Fukuyama: Interesting Books, With Some Baggage.

• Author: Lemieux, Pierre

The End of History and the Last Man

By Francis Fukuyama

418 pp.; Free Press, 1992

Liberalism and Its Discontents

By Francis Fukuyama

192 pp.; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. It is an impressive book that has been much read and discussed. After its release, Fukuyama, a Stanford University political philosopher, wrote two other major works (in 2011 and 2014) that he says "rewrote" The End of History.

Now, he is out with Liberalism and Its Discontents, which, despite its relatively short length, provides key insights into the evolution of his thought. To evaluate this latest book, one must understand The End of History, and so this review examines both.

THE END OF HISTORY

The genesis of the 1992 book was a 1989 essay, titled simply "The End of History," that Fukuyama published in The National Interest. The essay and book appeared at a time of great promise: the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and China was opening to capitalism and experiencing internal demands for greater liberalization--until Tiananmen Square in 1989.

All this led Fukuyama to observe in The End of History that both "authoritarian states of the Right" and "totalitarian governments of the Left" had failed. With the democratization of many countries in the last part of the 20th century, he saw only capitalism and democracy as the triumphant forms of economic and political organization. It seemed that the whole of human history pointed in the direction of liberal democracy as the only regime consistent with "the nature of man as man." (In the 1992 book, Fukuyama often used "man" to mean "human being of whatever sex." In his latest book, he uses more politically correct terminology.)

This raises the question of whether there is, in fact, a direction to human history-that is, an end toward which it progresses. The ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle believed in cycles, not progress. The first Western conception of directional history was that of Christianity pointing to the end times and final judgement. Immanuel Kant, an Enlightenment philosopher who believed in human progress, thought that a universal history pointing to freedom could be written. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher who straddled the 18th and 19th century, whom Fukuyama presents as the first historicist philosopher, attempted to do such a universal history.

The "last man" in Fukuyama's book title is the sort of person who will live when history has reached its end--that is, when everybody is satisfied with society and no new social ideal will upset it. There will still be events, but no wars and history as such: nothing fundamental will change.

Historicism is the theory that immutable laws preside over the development of history. Karl Popper, the well-known philosopher of science, persuasively argued in a series of articles in Economica in 1944 and 1945 that such "laws" don't exist in the scientific sense; only historical trends exist, but their persistence is not guaranteed. Fukuyama did not claim more than that: in a 2006 afterword to a new printing of The End of History, he explained that he did not believe in a rigid form of historical determinism, only in "a broad historical trend toward liberal democracy."

Two processes / According to Fukuyama, human history develops around two processes. The first one, which he calls "the Mechanism," lies in the progress of natural science, driven by the desire for material goods, by military competition, and by human reason. Economic growth requires capitalism, a term that Fukuyama uses interchangeably with "the market" and "a liberal economy." The result of the first process was the development of liberalism in the sense of capitalism.

Central planning cannot support technological innovation, which requires an atmosphere of freedom as well as proper financial rewards, nor obtain the required information incorporated in market-determined prices. Fukuyama could have traced the latter idea to Friedrich Hayek, the classical-liberal economist who won a Nobel in economics in 1974. Comparing the former Soviet system or the Chinese economy before the death of Mao to the partly capitalist economies of the fast-growing Asian countries (notably Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) makes the point. A "universal capitalist economic culture" and a "universal consumer culture based on liberal economic principles" have thus been developing over the whole planet.

Fukuyama defines liberalism in terms of the rule of law and "certain individual rights or freedoms." It entails economic liberalism (or capitalism)--that is, "the recognition of the right of free economic activity and economic exchange based on private property and markets." This looks like classical liberalism and Fukuyama says it is; as we shall see, the picture is a bit more complicated.

The Mechanism of modern natural science "creates a strong predisposition in favor of capitalism" but does not necessarily produce liberal democracy, despite the strong correlation between the two systems. Authoritarian capitalism can also result, Fukuyama emphasizes.

To this Marxian-like economic interpretation of history, he adds a parallel process driven by what Hegel saw as the third component of the human soul besides reason and desire for material comfort: man's desire for recognition, what Plato called thymos. Men, or at least some men, are willing to fight and risk their lives to have their dignity recognized. This second strand in Fukuyama's theory owes a lot to Hegel's political philosophy and its interpretation by French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve (who was also influenced by Marx).

For Fukuyama, in short, man longs for "a political system that would institutionalize universal recognition." This system is democracy--that is, popular sovereignty or the equal sharing of political power. It satisfies every man's thymotic longing for dignity and recognition.

Enemies of liberalism / According to Fukuyama, liberal democracy is a combination of liberalism, which satisfies the desire and reason components of the soul, and democracy, which satisfies the thymotic part. Between liberalism and democracy, The End of History gives precedence to the second term: the right to participate in political power is the most important of liberal rights. By adding thymos to the standard classical liberalism defended by John Locke and most modern liberals--and notably of the Anglo-Saxon variety-Fukuyama claims to defend "a higher understanding of modern liberalism."

Although Hitler and Stalin represent "bypaths of history that led to dead ends," Fukuyama realized that liberal democracy could meet obstacles on the path to the end of history. One danger would be a drift into extreme equality at the cost of freedom. The more equal society becomes, the more remaining small inequalities seem to stand out. As a result...