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Democracy is the end
The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled "The End of History?" which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government," and as such constituted the "end of history." that is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today's stable democracies, like the United States, France, or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.What is "the end of history"?
. . . what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times. This understanding of History was most closely associated with the great German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. It was made part of our dail intellectual atmosphere by Karl Marx, who borrowed this concept of History from Hegel, and is implicit in our use of words like "primitive" or "advanced," "traditional" or "modern," when referring to different types of human societies. For both of these thinkers, there was a coherent development of human societies from simple tribal ones based on slavery and subsistence agriculture, through various theocracies, monarchies, and feudal aristocracies, up through modern liberal democracy and technologically driven capitalism. This evolutionary process was neither random nor unintelligibile, even if it did not proceed in a straight line, and even if it was possible to question whether man was happier or better off as a result of historical "progress."Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies were not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisified its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx is was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no fruther progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all the really big questions had been settled.
. . . While this book is informed by recent world events, its subject returns to a very old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy? The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other to do with what is termed the "struggle for recognition."
It is of course not sufficient to appeal to the authority of Hegel, Marx, or any of their contemporary followers to establish the validity of a directional History. In the century and a half since they wrote, their legacy has been relentlessly assaulted from all directions. The most profound thinkers of the twentieth century have directly attacked the idea that history is a coherent or intelligible process; indeed, they have denied the possibility that any aspect of human life is philosophically intelligible. We in the West have become thoroughly pessimistic with regard to the possibility of overall progress in democratic institutions. This profound pessimism is not accidental, but born of the truly terrible political events of the first half of the twentieth century--two turning of science against man in the form of nuclear weapons and environmental damage. The life experiences of the victimes of this past century's political violence--from the survivors of Hitlerism and Stalinism to the victims of Pol Pot--would deny that there has been such a thing as historical progress. Indeed, we have become so accustomed by now to expect that the future will contain bad news with respect to the health and security of decent, liberal, democratic political practices that we have problems recognizing good news when it comes.
All of these developments, so much at odds with the terrible history of the first half of the century when totalitarian governments of the Right and Left were on the march, suggest the need to look again at the question of whether there is some deeper connecting thread underlying them, or whether they are merely accidental instances of good luck. By raising once again the question of whether there is such a thing as a Universal History of mankind, I am resuming a discussion that was begun in the early nineteenth century, but more or less abandoned in our time becuase of the enormity of events that mankind has experienced since then. While drawing on the ideas of philosophers like Kant and Hegel who have addressed this question before, I hope that the arguments presented here will stand on their own. The unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it, for two reasons. In the first place, technology confers decsisive military advantages on those countries that possess it, and given the continuing possibility of war in the international system of states, nostate that values its independence can ignore the need for defensive modernization. Second, modern natural science estalishes a uniform horizon of economoic production possibilities. Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires. This process guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances. All countries undergoing economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralized state, urbanize, replace traditional forms of social organization like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. such societies have become increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism. The experiences of the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries indicate that while highly centralized economies are sufficient to reach the level of industrialization represented by Europe in the 1950s, they are woefully inadequate in creating what have been termed complex "post-industrial" economies in which information and technological innovation play a much larger role.
Industrialization is no guarantee of political liberty
But while the historical mechanism represented by modern natural science is sufficient to explain a great deal about the character of historical change and the growing uniformity of modern socieities, it is not sufficient to account for the phenomenon of democracy. There is no question but that the world's most developed countries are also its most successful democracies. But while modern natural science guides us to the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy, it does not deliver us the Promised Land itself, for there is no economically necessary reason why advanced industrialization should produce political liberty. Stable democracy has at times emerged in pre-industrial socieities, as it did in the United States in 1776. On the other hand, there are many historical and contemporary examples of technologically advanced capitalism coexisting with political authoritarianism, from Meiji Japan and Bismarckian Germany to present-day Singapore and Thailand. In many cases, authoritarian states are capable of producing rates of economic growth unachievable in democratic societies.Our first effort to establish the basis for a directional history is thus only partly successful. What we have called the "logic of modern natural science" is in effect an economic interpretation of historical change, but one which (unlike its Marxist variant) leads to capitalism rather than socialism as its final result. The logic of modern science can explain a great deal about our world: why we residents of developed democracies are office workers rather than peasants eking out a living on the land, why we are members of labor unions or professional organizations rather than tribes or clans, why we obey the authority of a bureaucratic superior rather than a priest, whey we are literate and speak a common national language.
