Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”

Summary

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama was a foreign policy expert with an interest in Hegel. He published a little essay called “The End of History?” in which he argued that the Cold War was more than a rivalry between two superpowers or an experiment to find the most efficient way to organize an economy. Fukuyama thought it was the final chapter in a millennia-long struggle to find a way of life that satisfies our deep spiritual need for freedom and equality. Therefore the end of the Cold War would mark the end of History as such.

To argue that all of human history was coming to a conclusion was always a wild swing-for-the-fences argument but this one connected.

References

Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?"

Transcript

Note: this is transcribed using an online transcription service so it’s probably going to have a lot of errors. We do don’t have time to go through these all carefully but still thought that it would be more helpful than having no transcript at all.

Clif Mark 00:14

Today, Francis Fukuyama, the end of history, and why nothing interesting has happened since the 80s. I'm Clif Mark. And this is good in theory.

It may seem a little abrupt to follow up Plato's Republic with Fukuyama, his end of history, because one is one of the most seminal texts in the Western tradition. And the other is just one essay from a pretty obscure publication, and not even the book that was based on it. However, as I mentioned before, I want to start doing smaller projects to break up the bigger series on long texts. And even if this essay isn't the Republic, it's still kind of a banger. It's short, and it's odd. And when it was published, Fukuyama got a lot of criticism for it. But it still wound up being one of the most important takes on political life after the Cold War. People are still writing about it. They're still podcasting about it. And people are still assigning it in policy, one on one classes. So I think it's definitely worth an episode. And it will set us up nicely for Next Episode, when I interview some authors who think that the End of History existed, and may itself be coming to an end.

In the late 1980s, Francis Fukuyama was working for the State Department of the United States. So he's a foreign policy guy. But he also has this background in political theory. And in the summer of 1989, he publishes an essay called the end of history with a question mark. And in this essay, he argues that the Cold War, the decades long global rivalry between the US and the USSR is over, in that democracy has won.

In his timing on that argument was incredible. Because in 1989, communist regimes were crumbling left and right throughout Eastern Europe. And in November of that year, that all culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the reunification of Germany. And then, a couple of years after that, when his book was coming out, the Soviet Union fell apart. Russia made communism illegal on its soil, and they started adopting radical free market policies. And that was it. No more Cold War, no more communism as a political force in the world.

But Fukuyama didn't get famous for predicting the end of the Cold War, that writing was on the wall for everyone to see. Fukuyama got famous because of how he interpreted the meaning of that event. his thesis was that when the West won the Cold War, it wouldn't just be the end of a particular conflict or a particular period in history. It would be the end of human history as such.

On the face of it, the claim that history is over seems kind of ridiculous, because things are going to keep happening, and we're going to keep writing them down. And that's history. Right. Well, Fukuyama didn't mean that events were going to stop. But to understand what he did mean, we're going to have to do a bit of theory.

One way to see history is just all the stuff that happened in the past that we wrote down. You can call this history with a small age. Now Fukuyama, he's talking about history with a big age. And that's when you see history, not just as a chronicle of events, but as a kind of grand narrative of progress by which human civilization moves slowly, violently, but logically to a final resting point.

In particular, Fukuyama his End of History argument is based on the philosophy of a 19th century German idealist thinker, called Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. And there was one extra complication that I want to mention, which is that when Fukuyama talks about Hegel, he's actually talking about a particular interpretation of Hegel by a guy called Alexander codev, who fled communism for the West back in the 1950s. So when I say that Hegel says On this episode, I actually mean, that Fukuyama says that co Jeff says that Hegel says, you don't have to worry about that. The only reason I even mentioned it is because Hegel is really complicated. And interpreting him is very controversial. So if you disagree with what I'm saying about Hegel, you might be right. But I have to do it this way in order to explain Fukuyama.

Anyway, here are the Things that you need to know about Hegel in order to get what Fukuyama is up to. First, Hegel sees history as a dialectical process. And that just means that each stage in history is a certain set of distinctive ideas and social arrangements. And these arrangements produce distinctive internal contradictions. When people solve those contradictions, that pushes them to the next stage of history, which generates its own contradictions. So it's a progressive theory of history. And Hegel thinks that the general direction is towards more freedom, reason and autonomy for all human beings.

