The End of History and the Last Man.

AuthorBinder, Guyora
  1. The Curtain Parts

    Forty years a firmament dividing East and West, Left and Right, State and Market, the iron curtain one day crumbled like so much meringue. With it crumbled many realities and realisms that once seemed hard as gunmetal: the determination of international relations by the interests and relative strength of military elites, the total control of totalitarian states over their societies, the pseudosophisticated view that, in Francis Fukuyama's phrase, "nation-states [are] like billiard balls, whose internal contents, hidden by opaque shells, are irrelevant in predicting their behavior" (p. 248). The shells cracked, the curtain parted, and the intractable reality that force rules politics was, at least for the moment, exposed as mere appearance.

    In a chapter of his Phenomenology entitled "Force and Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World,"(1) Hegel evokes the vertigo we experience at such moments, when the forces that rule our world are revealed to be contingent interpretive constructs. We need simplifying generalizations to order our world, and living in an ordered world means treating its regularities as real, its particularity as ephemeral, even illusory. But when regularity itself proves ephemeral, we are reminded that our world was always capable of infinitely varied interpretation. At such moments theories abound, interpretive constructs sell for a quarter on every corner, while contingency and change seem like the only constants. Our world inverts and the rainbow seems realer than the laws of Optics.(2)

    The experience of this inversion, in which the world suddenly seems much realer than our ideas of it, paradoxically propels us toward idealism. At the moment when the proud mind - its expectations dramatically defeated - might be expected to yield in humility to events, it is distracted by its own reflection. "How wrong I was," it marvels, "but how powerful. For the past forty years, it is I who have ruled the world - not national interest, not nuclear balance, not military force, not totalitarian bureaucracy - but I who imagined each of these forces."

    Just when events clamor for our attention, we become most conscious of the operation of our minds in structuring and interpreting the world of events. The really momentous changes, the real discontinuities, it then seems, are in the realm of thought rather than events. And so our gaze focuses through events, at ourselves.(3)

    Th[e] curtain ... hanging before the inner world is withdrawn, and we have here the inner being gazing into the inner realm .... [W]hat we have here is Self-consciousness. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain, which is to hide the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go behind there, as much in order that we may thereby see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.(4)

    So today as we gaze in wonder, eastward or westward as geography dictates, at the spectacle exposed by the withdrawal of the iron curtain, we are searching for ourselves. We now see that the curtain was not only the boundary of our world, but the contour of our own minds, a boundary of our own creation, defining the conceivable and delimiting the visible. In a world undivided between communism and capitalism, how will we define ourselves? Where will our new boundaries be?

    As if to confirm Hegel's derivation of idealist metaphysics from the experience of contingency, many observers have turned to Hegel for aid in accounting for communism's unforeseen collapse and in imagining the world to follow. This review essay examines two such Hegelian responses to the events of 1989, The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama(5) and Civil Society and Political Theory by Jean Cohen(6) and Andrew Arato.(7)

    Fukuyama reads the collapse of communism as the millenarian triumph of liberalism and the end of meaningful struggle over values in international politics. Following Marx' famous claim to have inverted the Hegelian dialectic,(8) Fukuyama sets out to show that to discredit Marx' philosophy of history is to vindicate Hegel's. Fukuyama's portrayal of Hegel as the prophet of liberalism is notable for the interest it has excited rather than for the agreement it commands or deserves.

    Part II of this essay explains this notoriety by reference to the convergence of two developments: a gradual shift in the public function of the American intellectual from engineer to ideologue, coinciding with the ideological void suddenly created across the American political spectrum by the mutually entailed collapse of communism and obsolescence of cold war liberalism. Both developments have opened America to the influence of European political thought, which maintains a lively engagement with Hegel.

