships. I think the public break was difficult. On the other hand, it also seems part of the duty of someone who is a public intellectual to be honest about why you believe certain things."
The core of dissent was twofold. First, invading Iraq at all was based on the crazy illusion that somehow liberal democracy would miraculously emerge overnight in a state with no democratic traditions. Second, the use of American "hard power" to advance the neocon cause was "imprudent", he says.
"It was not a realistic way to approach this thing. Historically, the way democracy has been spread has been through soft power, the American example, the creation of civil society through flows of people and ideas. We need to get back to that."
Fukuyama now puts a lot of faith in Obama. "He's at the cusp of an important period in his presidency because if he succeeds in reforming the American healthcare system - and my feeling is that he will get this bill through Congress - then I think he'll go down as one of the most important presidents in recent history. Reforming this system is difficult, and it's something we need to do ... It will put him in a much better position for his second year. People won't be able to say he hasn't achieved anything but a few speeches and a silly Nobel prize."
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Meanwhile, Fukuyama looks at the Republican party with dismay. "It's very disappointing. There are people on the far right who believe Obama is not legitimately president. This is not good. In mitigation, I would say that it's only 15-20% of the people on the far right, but that's what the Republican party has retreated into."
The big downside of health reform is that it is forcing Obama to take his eye off some much bigger balls. Afghanistan, for instance, and his prolonged meditation on troop increases.
"Well, actually, I'm happy that he's taking his time. There's not an immediate crisis where everything's going to blow up in a week or two. It could end up like Vietnam, defining his presidency in a very negative way, as it did for Lyndon Johnson. There should not be a withdrawal, absolutely not. There's no reason to be that pessimistic. There's not much pressure in the US to wind down and it would be a disaster for our regional prestige."
Not only is this former neocon backing Obama; he also thinks Tony Blair as president of Europe would be "a good thing".
"Whatever you think about the Iraq war, what Europe needs is some energy, and he would have brought a tremendous amount of energy. Europe does need waking up a bit. Brussels is a good place to park inconvenient or superannuated politicians and, if that's the field, Blair beats them by a lot."
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The big picture with Fukuyama is that, though his political affiliations have changed radically, he insists his intellectual position is intact. At the heart of all this is his conviction, derived from the philosopher Hegel, that there is a direction to history, and this direction leads to liberal democracy.
My problem with this is, first, I don't believe it and, second, it is often not clear what it means in Fukuyama's thought. In his book Our Posthuman Future, for example, he suggests the whole process could be disrupted if we alter human nature through genetic engineering. So we must not tinker. In other words, we have to actively promote the direction of history; it's not a natural force. This suggests the end of history is simply morally desirable - "normative", in philosophy speak - rather than a fact in the world - "empirical".
"It's both empirical and normative," he responds. "I think the empirical part is just looking at the world around us. Is there a higher civilisation than liberal democracy that we can see? I think the answer to that is no. The normative judgment is my view of the way human beings are and what makes them happy.
"I think that, ultimately, living in a successful liberal democracy is probably going to be better for them than living in a dictatorship with unaccountable government in a society with a high degree of corruption that can't sustain economic growth based on a market economy."
Saying people want liberal democracy is very different from saying it's historically determined. People, as the occupants of the concentration camps and the gulags would testify, if they could, all too often don't get what they want.
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Anyway, never mind. He's still got the Superman tights on, and he's still at the centre of the argument. Of course, history, in all its epic perversity, just keeps trundling along.