Should it surprise that Joseph McCarney wrote the most devistating evisceration of Fukuyama in 1993? (Revised)
Philosopical Apprentice.
Editor: The opening paragaraph
Shaping Ends: Reflections on Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man has been widely regarded as a celebration of the triumph of the West.footnote1 Its message, on the accepted view, is that, with victory in the Cold War and the death of Communism, the Western way of life has emerged as the culmination of humanity’s historical evolution. As the end state towards which that evolution has been tending it represents a pattern of universal validity, a light to itself and to all non-Western societies still struggling in history. It will be argued here that this interpretation is wholly misconceived and, indeed, that it must be stood on its head to obtain the true meaning of the book. The distinctive core of what the West stands for, in Fukuyama’s view, is liberal democracy. What his book tells us is that this is itself a transitory historical form, the process of whose dissolution is already well advanced. It is a verdict inescapably grounded in the logic of the argument, in the fundamental tenets of the philosophy of history Fukuyama espouses. Thus, in the classic style of that subject, he arrives on the scene too late, when a way of life has grown old beyond hope of rejuvenation. There is a sharp irony in the fact that philosophy’s grey on grey should be taken in this case as an expression of maturity and vigour. Something is owed here to the complex perversity of the times, but something also, it must be admitted, to the strangely half-hearted, double-minded and inadequately self-conscious way in which Fukuyama has approached his task. All this constitutes, however, a reason not for abandoning the agenda he has set but for taking it onwards towards completion.
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Editor: I will selectively quote from this essay, that has not been matched by anyone I have encountered over the years!
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For Fukuyama to appropriate this body of thought he has to make a simple, strategic assumption. It is that ‘we can understand’ Kojève’s universal and homogeneous state as liberal democracy.footnote14 The crux of the matter is then easy to state: ‘Kojève’s claim that we are at the end of history . . . stands or falls on the strength of the assertion that the recognition provided by the contemporary liberal democratic state adequately satisfies the human desire for recognition.’footnote15 The incisiveness of this formulation is, unfortunately, not matched by Fukuyama’s response. Indeed, he never manages thereafter to hold the question steadily in his sights, still less to provide an unequivocal and authoritative answer. This failure is the chief source of the impression of systematic ambiguity left by his book. For the issue at stake, the satisfactoriness of liberal democratic recognition, is the best clue to the array of conflicting appearances it presents. Moreover, to survey the variety of views Fukuyama seems to endorse on it is not simply to encounter a medley of contending strains, all with much the same claim to be the true voice of their author. Instead we find on one side a line of thought that seems lifeless, blinkered, without much sense of personal involvement. On the other there is a strong thread of argument, drawn out with energy, individuality and full awareness. It confronts and seems able to rebut in its own terms the claims of the first side without meeting any answering denial or even engagement. Hence, the theme of recognition can shed light on the question raised earlier of authenticity, of which are the deep and which the shallow features of Fukuyama’s position.
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The Influence of Leo Strauss
There is, to begin with, a line of thought comprising the indications that Fukuyama accepts the essentials of Kojève’s case. That he is in some measure disposed to do so is hardly surprising since they provide the theoretical basis of his official doctrine in its first version. Thus, for much of the time he seems content to take over the substance of Kojève, giving it a liberal democratic gloss. In this frame of mind the liberal democratic state is conceived of as providing a fully satisfying recognition on Kojèvian lines. That is to say, it recognizes all human beings universally ‘by granting and protecting their rights’.footnote16 Recognition becomes reciprocal ‘when the state and the people recognize each other, that is, when the state grants its citizens rights and when citizens agree to abide by the state’s laws’.footnote17 At times Fukuyama even outdoes Kojève in propounding the merits of this arrangement, as in the claim, surely absurd on any literal reading, that ‘The liberal democratic state values us at our own sense of self-worth.’footnote18 We seem here to be firmly grounded in the brave new, and historically final, world of liberal democracy. Yet a different and deeper note soon intrudes, growing more insistent as the discussion proceeds. To appreciate it fully one has to take account of another element in the intellectual background of Fukuyama’s work. This is the presence there of Kojève’s major critic and interlocutor, Leo Strauss. Their debate was sustained for over thirty years, chiefly by means of a correspondence which has now reached the public realm in the second edition of Strauss’s On Tyranny. footnote19 The influence of Strauss on Fukuyama is much less prominently advertised than is that of Kojève, surfacing only in copious footnotes. Yet it is no less significant.footnote20 Indeed, Fukuyama’s book may be read as the record of a struggle in which the latter has the better of things in the end. To read it in terms of this unacknowledged drama is to gain an otherwise unobtainable perspective on its many evasions and equivocations.
