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April 23, 2006
Fukuyama's The End of History was not a simple reworking of Weber's theory of modernity as implied in my previous post did not argue that a desire for higher living standards--not liberty--was universal, and that these created a middle class that tended to seek political participation, with democracy eventually emerging as a byproduct of this process. Fukuyama's philosophy of history advanced a far more complex Hegelian argument than this kind of utilitarian liberalism, that is so deeply entrenched in Australia's public culture.
The text argued that the quest for recognition and the promptings of desire--driving respectively the struggle for equality and the advance of science--were the two motors of history. In the structure of the narrative as a whole, Fukuyama's assignment of their respective significance was unequivocal; the desire that lay behind the desire of economic man was a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. It was the political dialectic so unleashed that was the primary motor of human history. Hence the End of History text had a deeply agnostic conception of politics, and it this dialectic of recognition that gave the text its philosophical strength.
As Perry Anderson explains the philosophical basis of this construction came from the:
.... reworking of Hegel's dialectic of recognition by a Russian exile in France, Alexandre Kojeve, for whom centuries of struggles between masters and slaves--social classes--were on the brink of issuing into a definitive condition of equality, a "universal and homogeneous state" that would bring history to a halt: a conception he identified with socialism, and later with capitalism, if always with an inscrutable irony. Fukuyama adopted this narrative structure but grounded it in an ontology of human nature, quite alien to Kojeve, that was derived from Plato and came--along with a much more conservative outlook--from his Straussian formation. Kojeve and Strauss had valued each other as interlocutors and shared many intellectual reference points, but politically--as well as metaphysically--they were very distant. Strauss, an unyielding thinker of the right, had no time for Hegel, let alone Marx. In his eyes, Kojeve's deduction from their conceptions of liberty and equality could only presage a leveling, planetary tyranny. He believed in particular regimes and natural hierarchy.
The struggle for recogntion was a theory of mortal conflict. Hegel and Kojeve were, each in his own time (Jena, Stalingrad), philosophers of war.
What was being presented was not Hegel per se but in Hegel-as-interpreted-by-Kojeve, given Fukuyama's claim of an innate, ahistorical drive for recognition, built into "human nature". Hegel, in contrast, argued that recognition arises as a pressing need for the preservation of life; without recognition of one's property rights, your life is spent patrolling your boundaries, chasing away people encroaching on your property. It is no mysterious "drive for recognition", as it is a perfectly normal human need that arises from specific social condition and the necessity of the rule of law.
Fukuyama then explored the question whether or not the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies is "completely satisfying?" He says that the long-term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question.
He sketches two broad responses, from the Left and the Right to the question:
The Left would say that universal recognition in liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation's absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognise equal people unequally.
Fukuyama says that the second, and in his view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution's commitment to human equality:
This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a "last man" who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favour of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced "men without chests," composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognised as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human.
He's right about the signifiance of Nietzsche. Fukuyama, locating himeself on the Right rather than the Left, then asks a series of questions about the last man of utilitarianism. He says that:
Following Nietzsche's line of thought, we are compelled to ask the following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a "last man" with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the "peace and prosperity" of contemporary liberal democracy? Does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition constitute the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies, but also in modern liberal democracies? Will not their future survival depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be recognised not just as equal, but as superior to others? And might not the fear of becoming contemptible "last men" not lead men to assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial "first men" engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons?
It is this agonistic conception of politics that is missing from the latter Fukuyama.
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We first read this book in 1992/93. At the time I thought it was entertaining, and insightful, especially as it came on the back of the devolution of the Soviet Union.
Since its publication, this book has been subject to considerable debate by both adherents and opponents. The book proposes that the liberal democratic system operating a capitalist system is the end point of political history - ie that mankind has settled on a system of government that provides the best approach to regulating human affairs. Given the failure of communism, the failure of dictatorships (of the left and the right), I think this thesis holds true.
What opponents of the book/argument don't understand is that the author (I believe) is not suggesting that liberal democracy is not without its flaws, and occasionally will generate significant governance problems. (Take the seriously flawed Florida election ballot counting process in the Bush vs Gore US Federal Presidential election.) But what the thesis suggests is that the system is signficantly robust to work through problems, and deliver benefits on the other side. This ability to hande internal political problems without course to violence or repression is not a trait readily found in other political systems.
Fukuayma gets 'beaten' up too often for just suggesting that liberal democracy overall is a good thing, that it works, and it has succeeded other political systems because it works and people overall like it. Opponents of this thesis ought to remember that only in liberal democratic systems can opponents of the prevailing political status quo argue for its change or abolition. Try doing that when subejct to a dictatorship!