    Unfortunately, by caricaturing Hegel as little more than a cold-war liberal, Fukuyama deprives him of much of his ability to fill the ideological void left in the cold war's wake. Part III shows that the liberal values Fukuyama finds implicit in Hegel lose much of their content when removed from the context of the cold war. Fukuyama claims that an innate human drive for recognition, discovered by Hegel, has dictated the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy over communism. Yet Hegel warned that the demand for recognition could not be met merely by freeing markets or limiting states. Recognition required not only private property, but also social insurance sustaining a network of civil association. Moreover, Hegel warned, such a strategy of insulating civil society from market competition could not be universalized without interfering with the functioning of the market. Hence, Hegelian political theory suggests that recognition demands more than cold war liberalism and occasions intractable conflict. Rather than initiating the ideological innovation we will need to confront these challenges, The End of History denies its necessity.

    Civil Society and Political Theory, though destined by its density and bulk to be much less read, is significantly more responsive to the normative restlessness of Fukuyama's readers. In this volume, Arato and Cohen identify the collapse of communism with the revolt of what Hegel called "civil society" against the state. Part IV explains this revival of Hegel's concept by reference to a common frustration experienced by reform movements on both sides of the iron curtain. Both movements reluctantly concluded that seizing the state was both impracticable and undesirable. Yet the emergence in Eastern Europe's command-economy states of a private sector necessarily distinct from the market refuted the cold war's premise that state and market were exhaustive categories. To the West's dispirited reformers, Cohen and Arato bring welcome tidings: the East's "civil society" strategy proves that reform is possible outside the state.

    If Fukuyama pronounces the death of bipolarity in international politics, then Cohen and Arato pronounce its death in domestic politics. In so doing they reassert the relevance of Hegel's emphasis on association as the context for the recognition denied not only by state control, but also by consumer "choice." Part V exphcates Cohen and Arato's strategy for reviving civil society, but reasserts Hegel's warning that the simultaneous sustenance of markets and civil society for some may depend upon an international context in which these institutions are not available to all.

    Hence, a weakness common to both books is that their appropriation of Hegel is partial and Panglossian. Hegel was not only an idealist who thought the world was made by thought; he was also a realist who knew that social contradiction, for all the artificiality of its origins, could not be wished away. Hegel, like Adam Smith before him and Marx after him, viewed markets as at once liberatory and destructive. He saw a welfare state, mediated by a rich network of civil association, as an ingenious defense against the destructive tendencies of markets, but one that could not be universalized. The nation-state could deflect, but not eliminate, the corrosive force of a global market. In turning to Hegel to explicate the overthrow of utopian Marxism, we risk forgetting how much of Marx - and how little of his utopianism - was anticipated by Hegel.

  2. Not the End of Ideology

    In 1989 and 1990 enough popular periodicals to fill a long footnote reported that an obscure official at the State Department had announced the end of history in the pages of a little known neoconservative journal.(9) What made this event newsworthy? Surely not the end of the cold war which, though newsworthy enough, was, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, plain for all to see. No, the man-bites-dog aspect of the story was the official's celebration of the collapse of communism in the millenarian language that Marxists might have used to celebrate its triumph. While most Americans read the Eastern European rejection of communism as the ultimate refutation of Marx, Francis Fukuyama saw it as the ultimate vindication of the thinker best known to Americans as Marx' mentor, Hegel.

    Although the oddity lay partly in Fukuyama's reclaiming Hegel for capitalism, there was a deeper anomaly: For what, at its moment of triumph, did capitalism need Hegel? Thus, the real oddity lay in Fukuyama's effort to invoke capitalism in support of a tradition of philosophical history more commonly associated with capitalism's critique.

    To appreciate fully this anomaly we have to go back a generation. To the young scholars who peopled American universities in the wake of World War II, the twin enemies of fascism and communism embodied the dangers of ideology. Not the self-conscious aesthetes described by Fitzgerald a generation earlier,(10) nor the restless beats Richard Farina would later evoke,(11) these were veterans, hardheaded practical men, used to getting with the program, getting the job done, taking orders, and taking charge.(12)...

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