Larvatus Prodeo

21 Responses to “Shortest Ever Francis Fukuyama”

1. 1 Mark
   Apr 8th, 2006 at 3:33 pm

   There’s an extremely good take by historian Perry Anderson on Fukuyama’s rewriting of history in The Nation.

   In the Republican camp, moreover, neoconservative intellectuals were only one, and not the most significant, element in the constellation that propelled the Bush Administration into Iraq. Of the six “Vulcans” in James Mann’s authoritative study on who paved the road to war, Paul Wolfowitz alone–originally a Democrat–belongs to Fukuyama’s retrospect. None of the three leading figures in the design and justification of the attack, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice, had any particular neoconservative attachments. Fukuyama is aware of this, but he offers no explanation, merely remarking that “we do not at this point know the origins of their views.” What, then, of his own location within the galaxy he describes? Here–it must be said that this is uncharacteristic–he smooths out the record. With a misleadingly casual air, he says that while he started out “fairly hawkish on Iraq” at a time when no invasion was envisaged, when one was later launched he was against it.

   In this his memory has failed him. In June 1997 Fukuyama was a founder, alongside Rumsfeld, Cheney, Dan Quayle, Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams and Jeb Bush, of the Project for the New American Century, whose statement of principles called for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity” to “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.” In January 1998 he was one of the eighteen signatories of an open letter from the project to Clinton insisting on the need for “willingness to undertake military action” to secure “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power,” and declaring that “the US has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps” to do so. Four months later, he was among those denouncing the lack of such action as a “capitulation to Saddam” and an “incalculable blow to American leadership and credibility” and spelling out just what measures against the Baath regime were required: “We should help establish and support (with economic, political, and military means) a provisional, representative and free government” in “liberated areas in northern and southern Iraq” under the protection of “US and allied military power.” In other words: an invasion to set up a Chalabi regime in Basra or Najaf, and to topple Saddam from this base.

   And -

   Fukuyama remains fully committed to the American mission of spreading democracy round the world, and the use of all effective means at the disposal of Washington to do so. His criticism of the Bush Administration is that its policies in the Middle East have been not only ineffective but counterproductive. The promotion of internal regime change by the right mixture of economic and political pressures is one thing. Military action to enforce it externally is another, conducive to misfortune. In reality, there is no sharp dividing line between the two in the imperial repertory. Fukuyama forgets the successful overthrow of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, of which Robert Kagan is the major historian–a triumph of political will that we can be sure Fukuyama applauded at the time. Today, in the wake of Iraq, he is concerned to distance himself from such forms of activism. He now explains there is no universal craving for freedom that insures democracy will emerge wherever a society is liberated from tyranny. Modern liberty typically requires certain levels of economic and social development for the habits needed to sustain it. These cannot be created overnight, but must be carefully nurtured over many years. Nor will neoliberal recipes relying on market incentives alone bring the necessary order and prosperity. For these a strong state capable of “good governance” is the essential condition, and a sensible American policy will often give precedence to fostering such state-ness over building democracy in the more dangerous parts of the world.

   In the service of this revision, Fukuyama disfigures his original construction. The End of History and the Last Man, he assures us, was actually an exercise in modernization theory. All he said was 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. This banalization of a complex argument in the philosophy of history is not just an effort to simplify its message for a wider audience; it has a bowdlerizing impulse. In the work that made Fukuyama’s name, 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. The concatenation between them was never quite pulled off in the theory, generating significant disjunctures toward the end of the story. But 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.” The mental universe of Alexandre Kojève was a long way from that of modernization theorists like Daniel Lerner and Gabriel Almond.

