After reading about three quarters of the essay, I'd say that the author is basically stating that liberal democratic ideals (free market, upward class mobility, elections of government officials, basically every aspect of a western nation) is the ideal society for humankind. He points out that in recent history, this system of government has been the most successful, beating out all other types (monarchies, communism, dictatorships), and marks the end of human philosophy as the culmination of our entire history of political upheaval. I would disagree with the author, however. Most of his points are based around change that has occurred since the American Revolution, and ignores the majority of human history. If you were to look at Greece or Rome as close historical models (which, in a sense, they were), then you would see that a democratic system eventually fell when infighting weakened the Greek states, and they were easily conquered by a foreign power. Rome, originally a republic, became a dictatorship much like the one established in WW2 Germany. The only real difference is that Rome succeeded in its goal of world domination (keep in mind that they had conquered land to the point that they were surrounded almost entirely by unsophisticated tribal societies, and the only other politically and socially sophisticated nation at the time, China, was far removed geographically from Rome), where Germany fell to the Allied powers after a heroic effort by Britain, and, later, the United States, to push back into Europe. It would be quite a stretch to say that a single form of ideological is the culmination of human thought when it has only existed for a little over 300 years, and only truly thrived (globally) in the last 30. Much of the ideological spread could very easily be attributed to increased ease of communication, rather than "my ideology is better than yours, and I'll prove it by killing you."