Finding Fukuyama’s Ends
Unraveling the intricate theories of Francis Fukuyama, we embark on a journey to comprehend his vision of 'The End of History'. Delving into the depths of his philosophical perspectives, we explore the essence of his controversial 'Ends'.
After the End of History
Present geopolitical circumstances beg for renewed consideration of Fukuyama’s wager about the providential ascendance of liberal democracy.
- In a series of fireside-chat style interviews with Mathilde Fasting, a fellow at the Norwegian think tank CIVITA, the historian covers a lot of terrain, from his disenchantment with poststructuralism as a graduate student in the 1970s to reflections on his many weighty volumes, including The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
Fukuyama’s latest book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, takes up in a chapter called “Is Identity Politics a Question of Thymos?” a familiar quasi-Marxist reading of our cultural political situation.
In line with scholars such as Mark Lilla, Fukuhama sees the efflorescence of identity politics as a symptom of class antagonism and the desire for human dignity.
- Using Plato’s notion of thymos (recognition) in order to understand the politics of grievance and ressentiment, with respect to either Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, or the “Make America Great Again” crowd.
The End of History?
Fukuyama argued that the disintegration of the Soviet Union signaled the “total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives” to the “unabashed victory” of “economic and political liberalism.”
- He drew heavily on Alexander Kojève’s mid-twentieth century reading of Hegel and especially his reception of the French Revolution.
- Hegel felt that the revolution was a concrete instantiation of the principles of liberty and equality.
- Napoleon’s victory over the Prussian monarchy in the Battle of Jena in 1806 seemed to herald an “absolute moment” wherein the philosophical demand for freedom found a kind of final (world-historical) political realization.
The Unipolar Moment
Fukuyama’s wager provided crucial philosophical texture for accounts of the so-called “unipolar moment” of US hegemony in the 1990s
- The economic and ideological determinism of the post-Cold War period held that liberal internationalism and geoeconomics had transcended geopolitics, political ideology, and geography; market liberalization was producing political liberalization
- September 11, 2001 marked “the end of the end of history” and the triumph of Samuel Huntington’s thesis about a clash of civilizations
- A dozen or so years later, the tragic language of great power politics has seized the US foreign policy establishment
- We are in a “multipolar moment” characterized by “inter-state strategic competition”
- “The post-World War II liberal world order remains in an identity crisis. The exponential forces of complex interdependence and hyper-globalization are hard to identify and impossible to disaggregate.”