Marx is old hat
But economic interpretations of history are incomplete and unsatisfying, because man is not simply an economic animal. In particular, such interpretations cannot really explain why we are democrats, that is, proponents of the principle of popular sovereignty and the guarantee of basic rights under a rule of law. It is for this reason . . . [that] an account seeks to recover the whole of man and not just his economic side. to do this, we return to Hegel and Hegel's non-materialist account of Hisotry, based on the "struggle for recognition."Hegel is in
According to Hegel, human beings like animals have natural needs and desires for objects outside themselves such as food, drink, shelter, and above all the preservation of their own bodies. Man differs fundamentally from the animals, however, because in addition he desires the desire of other men, that is, he wants to be "recognized." In particular, he wants to be recognized as a human being, that is, as a being with a certain worth or dignity. This worth in the first instance is related to his willingness to risk his life in a struggle over pure prestige. For only man is able to overcome his most basic animal instincts--chief among them his instinct for self-preservation--for the sake of higher, abstract principles and goals. According to Hegel, the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to seek to make the other "recognize" their humanness by staking their lives in a mortal battle. When the natural fear of death leads one combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born. The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige. And precisely because the goal of the battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first glimmer of human freedom.The struggle for recognition
The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western political philosophy, and constitutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human personality. It was first described by Plato in the Republic, when he noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos, or "spiritedness." Much of human behavior can be explained as a combination of the first two parts, desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things outside themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get them. But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today's popular language we would call "self-esteem." The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos. It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they ahve a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger. Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride. The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.Hegel and human rights
By Hegel's account, the desire to be recognized as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to the death for prestige. The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death. But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have characterized the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves. The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way whatsoever. But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as well, because he was not recognized by other masters, but slaves whose humanity was as yet incomplete. Dissatisfaction with the flawed recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a "contradiction" that engendered further stages of history.Hegel believed that the "contradiction" inherent in the relationship and lordship and bondage was finally overcome as a result of the French and, one would have to add, American revolutions. These democratic revolutions abolished the distinction between master and slave by making the former slaves their own masters and by establishing the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The inherently unequal recognition of masters and slaves is replaed by universal and reciprocal recognition, where every citizen recognizes the dignity and humanity of every other citizen, and hwere that dignity is recognized in turn by the state through the granting of rights.
Anglo-Saxons and human rights
This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of contemporary liberal democracy differs in a significant way from the Anglo-Saxon understanding that was the basis of liberalism in countries like Britain and the United States. In that tradition, the prideful quest for recognition was to be subordinated to enlightened self-interest--desire combined with reason--and particularly the desire for self-preservation of the body. While Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison believed that rights to a large extent existed as a means of preserving a private sphere where men can enrich themselves and satisfy the desiring parts of their souls, Hegel saw rights as ends in themselves, beause what truly satisfied human beings is not so much material prosperity as recognition of their status and dignity. With the American and French revolutions, Hegel asserted that history comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process--struggle for recognition--has now been satisfied in a society characterized by univeral and reciprocal recognition. No other arrengment of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible.The desire for recognition, then, can provide the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics . . . Desire and reason are together sufficient to explain the process of industrialization, and a large part of economic life more generally. But they cannot explain the striving for liberal democracy, whichultimately arises out of thymos, the part of the soul that demands recognition. The social changes that accompany advanced industrialization, in particular universal education, appear to liberate a certain demand for recognition that did not exist among poorer and less educated people. As standards of living increase, as populations become more cosmopolitan and better educated, and as society as a whole achieves a greater equality of condition, people begin to demand not simply more wealth but recognition of their status. If people were nothing more than desire and rason, they would be content to live in market-oriented authoritarian states like Franco's Spain, or a South Korea or Brazil under military rule. But they also have a thymotic pride in their own self-worth, and this leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognizing their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realization that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition.
An understanding of the importance of the desire for recognition as the motor of history allows us to reinterpret many phenomena that are otherwise seemingly familiar to us, such as culture, religion, work, nationalism, and war . . . A religious believer, for example, seeks recognition for his particular gods or sacred practices, while a nationalist demands recognition ofr his particular linguistic, cultural, or ethnic group. Both of these forms of recognition are less rational than the universal recognition of the liberal state, because they are based on arbitrary distinctions between sacred and profane, or between human social groups. For this reason, religion, nationalism, and a people's complex of ethical habits and customs (more broadly "culture") have traditionally been interpreted as obstacles to the establishment of successful democratic political institutions and free-market economies.
