On 'The End of History?'
Revisiting Francis Fukuyama
Dear Friends,
For my pieces here, I’m exploring classic essays. The idea is two-fold: to revisit through the essays ideas that have had a pervasive influence in the culture and then to offer my own critique of those essays.
Best,
Sam Kahn
ON ‘THE END OF HISTORY’
Has there ever been an essay as famous or influential as Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History?’
The essay’s trajectory out in the world followed a sort of Platonic ideal of how essays are supposed to work—the sort of thing that never actually happens in real life. Fukuyama published the essay in the fairly obscure magazine The National Interest in 1989. The article was long, dense, and interesting. It was picked up, with startling rapidity by the cultured classes and the foreign policy establishment—and represented the idea that defined an era. I’m really amazed how often I come across references to the essay. Probably more often than not, these are mocking—something terrible happens and it’s a reminder that ‘history’ is still very much alive—and they are answered pretty much always by ripostes from Fukuyama’s fervent admirers (of which there are many) contending that the end of history did not mean that nothing would ever happen again. In a sense, the disclaimers on the essay have become better known than what the essay itself was saying.
I’ve read various arguments on one side or another of the essay—has it been disproven by this or that event?, etc—and I’ve read much of the book Fukuyama wrote embroidering upon it, but, here, I’d like to discuss just the essay itself.
Fukuyama’s central thesis—and this often gets glossed over in the ‘mass marketization’ of his ideas—is Hegelian. Hegel believed that there was an arc to history, that, as Fukuyama writes, “history culminated in an absolute moment—a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.” For Hegel, that moment was, of all the obscure pieces of trivia, the Battle of Jena in 1806— although that’s not quite as arbitrary and propinquitous as it sounds. Jena marked the victory of ‘the ideals of the French Revolution’ at the expense of the old European monarchies—and pointed towards, as Fukuyama writes, “the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality.” That ‘end of history’ appeared to have been short-lived—the European monarchies came roaring back, the French Revolutionary forces defeated only a few short years later—but the central thesis of Fukuyama was that Hegel was essentially right, with the shape of the end of history discernible in 1806 but made apparent by the emergence of the Common Market in the aftermath of World War II and then, above all, by the collapse of liberalism’s great rival, the Communist system, in the 1980s. Fukuyama wrote:
The century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an ‘end of ideology’ or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism. What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
The disclaimers abound from there. Fukuyama is quick to say, in the very next breath, “that there will be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’ yearly summaries of international relations.” He is not—as in the straw man version of his argument—positing on end to violence or conflict. But Fukuyama’s claim is nothing if not ambitious. And what is most ambitious—and distinctively Hegelian—is the twist that ‘the end of history,’ which was viewed by virtually all of Hegel’s intellectual followers as leading to Marx’s dialectical materialism or to some sort of absolutism, turned out to be nothing more glamorous than market capitalism combined with elections. The grandly-named ‘universal homogenous state’ of Hegelian theory was, when the curtain was ripped away, “precisely those flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward-looking, weak-willed, post-World War II states whose grandest project was nothing more heroic than the creation of the Common Market,” as Fukuyama writes, while its content was “liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic.”
As in the Platonic image of all articles, there is something about Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History?’ that perfectly captures the playful, naive spirit of its time. Top-shelf theory could be invoked, but the theory was subordinate, ultimately, to the allure of the VCR. Much of the essay does not, in fairly literal terms, hold up well. There are the lines of breezy imperialism like “For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind.” There are the overly-confident predictions that China would rapidly and inevitably democratize; that the presence of Japanese electronics in Iran signified the failure of “the regime’s pretensions of restoring a state based on the rule of shariah.”