   If this vision now appears to be something of an encumbrance for Fukuyama, perhaps that is because it was a theory of mortal conflict. Hegel and Kojève were, each in his own time (Jena, Stalingrad), philosophers of war. Their legacy is too agonistic for the purposes of drawing a line between the newfound caution of the statecraft Fukuyama now recommends and the democratic hypomania of former friends at the Standard. The platitudes of modernization theory are safer. But there is a price to be paid for the drop in intellectual level to “Nation-Building 101″–the title, without excessive irony, of one of Fukuyama’s recent essays. As a run-of-the-mill social scientist, he is never less than competent. There is even, in his criticism of free-market recipes for development in poor countries, and in his call for strong public authorities, what could be read as a memory trace of his Hegelian formation: the idea of the state as the carrier of rational freedom. But the miscellaneous proposals with which America at the Crossroads ends–greater reliance on soft power, more consultation with allies, respect for international institutions–are of a desolating predictability, the truisms of every bien-pensant editorial or periodical in the land. The most that can be said of them is that in offering a bipartisan prospectus for the foreign policy establishment, they seal a well-advertised vote for Kerry and understanding with Brzezinski, who co-edits The American Interest with Fukuyama. There is not the faintest suggestion in these pages of any basic change in the staggering accumulation of military bases around the world, or the grip of the United States on the Middle East, let alone symbiosis with Israel. Everything that brought the country to 9/11 remains in place.

   Folks might want to read the rest.

2. 2 Rob
   Apr 8th, 2006 at 9:52 pm

   There is not the faintest suggestion in these pages of any basic change in the staggering accumulation of military bases around the world, or the grip of the United States on the Middle East, let alone symbiosis with Israel. Everything that brought the country to 9/11 remains in place.”

   What on earth does this peculiar author mean by that last sentence?

3. 3 Leinad
   Apr 8th, 2006 at 11:10 pm

   What kind of faux-rhetorical question is that?

4. 4 Cameron Riley
   Apr 9th, 2006 at 12:46 am

   Rob, What on earth does this peculiar author mean by that last sentence?

   Blowback

5. 5 Sacha
   Apr 9th, 2006 at 12:49 pm

   Off topic, but on Fukuyama – I remember thinking, when I heard the title and basic idea of his book (“The end of history” or something similar) in the early 90s, how ridiculous the idea of the book sounded – that liberal democracy was an endpoint.

6. 6 Gummo Trotsky
   Apr 9th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

   Sacha,

   As I’ve said before, I couldn’t get past the fact that he was seriously advancing a proposition that Sellars and Yeatmen advanced in jest in 1066 and All That. Still can’t. Now I can add to that the fact that he’s too embarassed to come out and say “Sorry, but got it wrong” and still analyses global politics in terms of a unipolar US-style Liberal Democratic ascendancy. And bases his prescriptions on pronouncements on that assumption.

7. 7 Mark
   Apr 9th, 2006 at 2:02 pm

   Actually, Gummo, I disagree, because I think the question of meaning in history is a serious one and if you read Fukuyama’s book it’s harder to refute than you might think. That’s not to say I agree with him.

8. 8 Cliff
   Apr 9th, 2006 at 2:24 pm

   Frankly, we still haven’t proved him wrong. Granted, we do seem to be moving away from liberal democracy, but hardly towards something new and better. If anything, the direction of world politics this century thus far has been decisively atavistic. Those who think Fukuyama has been proven wrong aren’t home free yet… he didn’t say life would be rosy after the end… but rather that we couldn’t get much better…. which is as good as saying that things will get worse, in my opinion. If we give this kind of interpretation to Fukuyama’s thesis then he appears to be frighteningly correct.

9. 9 cs
   Apr 9th, 2006 at 2:29 pm

   Great job by Perry.

   In Gummo’s link, I laughed at Fuky’s escape clause “historical time”. Hmmm, where to begin? History is about time past. Does Fuky mean “past time”? I don’t seem to be getting far …

10. 10 Major Anya
    Apr 9th, 2006 at 7:20 pm

    Thanks for giving us the brief version, well, until someone gave us the long one.

11. 11 Sacha
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 5:02 pm

    Sorry, when I wrote that comment a few days ago it wasn’t very well explained.

    I havn’t read his work, so this is only a comment on what I heard about what he wrote (and so might easily be based on a wrong impression) – anyway, it may be that liberal democracy is the end-point of political evolution in the near to medium future – but this could be known sometime in the medium-term future (say) – any science-trained person might say “how do you know that it’s the endpoint?! – you can’t predict the future!”

    This was why I thought it silly to assert that liberal democracy is the end-point. Plus, and this is more silly, but it seems rather self-centred to think that the end-point has happened NOW, in our lifetimes. Perhaps this reflects the scientist’s dislike for NOW to be somehow privileged and special.

    Someday, when I have some time (ha!), I’d like to look at his work.