But the truth is considerably more complicated, ofr the success of liberal politics and liberal economics frequently rests on irrational forms of recognition that liberalism was supposed to overcome. For democracy to work, citizens need to develop irrational pride in their own democratic institutions, and must also develop what Tocqueville called the "art of associating," which rests on prideful attachment to small communities. These communities are frequently based on religion, ethnicity, or other forms of recognition that fall short of the universal recognition on which the liberal state is based. The same is true for liberal economics. Labor has traditionally been understood in the Western liberal economic tradition as an essentially unpleasant activity undertaken for the sake of the satisfaction of human desires and the relief of human pain. But in certain cultures with a strong work ethic, such as that of the Protestant entrepreneurs who created European capitalism, or of the elites who modernized Japan after the Meiji restoration, work was also undertaken for the sake of recognition. To this day, the work ethic in many Asian countries is sustained not so much by material incentives, as by the recognition provided for work by overlapping social groups, from the family to the nation, on which these societies are based. This suggests that liberal economics succeeds not simply on the basis of liberal principles, but requires irrational forms of thymos as well.
The struggle for recognition provides us with insight into the nature of international politics. The desire for recognition that led to the original bloody battle for prestige between two individual combatants leads logically to imperialism and world empire. The relationship of lordship and bondage on a domestic level is naturally replicated on the level of states, where nations as a whole seek recognition and enter into bloody battles for supremacy. Nationalism, a modern yet not-fully-rational form of recognition, has been the vehicle for the struggle for recognition over the past hundred years, and the source of this century's most intense conflicts. This is the world of "power politics," described by such foreign policy "realists" as Henry Kissinger.
But if war is fundamentally driven by the desire for recognition, it stands to reason that the liberal revolution which abolishes the relationship of lordship and bondage by making former slaves their own masters should have a similar effect on the relationship between states. Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than otherw with a rational desire to be recognized as equal. A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another's legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values. Nationalism is currenlty on the rise in regions like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union where peoples have long been denied their national identities, and yet within the world's oldest and most secure nationalities, nationalism is undergoing a process of change. The demand for national recognition in Western Europe has been domesticated and made compatible with universal recognition, much like religion three or four centuries before.
The last man
. . . . the creature who emerges at the end, the last man. . . in the course of the original debate over the National Interest article, many people assumed that the possibility of the end of history revolved around the question whether there were viable alternatives to liberal democracy visible in the world today. There was a great deal of controversy over such questions as whether communism was truly dead, whether religion or ultranationalism might make a comeback, and the like. But the deeper and more profound question concerns the goodness of liberal democracy itself, and not only whether it will succeed against its present-day rivals. Assuming that liberal democracy is, for the moement, safe from external enemies, could we assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefinitely? Or is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system? There is no doubt that contemporary democracies face any number of serious problems, from drugs, homelessness and crime to environmental damage and the frivolity of consumerism. But these problems are not obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles, nor so serious that they would necessarily lead to the collapse of society as a whole, as communism collapsed in the 1980s.Writing in the twentieth century, Hegel's great interpreter, Alexandre Kojčve, asserted intransigently that history had ended because what he called the "universal and homogeneous state"--what we can understand as liberal democracy--definitely solved the question of recognition by replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and equal recognition. What man had been seeking throughout the course of history--what had driven the prior "stages of history"--was recognition. In the modern world, he finally found it, and was "completely satisfied." this claim was made seriously by Kojčve, and it deserves to be taken seriously by us. For it is possible to understand the problem of politics over the millennia of human history as the effort to solve the problem of recognition. Recognition is the central problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism, and the desire to dominate. But while it has a dark side, it cannot simply be abolished from political life, because it is simultaneously the psychological ground for political virtues like courage, pbulic-spiritedness, and justice. All political communities must make use of the desire for recognition, while at the same time protecting themselves from its destructive effects. If contemporary constitutional govenrment has indeed found a formula whereby all are recongized in a way that nonetheless avoids the emergence of tyranny, then it would indeed have a special claim to stability and longevity among the regimes that have emerged on earth.
But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies "completely satisfying?" The long-term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question.. . we sketch two broad responses, from the Left and the Right, respectively. The Left would say that universal recongition in liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation's absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor, and therfore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognize equal people unequally.
The second, and in my view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution's commitment to human equality. this Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a "last man" who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced "men without chests," composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognized as greater than other, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above thos wants, the last man ceased to be human.