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The question of what is ‘more Marxist’ about such a vision may be set aside here, except to note the obvious distancing function of that description. What is important is that we appear to be at a strategic turning point in the argument. For Kojève’s abstract statism is surely being decisively rejected. The comments on it have every appearance of constituting a considered verdict, reached through a prolonged engagement, not to say infatuation, with its object. It crowns a spirited and committed movement of thought and the position being criticized is never rehabilitated thereafter. This is as close as we shall get to noting an authentic, principled shift in Fukuyama’s thinking. It provides both an obituary for his Kojèvianism and a clear indication of an alternative way forward. If the thesis that history ends in liberal democracy is to be sustained it is plainly not to the liberal democratic state that we should look for a consummating satisfaction. Instead we have to turn to the sphere of community life with its host of mediating institutions, to what is today generally referred to as ‘civil society’.
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Fukuyama’s thinking about these matters has another important dimension to consider. It consists in his awareness of a viable, indeed flourishing, alternative, even at the supposed end of history, to liberal democracy. Earlier he had noted that Asian societies offer a sense of community conspicuously absent from the contemporary United States.footnote40 Their ‘community-orientedness’, it now appears, is grounded not in contracts between self-interested parties but in religion or some near-substitute such as Confucianism.footnote41 The recognition they provide is a kind of ‘group recognition’ that is vanishing from the West. What the individual works for is the recognition that the group accords him and the recognition of the group by other groups.footnote42 He derives his status ‘primarily not on the basis of his individual ability or worth, but insofar as he is a member of one of a series of interlocking groups’.footnote43 The resulting emphasis on group harmony has, Fukuyama acknowledges, implications for political life. Even Japanese democracy looks, he observes, somewhat authoritarian by American or European standards, while elsewhere in Asia authoritarianism of a more overt variety is widespread.footnote44 Here we witness the raising of a spectre that comes increasingly to haunt the pages of Fukuyama’s book. The manner in which his focus gradually shifts from West to East in pursuit of it is itself a major aspect, as well as a symbol, of the complex dislocations that characterize the work.
The haunting power of this vision can be fully appreciated only if one notes another factor in the situation. It takes one back to the first of Fukuyama’s historical mechanisms, ‘the logic of advanced industrialization determined by modern natural science’. It is a logic which, according to a constant theme in his work, ‘creates a strong predisposition in favour of capitalism and market economics’.footnote45 He is equally constant in holding that it has no such tendency to favour liberal democracy. Indeed, democracy is, he assures us, ‘almost never chosen for economic reasons’.footnote46 More emphatically still, it has ‘no economic rationale’ and ‘if anything, democratic politics is a drag on economic efficiency’.footnote47 The reasons for this are in part rather familiar ones which have been articulated by Lee Kuan Yew and, in a more sophisticated form, by Joseph Schumpeter. The basic idea is that democracy interferes with economic rationality in decision making. It does so through its tendency to indulge in policies that sacrifice growth and low inflation to requirements of redistribution and current consumption.footnote48 In addition Fukuyama employs a more interesting and distinctive line of reasoning. It holds that ‘the individual self-interest at the heart of Western liberal economic theory may be an inferior source of motivation to certain forms of group interest’. Hence it is that ‘the highly atomistic economic liberalism of the United States or Britain’ becomes ‘economically counter-productive’ at a certain point. It does so when it begins to erode the work ethic on which capitalist prosperity ultimately depends.footnote49 Thus, the logic of the industrialization process would seem to point neither to liberal democracy nor to socialism but to what Fukuyama calls ‘the truly winning combination’ of liberal economics and authoritarian politics; that is to a ‘market-oriented authoritarianism’.footnote50 This projection of theory is, in his view, fully in line with the empirical evidence, for instance, the historical record of authoritarian modernizers as against their democratic counterparts.footnote51 It is borne out most strikingly by the contrast between the lack of ‘economic functionality’ shown by democracy in America in recent years and the economic success, indeed economic miracle, achieved by neo-Confucian, authoritarian capitalism in South-East Asia.footnote52