12. 12 Mark
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 5:37 pm

    Sacha, he’s really not working with concepts such as “political evolution” but more with a Hegelian dialectic – the question he’s answering is “does history have an end?” with “end” being understood both as a goal and a point in time. It’s actually a bit of a glib reading to see him as saying that “liberal democracy” is that end – in fact there’s a much more pessimistic tone to his book overall.

    The question could be rephrased – what viable political alternatives now exist?

13. 13 Tyro Rex
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 6:19 pm

    but on Fukuyama – I remember thinking, when I heard the title and basic idea of his book (â€?The end of historyâ€? or something similar) in the early 90s, how ridiculous the idea of the book sounded – that liberal democracy was an endpoint.

    I certainly do not think the idea so ridiculous, but Fukuyama mistakes cause and effect. His thinking is not at all original in the sense that others, well before Fukuyama, saw the End of History, not as a celebration of Liberalism’s victory, but as a sign of its defeat.

    Here I would most strongly reference Guy Debord “Society Of The Spectacle”. He talks extensively about the return to ‘cyclical time’, which you can interpret as the end of the modernist project; the ‘Spectacle’ is an everlasting present: ‘What is Good, Appears; all that Appears is Good’

    The spectacle, considered as the reigning society’s method for paralyzing history and memory and for suppressing any history based on historical time, represents a false consciousness of time.

    Society Of the Spectacle, Chapter 6, paragraph 158.

    In his 1988 “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle” Debord writes;

    Spectacular domination’s first priority was to make historical knowledge in general disappear; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past. The evidence for this is so glaring it hardly needs further explanation. With mastery the spectacle organizes ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood.

    ( … )

    In France, it is a dozen years now since a president of the republic, long since forgotten but at the time still floating on the spectacle’s surface, naively expressed his delight at “knowing that henceforth we will live in a world without memory, where images chase each other, like reflections on the water.” Convenient indeed for those in business, and who know how to stay there. The end of history gives current-day power a pleasant break. Success is absolutely guaranteed in all of power’s undertakings, or at least the rumor of success.

    “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”, Part IV.

14. 14 Mark
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 6:26 pm

    Debord, here, is really more part of the postmodern moment which has something in common with “endism”.

    It’s worth emphasising that Fukuyama is a disciple of Strauss as well as of Kojeve/Hegel and thus believes in exoteric writing – one message for the masses, another for the “philosophers”.

    I argued this in a paper I recently wrote:

    It is best to deal with Strauss first, as in a sense and for the purposes of this paper, his thought is the most straightforward despite his interest in the arcanii imperii and his method of writing exoterically. Strauss, despite some equivocation designed to protect the figure of the philosopher from perception of his dangerous art, is an anti-liberal, but then so too are Heidegger and Schmitt. Strauss’ real importance does not lie in the trajectory that can be traced from his thought to contemporary neo-conservatism (though again work on this theme is valuable and necessary) but rather in the starkness of his answer, when stripped of its philosophical clothing, to a question common to both conservatives and liberals in modernity – how to govern despite the people. At heart, this is a Hobbesian question, and Hobbes is also obviously important for Schmitt. As Weber perceived, this question was also one that social democrats and indeed socialists faced, and the answer lies where he feared it did – in rationalisation and unfreedom. But is this also true for an era of unending war and symbolic politics? An era where the disconnect between the political and the polis has been already well entrenched? Strauss points to a qualified negative answer. His technique of rule is deception. Let the people identify enemies, identify with religion, and authority will be secured, while the philosophers rule in the chambers of power, without daring to speak their name. In Strauss’ interpretation of Plato, democracy is a thing to be held in contempt and his theory represents a manual of practices which disguise that contempt. The most seductive reading of Fukuyama is Straussian – one can ignore the surface text and attend closely to the theme of thymos. In Fukuyama’s Hegelian-Kojevian phenomenology of political affect, those who do not regard honour as the highest good, and those who are not prepared to die for a principle, are slaves driven by resentissment. Politics at the end of history, for Fukuyama, is animalistic, and desires are animal desires, and speech is just noise. It is the task of the Straussian philosopher to be fully human, and to encourage humanity through reintroducing the drama of the contest unto death, and this contest will certainly not take an economic form. There is no surprise at all that Kojeve corresponded both with Schmitt and Strauss, lauding both as fellow philospher kings, and that he was happy to substitute the capitalist West as the progenitor of the end state for his faux-Napoleon, Stalin. Nor is it surprising that Strauss, despite the approaching doom that German Jews like him faced, could write to Schmitt arguing that Schmitt’s concept of the political was insufficiently bellicose. Likewise, the content of the political is in a real sense irrelevant for Strauss and Fukuyama. What is important is that political virtue survives. The teleological end of history is welcome, but not so welcome perhaps as the conflagration of blood and iron that will usher it in.