Following Nietzsche's line of thought, we are compelled to ask the following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recongition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a "last man" with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by "peace and prosperity" of contemporary liberal democracy? Does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition consittute the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies, but also in modern liberal democracies? Will not their future survival depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be recognized not just as equal, but as superior to others? And might ot the fear of becoming contemptible "last men" not lead men to asser themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial "first men" engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons?
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I thought of our last exchange as I keyed this in.
How can you detach your rights doctrine from this fellow?
FYI
Wonder why it took Fukuyama so much longer than others to get to the terminus of this dead-end road...and then only to wonder if that's really where he is.
For your consideration as you ponder the future.
I wish you could use your command of English to send this guy packing, but I doubt you could.
It's not so much the end, logos, its appeasement-- satisfaction confirmed--an eternal now that vies for your allegiance. What's the missing puzzle piece?
What's the missing puzzle piece?
What's missing? Why, anything outside of Man, of course. If Man is still dissatisfied once he has accomplished self-deification, which is the strongest implication of this piece (at least as I understand it), why are "we" struggling so hard to get there? And now that I mention it, where is "there?"
Fukuyama looks into his mirror...and sees nothing. He is Post-Modern Man personified.
Just finished reading "Suicide of the West" by Burnham. I couldn't believe it was written in the early '60s. If you haven't read it, you might want to. He basically says that liberalsim is a philosphy to comfort the grief of suicide. Liberal's guilt makes it impossible for them to do what is necessary to protect a society, and so they find ways to rejoice over it's incremental defeat. An anti-western dictator takes over a country where western (American) businessmen had interests and they rejoice "freedom and justice" without noticing that all his opposition is in jail or murdered and the standard of living for the people is half of what it was.
He is focused mostly on communism as the "enemy of the west" but I don't think these liberals need an enemy, they ARE the enemy. You can take this "spinning" right down the line. They rejoice in infant murder, they rejoice in acceptance of deviant behavior, they rejoice in rendering our grandchildren defenseless slaves of whatever tyranny should arise in the future. They are absolutely despicable, but they see themselves as "our saviours".
I had a copy of Burnham's that disappeared--had browsed in it, but never got to read it.
But there is a reason for the anti-communism of some that is different than those of today. Especially for Whittaker Chambers, who understood it was nothing else but a "last battle" between God and man.
I think he was right, because I believe the need for recognition stems from God having created man a little god. We are created in his image, we're told. The risk in creating little sovereigns includes the possibility for evil, seemingly inevitable: mutiny against the big sovereign.
Without such a framework, there is no such thing as evil. All that is left is interruptions against the equilibrium of atomized selves.
I agree with you, and so did Burnham. He recommended that in order to preserve western civilization we should do all we can to strenghten the institutions we have that make it strong; religion, the family, devotion to our Constitution and country. It ain't no accident that the things the liberals want to destroy the most are, you guessed it, religion, the family, the Constitution, and the nation itself. God Bless you, brother.
P.S.: Listen to Ravi Zacharias. He says Neitsche predicted that since man had "destroyed God" the Twentieth Century would be the bloodiest in history. Yup. He also said that without God man would turn either to hedonism or authoritarianism, that our choice without God was the phallus or the sword. Look around, we have the bloodiest century in history punctuated with casual acceptance of not only violence but casual acceptance of depravity and deviance, and those who celbrate these things lament that they can't satisfy their apetites with what is already available to them.
The short answer is, a rights doctrine is nothing more than a rights doctrine. It is not a religion, not a description of man, not even a pseudoreligion. Thank you for the flag, I'll read and reflect tomorrow, for possibly a beefier comment.
Thanks for the ping. From the reading I have done so far, it is apparent that Fukiyama has a weird interpretation of historical events and his version of the end of history as an ultimate form of government (liberal democracy) is bleak and depressing and just a little narrow minded. I look forward to reading more (and to finishing Francis Fukuyama as Teacher of Evil as well).
THIS FELLOW IS BOTH RIGHT AND WRONG
...so much at odds with the terrible history of the first half of the century when totalitarian governments of the Right and Left were on the march ...
Let's start here. Only historical ideologues, professionals who lean on somebody else's crutches, use this descriptive terminology. There is no characteristic difference between communisim and national socialism. Academics, overwhelmingly leftists, have stretched credulity far beyond the point of reason when they attempt to argue this point. They are forced to do this for practical reasons. The sale cannot be made if the customer is told that the car will only drive off a cliff.
