Redefining Fukuyama: The start of the end of history

Israel’s policy on Gaza is political and all about timing. They have a short two week window for a defacto invasion of the Strip before Obama is released from his self-imposed “one president at a time” shackles and Israel wakes up to a less-warm American leadership. That time block also gives Tzipi Livni a fortnight to present her credentials as a tough wartime leader before she herself goes for a “battle of the hawks” electoral showdown with Binyamin Netanyahu in late February. War, in this case, is a valid liberal democratic tool and thousands in Gaza will pay for it with their lives.

It was the victory of the capitalist liberal democratic idea that was the central thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s now almost notorious 1992 book with the portentous and pretentious title of “The end of history and the last man”. This book managed to offend everyone including historians, feminists, Marxists, Christians, economists and philosophers. His opponents took glee in pointing out that Fukuyama’s new world order era idea was declared destroyed as early as 11 September 2001. The recent death of Sam Huntington brings Fukuyama back to attention. Huntington's own 1993 “Clash of Civilisations” was an early model to contradict Fukuyama’s somewhat Pollyanna-ish view of the power of liberal democracy. Yet, no one has managed to come up with a convincing response to the central argument: what political system is better than the Capitalist Liberal Democratic model that is now a cornerstone of most countries across the world?

To get a good answer to that question it is necessary to move beyond the facile analysis that Fukuyama has been “proved wrong” and look at how a smart and highly-educated man might even consider the idea that history has ended. Fukuyama didn’t invent the notion. He argued strongly that the success of liberal democracy had less to do with the philosophies and ideas of Hobbes and Locke. Instead he attributed it to a rehash of the universal histories of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as filtered through the obscure work of Alexandre Kojeve.

Hegel was one of the great scholars of modernity and had enormous influence on those who followed him. Fukuyama considered Marx to be the best nineteenth century interpreter of Hegel’s ideas and Kojeve the foremost of those of the twentieth century. It was Kojeve who came to the conclusion that Hegel was right and that history had ended. He was even able to point to an exact event that ended it: the 1806 Battle of Jena which established the Napoleonic code as the cornerstone of European law. Teaching in Paris’s influencial Ecole Practique des Haute Etudes in the 1930s, Kojeve said that all the wars since Jena were merely an “alignment of the provinces”. The impact of the Bolshevist revolutions, he said, was to spread existing principles of liberty and equality.

Just as Fukuyama was ridiculed after 9/11, Kojeve’s own ideas became unfashionable after the devastating impact of World War II. Kojeve proclaimed the end of history would arrive when humans developed a complete satisfying political system. He argued that liberal democracy (despite its manifest faults of discrimination and poverty) provided such satisfaction. Kojeve saw entities such as the European Union as the most advanced form of liberal democracy and would eventually quit teaching and spend the rest of his life working for the EU.

His central idea was that all human action is based on the desire for recognition. This idea runs contrary to most Enlightenment thinking. In their influential writings, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke propagated the notion that citizens of society are primarily interested in their own material well-being. Their ideas were imbibed by the framers of the US constitution, a document which is pre-occupied with material well-being. But Kojeve said it was Hegel’s appeal to a “struggle for recognition” which was the real motor of civilisation. It is not self preservation but the prideful and assertive side of human nature that causes Palestinians in Gaza to toss rockets across the border and Israelis to respond with heavy artillery.

Humanity, according to Hegel, did have its natural side that demanded sleep, food and sex. But many human actions contradict these natural tendencies. They are sidetracked by thorny matters such as prestige, recognition, respect, honour, and dignity. Fukuyama identified the seat of all these complicated emotions as “thymos” which is a Greek word approximate to “spiritedness”. Thymos drove this desire for recognition, he said, and it was as crucial a cause of human action as both desire and reason.

Fukuyama saw the desire for recognition as the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics. As people become wealthier they demand not simply more wealth but also recognition of their status. It drives the demand for democracy. The struggle for recognition out of thymos might take thousands of years but it would in the end, be “completely satisfying” because recognition was the most deep seated and fundamental human longing.

At the end of the twentieth century liberal democracy stood alone without ideological competitors. Fukuyama wrote that outside the Islamic world, there was a “general consensus that accepts liberal democracy’s claims to be the most rational form of government, that is, the state that realizes most fully either rational desire or rational recognition”. He would be eventually hoist on the petard of his own Islamic exclusion but has not yet been challenged on whether there are better systems available. The question for the 21st century is whether liberal democracy remains the best vehicle to tackle the growing list of global issues: environmental impact, water and food, international law, disease, biodiversity, and poverty.