15. 15 Tyro Rex
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 7:03 pm

    Mark, I am not so sure what is meant by “endism”. Certainly I think Debord held no illusions of the difficulty of his project, and I don’t think that he would ever say we were living in any sort of eschatonic time.

    Certainly I read something like this that you wrote;

    Strauss’ real importance does not lie in the trajectory that can be traced from his thought to contemporary neo-conservatism (though again work on this theme is valuable and necessary) but rather in the starkness of his answer, when stripped of its philosophical clothing, to a question common to both conservatives and liberals in modernity – how to govern despite the people.

    And immediately think of any number of the essays in the International Situationniste. Of course, their project not “to govern despite the people” but rather to live in spite of government.

16. 16 Mark
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 7:06 pm

    By “endism”, I’m referring to the sort of political utopianism that assumes that there’s an ideal state that will be reached after political struggle, T. Rex – the grandaddy of endists of course is Hegel. My argument would be that there’s heavy overtones of eschatology in endism.

    Anarchism, whether situationist or otherwise, is also a utopianism, but it’s a rather different species, I think.

17. 17 Tyro Rex
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 7:17 pm

    the grandaddy of endists of course is Hegel

    And a specific critique made of him by Debord (‘Hegel situates himself at the end of history’). I never got the notion that Debord ever really thought there was any end-state, only the constant struggle of the subject.

    Anarchists; I pity them their delusions. The road of Utopia leads straight to the gates of the Death Camp.

18. 18 Mark
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 7:20 pm

    That’s why I say that it’s a different species of utopianism – work on the self and on society as a struggle rather than “world-historical” classes, Geist, what have you…

    What do you mean about the “Death Camp”?

19. 19 Tyro Rex
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 7:35 pm

    In a utopia, there is an Ideal. Ideal actions, Ideal thoughts, Ideal humans. Soon it will be found that some people (at first) no longer (or never) live up to the Ideal; this is less than Perfect, and cannot be tolerated, therefore those people can/should/must be liquidated from the Perfection.

    Situationists, on the other hand, contained within itself the project “to destroy … the bourgeois ideal of happiness”. The SI were the direct inheritors of the project of Surrealism (via the Lettrist International), at least in the French section. They quickly degraded into a sect, excluding members with the same clinical efficiency of their Stalinist enemies. The project was flawed and doomed from the start, but then, I think of the words “to destroy … the bourgeois ideal of happiness” … and cannot but agree.

20. 20 Mark
    Apr 10th, 2006 at 7:58 pm

    Yes – that’s right – but there’s an alternative sense of utopia in that it can be an ideal held before us which we know we will never reach but which we try to instantiate in our time. That’s Benjamin’s “weak messianism” or Derrida’s “democracy to come”, if you like.

    I don’t know too much about the Situationists but the perspective I’m describing is characteristic of some non-violent anarchists.

21. 21 Sacha
    Apr 11th, 2006 at 12:14 am

    ‘Sacha, he’s really not working with concepts such as “political evolutionâ€? but more with a Hegelian dialectic – the question he’s answering is “does history have an end?â€? with “endâ€? being understood both as a goal and a point in time. It’s actually a bit of a glib reading to see him as saying that “liberal democracyâ€? is that end – in fact there’s a much more pessimistic tone to his book overall.

    The question could be rephrased – what viable political alternatives now exist?’

    Thanks Mark. What viable political alternatives now exist? Hmm… I’ll have to think about this… (!)

Leave a Reply

Please read the comments policy. If you would like an icon beside your comment, please register a Gravatar.

There is a Comments Preview function below the typing box which activates when you start typing.