State control of the means of production, invasive regulation of citizen's lives, forced movement of population groups, large and complex labor and prisoner camp systems, totally state controlled information outlets, one party political structures, militarism ... the list goes on and on, and both of the "types" outlined by this man have these elements in common.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and flys like a duck and swims like a duck, has waterproof feathers, a bill instead of a beak, and lays eggs, it's a duck.
Reject all contentions that there is any substantive difference between communism/socialism and fascism. Both of them are merely feudal monarchies designed by a public relations expert. And feudal monarchies are just better organized tribal structures, which in turn are extension of Jane Goodeall's mountain gorilla family group political structure
History has produced only two kinds of human government: the tribe and the democratically elected representative republic whose power is vested in legal concepts rather than people. All varieties of government not based on the latter are permutations of the former.
Second, modern natural science estalishes a uniform horizon of economic production possibilities. Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires.
Absolutely true, and a key to one of this man's central premises, to wit: the most dangerous threat to totalarianism is the washing machine.
All countries undergoing economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralized state, urbanize, replace traditional forms of social organization like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens.
Absolute truth and absolute crap. Here's the true part. Mass production (Henry Ford) is homogenization. Here's the false part. He says the traditional family must go. Absolutely wrong. Mass production requires a geographically stable work force -- and the family is the key to that. No family, no stable, dependable workers. No stable, dependable workers, no factory. No factory, no mass production. No mass production, no homogenization.
And, his implication that education must also be homogenized (become a factory) is completely wrong. Material homogenization is not a static force. The Model T was not the only car Ford ever made. The key to this man's eternal, unlimited economic growth lies in the area of product improvement. By definition, an improvement is a change. By definition, change requires thinking differently than the norm. By definition, thinking differently than the norm is not a product of an educational factory. Therefore, our factory schools retard, rather than aid, our factory economy. All elementary schools must teach children how to read and write, and about the physical elements of our universe and civic elements of our government. After that, which should be completed by the sixth grade (eighth grade at the latest) the educational system should blossom out into a myriad of different directions. New York's highschool of the dramatic arts is one example of this. Teens who are fascinated by mathematics should be allowed to focus on numbers in highschool. Children who like bugs should have a school to attend that focuses on the biological sciences. Children who like to work on cars should be able to attend a highschool with a metal shop the size of the football field.
Industrialization is no guarantee of political liberty
True, but misleading. Add the word "successful" in front of that sentence and industrialization becomes a guarantee of political liberty. This is because successful industrialization requires constant innovation. A static culture doesn't innovate. Industialization always fails in static cultures. That's why the Soviet Union collapsed. New methodology could not come from within, so it had to be acquired from without. Stolen. By definition a stolen idea already exists. That means the people you stole it from were ahead of you. This is why static cultures are always technologically behind. By definition they never come up with an idea first.
for there is no economically necessary reason why advanced industrialization should produce political liberty.
Wrong. As I proved above, advanced industrialization requires new ideas. New ideas do not come from a static culture. They only come from a culture where people are allowed to question established ideas. Thus, advanced industrialization is as tied to poliical liberty as your lungs are to breathing. You can't just have air and no lungs. YOu can't have just lungs and no air. YOu must have both or the system (in this case, you) doesn't work.
Well, that's enough for now. This fellow is pretty good. His premise that when an economy reaches a certain GNP the government immediately turns into a western democracy is a fascinating one. It perfectly matches the views of the greatest political philosopher in history, Niccolo Machiavelli.
The essence of Machiavelli is as follows: if the people decide to get pissed, any government can be brought down in a day. All politics, in other words, is local. All power always resides at the bottom, not the top. Uneasy lies the crown.
In the case of this fellow's philosophy, this driving force is the washing machine. Let women see one of those and unless they all get one, the heads of the mighty will fall.
Pure Machiavelli.
With apologies for any spelling errors above because this is first draft, I must go work on my secret new litarary project. So long, to all from the magnificient fishman.
State control of the means of production, invasive regulation of citizen's lives, forced movement of population groups, large and complex labor and prisoner camp systems, totally state controlled information outlets, one party political structures, militarism ... the list goes on and on, and both of the "types" outlined by this man have these elements in common.
And this is what Fukuyama opposes. That's what passes as conservatism. I've seen some ducks of odd color swim with the mallards.
Good critique.
I would like to add a few points:
While individual rights are a constant, their implementation in a society is forever in flux. That is because the social division of labor changes with technology. An agrarian society would have a social order different from an industrialized society, which is different from what we have today, and the social order that we have today will be changed in ways we cannot imagine. One imminent shift is the implementation of intellectual property rights. So, for that reason alone, I don't see the society or "history" coming to a happy end.