Yet it is too easy to be stuck in the stasis of pessimism. The end of history seems no where on the horizon, thankfully, and the ability to create our destinies remains as strong as ever. Fukuyama’s thoughtful provocation on the subject should be seen for what it is, a brave and informed attempt to establish dialogue about the very real impact of motivations. It should not be condemned nor ignored for the obvious fact (quite apparent to the author himself) that history, in the sense we understand it, has continued. Thymos deserves to be better known.

Gray and Fukuyama

Today’s The Australian has a feature on British philosopher John Gray who arrives for the Sydney Writers Festival in a week’s time. Gray is not to be confused with Dr John Gray who writes about men and women as if they come from different planets, neither of which support life. The Sydney-bound Gray has also been accused of not supporting life. His straight talking and profoundly original thinking in books such as “Straw Dogs” has seen him labelled erroneously as a misanthrope. But the reason Gray doesn’t like big ideas because they lead to “big casualties”. Gray is a post-anthropist, recording likely future extinction with scientific insensitivity. He will be in Sydney to promote his new book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia in four events at the festival between May 19-25.

One of John Gray’s most vehement critics is Francis Fukuyama, still best known for his 1992 work “The End of History and The Last Man”. The book’s elegiac title alone should have endeared Fukuyama to Gray. But Gray had no time for Fukuyama’s theory that the end of the Cold War marked a total victory for the idea of liberal democracy.

Both men have their political contradictions. Gray has in his time supported the Tories, then New Labour and now wishes a plague on both their houses. After establishing his reputation, Fukuyama joined the powerful People for New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. PNAC backed the winning horse (after a protest) in the 2000 election and most of the key positions in the Bush Administration were filled by PNAC members. Behind the scenes, Fukuyama and PNAC were key advocates of linking Iraq to 9/11. Inexplicably, Fukuyama changed course in 2002 and began distancing himself from the neo-cons. By 2006 he was saying that history will not judge the Iraq War or “the ideas animating it” kindly.

Back in 1995, Gray interviewed Fukuyama for the then new “Prospect” magazine. Fukuyama had just released his follow up to The End of History called “Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity”. In that book Fukuyama explored the social factors that created prosperity and how they could be harnessed. Gray called him a “theorist of global economic rivalry and, perhaps, of American decline.” The second-generation Japanese immigrant bristled at the latter prospect.

In his 1999 work “The Great Disruption”, Fukuyama described Gray as an inheritor of the “Burkean critique of the Enlightenment.” Fukuyama described Gray as the logical follower of the 18th century Irish statesman and orator Edmund Burke. Burke was the MP for Bristol at the time of the French Revolution. He was a Whig but as Tory as they come. Burke excoriated the French Revolution as a human disaster. The Revolution, like the Enlightenment that caused it, sought to replace traditional rules with rational ones.

Fukuyama saw these qualities in Gray. Fukuyama said Gray’s reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall (a pivotal event in his own End of History schema) was that it laid bare the internal contradictions of the Enlightenment. Gray’s 1995 book “Enlightenment’s Wake” said the victory of capitalism in Berlin led to higher crime rates and social disorder in the US. The self-interest of capitalism reinforces the process by placing self-interest ahead of moral obligation and a tragedy of the commons occurs. Society survives only on a limited human capital that is running out and not being replenished.

Himself veering further to the right as the 1990s wore on, Fukuyama disagreed with the assumption that human capital could not replenished. Fukuyama pointed out that both crimes against violence and property were on the wane since 1992, falling dramatically especially in the big cities of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. In New York, crime levels are now at the levels they were at before they exploded in the 1960s. Fukuyama calls the period of the 1960s to the 1990s the “Great Disruption” when society underwent the greatest structural change. He says a new social order is now emerging from the chaos because we are all biologically hardwired to forge bonds.

Gray believes that Fukuyama’s ideas proved irresistible to the right because they painted a seductive picture of capitalism as an unstoppable force of nature. Gray proved better at predicting the course of history than Fukuyama when he said it would quickly resume in the shape of ethnic, religious and resource wars. He knew that a non-ideological approach would be needed to deal with the conflicts to follow the victory of liberal democracy. But in Gray's eyes the Enlightenment was still culprit. He sees Al Qaeda as an inheritor of the same post-Enlightenment revolutionary tradition as communism, Nazism and neo-conservatism. Al Qaeda can mean "the base" but can also mean "the database". Knowledge is indeed power in Gray's book.