But dealing with the essay—as Fukuyama would wish us to—in the domain of Hegelian idealism, it has its limits as well. The most obvious and anachronistic failing is in Fukuyama’s facile pairing of “economic and political liberalism.” This seems to be a real piece of end-of-the-Cold-War naïveté that China’s rulers, for instance, did not at all share. Economic liberalism was one thing—it’s hard not to accept Fukuyama’s underlying idea that ‘the market economy’ had, within the logic of ideas, ‘proved itself’ against centralized planning—but if the last thirty years have shown us anything it’s that the free market is readily uncoupled from the pretense of democracy. That’s what China appears to have figured out, as has Putin, and so, on a smaller scale, have places like Singapore and the UAE. The main intellectual adversary Fukuyama contends with within the essay is a realpolitik school of thought embodied for Fukuyama by Charles Krauthammer. Fukuyama is at pains to explain that this time really is different—that the underlying truth of idealism and free markets will prevail over base considerations like geopolitical rivalries—but Krauthammer’s guess that Russia “shorn of Communism will revert to the behavior of 19th century imperial Russia” looks better in retrospect than Fukuyama’s predictions.
In a way, that fundamental mistake—that democratic freedoms follow inevitably from free markets—invalidates all by itself Fukuyama’s argument, but the flaws with the essay run even deeper than that. Fukuyama has a great ease in using the word ‘victory.’ He means it in the realm of Hegelian ideas, that one set of ideas proved their validity over another. But the terms of ‘victory’ appear to be ever-changing—and always self-serving to Fukuyama’s argument. The French Revolutionary ideas won, in Fukuyama’s framing, because they were so wonderful that their “theoretical truth is absolute and cannot be improved upon.” Meanwhile, the ideas of Fascism—treated here as a 20th century challenge to liberalism’s ascendancy—were disproven on the battlefield, or, more precisely, through the perception that the heightened militarism of Fascism contained a sort of self-destruct mechanism within itself. And, meanwhile, Communist central planning was disproven not exactly in material terms but because Gorbachev and his faction chose against it. These claims strike me as all connecting to very different domains: the ‘victory’ of Enlightenment principles of freedom and equality in the unsullied realm of ideas is very different from ‘victory’ over Fascism, which mostly had to do with Soviet soldiers out-toughing Nazis in Stalingrad and with Werner Heisenberg using heavy water rather than graphite for his atomic bomb project, and that is very different from ‘victory’ over Communism, which, in Fukuyama’s framing, was all about “a shifting of consciousness among elites” in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The issue—and this strikes me as being Hegel’s problem as much as Fukuyama’s—is that ideas map only imperfectly onto reality. It is difficult to claim, for instance, that Fascism was a viable intellectual challenge to liberalism but was somehow simultaneously disproven both in the realm of ideas and in the realm of reality by the battlefield defeat of Nazi Germany. The way of thinking about it that I would tend to subscribe to was that Fascism is at its core violent, militaristic, inhumane but that there are aspects of it that are appealing to the human psyche—and one can’t wish that it will somehow ‘lose’ in the sacrosanct realm of ideas; it loses if rival systems prove politically and militarily stronger than it. By aligning the ideational with the political, Hegel and his followers find themselves constantly attaching directions, inevitabilities, etc, to events that are either random or that, at best, are trends.
Again, follow out the logic of Hegel and one tends to arrive in a very deterministic, very militaristic place that has less resemblance to the vagaries of history. The Prussians lost at Jena in 1806 not because freedom and equality were can’t-be-improved-upon ideas but because Napoleon was a better battlefield general than his Prussian rivals. By 1812, that trend no longer prevailed. In 1989, with the failure of central planning, liberal democracy and free markets looked very good. By the 2010s and ‘20s, with free elections producing Trump, Bolsonaro, etc, with authoritarian China gaining ground economically on the U.S. and authoritarian regimes showing no inkling of reforming themselves, that sanguine view was no longer so easy to adopt.
I do not take these shifting trends to be a critique of liberal democracy—I find it to be a good system and, in a complicated world, about as close as a political system can apparently get to some basic accountability to the population-at-large—but they do point to the fundamental problem with Fukuyama and his school of thought, that politics is very unlikely to have any direction. Attempt to line up politics with a vision of ineluctable historical progress and one will find oneself invariably becoming disappointed that the system that one takes as ‘theoretical truth’ does not seem to be yielding quite the utopia implicit in a term like ‘the end of history.’