There is another force, too. The liberal democracy tends to evolve toward an increasingly complex social contract at the expense of individual natural rights. As conservatives we are painfully aware of it, and we are not in the mood to celebrate any happy end. The growth of government ensures lack of stasis. Either a mechanism is found to control it democratically, or the bloated bubble will burst.
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I'll have to re-read this and dissect it. Very interesting piece. Thanks for the heads up.
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The comment made about authoritarian states making techno-capitalism work even better ignores the fundamental economic position of pragmatic (as in non-orthodox) libertarianism which is also the basis of capitalism: authoritarian government is inherently a roadblock to broader capitalist growth; people are greedy, the less government you have, the more room for that greed to flourish. Thus in the short term countries like singapore can look all big and bad economically but they will never amass the megawealth and military power of a capitalist republic like the US because in a capitalist republic the government serves one main function: protect the rights of the people. So it comes down to this: the less government, the less taxes you'll have. The less taxes the more your economy will grow. The more your economy grows, the more revenues. So lighter taxes on a very rich economy are far more preferable to a government than heavy taxes on a moderate economy. Thus a capitalist republic has the advantage of a better economy and significantly more general funds than the authoritarian state.
No doubt that is what is so comforting about democracy, eh? What a wonderful world it is. Are you a Last Man?
It seems to me that I am surrounded by last men.
I work for an upstart B2B dot.com company that should be filled with dynamic "first men" going for capitalistic glory in a free marketplace.
Instead our corporate e-suggestion-box is filled with requests for increased benefits and quasi-fascistic requests for corporate give-aways.
Very few people seem concerned about the election, though I am noticing more bumper stickers than for the last election.
Everybody is just busy producin' 'n consumin'!
At first I was depressed and appauled by this, but then I thought: Nine times out of Ten when some "great" leader calls out the populace to join him in some "great" cause it is a VERY bad thing for the populace.
Maybe its better to be surrounded by "last men" so that I have the freedom to philosophize and do my thing without interference from the demagogues.
When Zarathustra "thus spake", I'm certain he didn't mention either Bush or Gore. These are "last men" candidates for a "last men" populace. They will tinker with the machinery a bit to fine-tune it a bit more to slightly decrease the chance of war and recession and slightly increase the chance of economic gain and peace.
Meanwhile the vast majority of mankind will continue to stick their collective head into the smallest hole they can fit it into ... namely the cosmos.
Don't tell me Aristotle was a Last Man after all?!
Of course not. He was a truly thoughtful and inciteful human philosopher.
My understanding of Fukuyama's work (and although I read his book "Trust" I only know "The End of History" from the blurbs) is that Last Men are very much like the average citizens of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".
These are the sorts of people that I see more and more each day. The funny thing is that these are probably the people that by and large have populated the world from the beginning of history: most people frankly just don't give a damn about anything that is more than about three feet in front of their faces.
Even if you limit yourself to the average Christian or religious person, you will get a bunch of folks who go to church for primarily traditional, family, or social reasons. If this weren't the case, then I might occasionally hear a sermon on the thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas or proofs for the existence of God, etc. but I have yet to hear any.
I even wonder how many of the "true believers" such as those who drove truck bombs to theirs (and others) deaths did it for purely religious or philosophical reasons. I wouldn't doubt it if it turned out that the majority of them did it out of some lower urge like revenge or self-loathing, or anger.
So if Fukuyama is right and all of the mujahadeen(sp?) turn in their surface-to-air missiles for palm pilots and health club memberships, that still doesn't mean we have to stop caring about the big issues. Just because no one is starting wars over them (and when can you positively say a war was ever started over truly deep philosophical issues rather than just some petty monetary or face-saving reasons) doesn't mean we can't have vigorous debates over them.
It might actually work out to our advantage if we are trying to gain converts to philosophizing: if there is little or no threat of war or violence attached with total commitment to one philosophical viewpoint or another, then more people may be willing to sign-up. People are willing to sacrifice a lot for a set of values, but often not basic security.
If I have a choice between philosophy with bombings or consumerism with the occasional mugging, I may choose consumerism.
If I have a choice between philosophy with ascetism or consumerism with angst/ennui/meaninglessness then I may very well choose philosophy!
I'll take an Aristotle/Acquinas combo with a side of Schopenhauer and a slice of Nietzshe for dessert ... oh yes ... and I WILL have fries with that!
FYI
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