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It is time to draw some threads of this discussion together. The nub of the matter, it is now clear, is that both of Fukuyama’s historical regulators lead decisively away from liberal democracy. That system is economically dysfunctional and cannot provide satisfying recognition either. In each case the root cause of failure is the same, the radical individualism that corrodes the ties of community on which, ultimately, meaningful recognition and economic success alike depend. A less triumphal message would be hard to conceive. It tells us that the contemporary Western way of life is doomed, just as communism was and for essentially the same reason, an inability to resolve the fundamental contradictions of desire which have driven human history up to now. To point this out is in a sense to reach the outer limits of a programme of showing what may with confidence be inferred on the basis of Fukuyama’s argument. It is, however, a verdict of a somewhat negative kind. Given that we in the contemporary West are not experiencing the end of history, it is natural to wonder whether anything more positive might be said about the significance of the stretch of historical time through which we are passing. The complex theoretical apparatus Fukuyama has assembled might after all be expected to have some kind of intelligible perspective to offer on the current wanderings of history’s wagon train. To raise this issue is to be brought up at once against the looming presence of the alternative form of capitalism he calls ‘market-oriented authoritarianism’. The status of, and prospects for, this system need a closer look.
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https://newleftreview.org/issues/i202/articles/joseph-mccarney-shaping-ends-reflections-on-fukuyama
Philosopical Apprentice.
Editor: Reader if you are looking for an example of ‘The Cult Of Fukuyama’ let me offer this, via Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Rutgers University-Newark
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Within this impressive oeuvre, The End of History remains unparalleled as Fukuyama’s most theoretically ambitious work and the book that made him famous. Yet since the 1990s, The End of History has arguably acquired that status of a work whose title is repeatedly invoked, by scholars and pundits alike, but the actual content seldom seriously considered: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins readily come to mind as longstanding examples of that curious fate. Except that unlike these two other classics and highly esteemed works, Fukuyama’s book, like the essay that preceded it, has been mostly vilified by critics across the political spectrum. Leftists intemperately or condescendingly dismiss it, and fellow travelers within the bandwidth of right-wing liberalism harshly indulge in analogous dismissals, or similarly superficial invocations often caricaturizing its argument. Virtually everywhere across the scholarly political spectrum, the actual theoretical solvency and historical cogency of the work, including its actual argument, were skidded over, vulgarized, or simplified.4 Academic political theorists are not exception: within its precincts Fukuyama’s argument has been mentioned but largely unexamined. But for anyone who cares to dispassionately read the book, this is a work that belongs to a well-known genre: political theorizing qua philosophy of history. More specifically: it is best situated within a subcategory within it: philosophies of historical closure that narrate the present in terms of a historical terminus as part of a larger universal history. But not only that. The End of History constituted a genuinely original intervention in this field, one that repays serious consideration for its theoretical originality. Limitations of space preclude any comprehensive treatment of every aspect of Fukuyama’s construction of universal history. Instead, below are some observations about the basic conceptual, theoretical, and political architecture of his argument, and a brief consideration of its central claims about liberal democracy, the central theme in his narrative of universal history
August 2022
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file:///C:/Users/steph/Downloads/Vazquez-Arroyo-FukuyamasUH-Polity.pdf
Philosopical Apprentice