I have very little doubt that Fukuyama’s essay and the school of thought that come with it have created real harm in the world. In a thoughtful interview for Meduza, the Russian sociologist Grigory Yudin, discussing the rise of Putin and his politics of revanchism, pins much of the blame on ideas like Fukuyama’s that were circulating freely in the ‘90s. “There are some grounds for resentment in Russia. It’s related to the instructive role that the U.S. and some parts of Western Europe took on in the 1990s,” Yudin says. “It was the result of a profound ideological mistake: In the conditions of the socialist project’s collapse, it seemed to many that there was only one correct path, the famous ‘end of history.’” In Yudin’s framing, it was that arrogance of the would-be reformers that led to Putin and to the politics of resentment—“monstrous, endless resentment.” The project of capitalism, democratic elections, human rights, wasn’t itself so bad. It was—in Yudin’s analysis—the instructive tone of it, the idea that some ‘theoretical truth’ was being offered.
And Fukuyama’s approach had, I believe, real, unfortunate repercussions in what’s called ‘the developing world.’ Fukuyama’s naïveté is no longer so vivid as when he seems to view the arc of history as something that was worked out in Enlightenment salons and is in the process of being disseminated to the developing world. “The two world wars in this century and their attendant revolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending liberal principles spatially, such that the various provinces of human civilization were brought up to the level of its most advanced outposts,” writes Fukuyama in one of his lines that has not aged well. That philosophy—materialized in ‘developmental economics’—deemphasized the importance of place and culture, created a cult of the market and encouraged poor countries to join in common markets that continued to disadvantage them.
The most arresting part of Fukuyama’s essay is the last paragraph. Having been buoyant and relentlessly optimistic throughout the essay, Fukuyama’s tone suddenly shifts. He writes:
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.
It is hard not to be moved by this image—an updating of Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man.’ The vision is that we are condemned to progress - ineluctable, almost mathematically determined—but are sulky passengers along for the ride. As animals with clashing, chthonic drives, we might secretly prefer a bit of violence, a bit of ideological conflict, but capitalism and democracy have simply proven too wise and powerful: we are condemned to our own heaven. Fukuyama, however, seems not to notice that if he is nostalgic for the old way, then others might be as well. And if, as he writes in the essay’s evocative last line, “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again,” then it follows that the whole argument eats its own tail. If something as simple as boredom can be enough to restart history, then history must never really have ended, and the apparent triumph of liberal democracy in the 1980s and ‘90s was really just a hiatus in normally more acrimonious inter-state relationships.
Again, it becomes very important to distinguish between economics and politics. It is true that a world economy has a momentum of its own, that those who are not part of the market find themselves losing out to those who are. But markets are inherently amoral, and the simple establishment of a globalized market system is not what Hegel or Fukuyama would have had in mind. For history to have a direction—for there to be such a concept as the ‘end of history’—politics has to be involved; there has to be some notion that the optimal society has been worked out. Enlightenment liberals thought they were on the right track. Fukuyama felt that the emergence of democratic regimes around in the later part of the 20th century was the culmination of their vision. But if it turns out—as it seems to—that markets can cope perfectly well with authoritarian regimes, then democratic liberalism needs a different raison d’être from being the ‘theoretical truth’ and ‘end of history.’ For my money, democratic liberalism works because it’s more consonant than various flawed alternatives with individual freedoms. That’s invaluable—and it’s worth investing in and fighting for the system for that reason. But assign it more than that and one wanders down the primrose path to historicism and determinism, to forgoing critical judgement and believing that whatever the latest trend is is somehow expressive of ‘theoretical truth.’
Sam Kahn writes Castalia.
A salient point: "In a way, that fundamental mistake—that democratic freedoms follow inevitably from free markets—invalidates all by itself Fukuyama’s argument." This goes to your recent essay on Dubai, and it recalls a point I made frequently with hawkish friends during the Iraq War, that a McDonald's goes up on every street we claim to liberate.