The next thing I want you to know is that Hegel was an idealist. This doesn't mean he was an optimist or utopian. It just meant that he thought that ideas matter, they were efficacious in the real world. So ideology in the broad sense, including religion, culture, values, all of that. That's where the historical action is.

But this doesn't mean that he thinks everything happens in our heads, or that the real world doesn't matter. He doesn't even think you can draw a really sharp distinction between the real world in the ideal because for him, ideology isn't just ideas. It's embodied in the real world in actions in institutions, and social relationships.

To illustrate this point, say that you're an artist, you can tell yourself in your head that you're an artist, all you want. But if you never put any paint on canvas, or chisel to marble or anything like that, it's hard to see how you're really an artist. And Hegel takes that a step further. He says that, even if you do slap some paint around, but you still never show it to anyone, you never sell it in a gallery you never put on a wall, you still might not fully be an artist. And all this is to say that it's not enough to be an artist in your head. It's not even quite enough to paint things. You need to live in a society where being an artist is a thing. And you have to participate in the social practices of art, and be recognized by others as being an artist. If all that doesn't happen, Hegel would say you're not really doing the thing.

Now, Hegel doesn't really care that much for all artists or not, he cares that human beings can realize their potential as rational and autonomous beings. And that requires being recognized as rational and autonomous by others. And this is something that we don't get right the first time, we don't even really understand what we're doing at the outset, we just start with a little seed of reasonable freedom, in the whole course of human history, is the process of us trying out different ways of putting it into practice. We try out different social arrangements and institutions and ideologies and religions and all the time, we're running into contradictions. And then resolving those contradictions, which moves us to the next stage of history.

And there's a really famous bit in Hegel called the struggle for recognition that shows how this works at an individual level. It goes like this, two guys run into each other. And they both want the other to recognize them as free. So they wind up fighting, and it gets really serious, they're in a fight to the death, until one of them decides he wants to live. And he says, uncle, he gives up. The winner of the fight, makes the loser be his slave. So he'll have to obey Him and recognize his autonomy all the time. And thus, a new social relationship is born, the relationship between master and slave.

At first winning the fight is cool. The winner standing of the loser like Muhammad Ali in that photo, in the loser is begging for mercy. And that all feels pretty good, the winner feels seen. But as time goes on, the master realizes that his desire for recognition isn't being satisfied. And that's because even though he's getting recognition from the slave, that's a slave, he has no respect for him. So their recognition is worthless. And of course, the slave isn't satisfied either, because he's not getting any respect from anyone. That's the contradiction inherent in the master slave relationship. nobody's getting the recognition they want. So they've both got to try out other arrangements until they finally figure out that the only thing that can really satisfy our need for recognition is mutual recognition between equals.

The story of the dialectic between master and slave is kind of a small scale fable that Hegel thinks illustrates something that's going on at a grand historical scale. It's the same basic process that moves us through tribal communities, slave societies, theocratic societies, until finally, we get to democratic egalitarian societies, which is the final rational form of human society.

And in this grant historical narrative, the French enlightenment is an important moment, because that's when humankind throws off its reliance on superstition and tradition in old hierarchies and Self consciously takes charge of its own fate. In the Enlightenment, we recognize ourselves in each other as rational and free agents. And we want to make that the basis of society, rather than God or tradition or hierarchy. So we invent a new form of government, liberal democracy. liberal democracy is a huge deal for Fukuyama because it represents the end of history. And the reason for that is because its institutions finally organize social recognition in a way that our nature as free, equal, rational beings can flourish.

Of course, there's a lot of variation between different kinds of liberal democracy. But the basic principles are that it's liberal. There's rule of law and individual rights. And those are ways of institutionalizing and recognizing everyone's equal status and freedom. And it's democratic, because it enshrines popular sovereignty, the people are autonomous, because ultimately, they rule themselves. And because liberal democracy satisfies our need for recognition, it doesn't create any more serious contradictions that would push us into another historical stage. That's why it's the end of history.

Now, I know that was all very abstract and crowded a lot of concepts into a small space. But to summarize them even more briefly, Fukuyama thinks that big Ah, history is a process whereby contradictions and ideologies drive history forward, until you get to one that recognizes and institutionalizes human reason and autonomy in a satisfying way. liberal democracy does that. So when it appears, it doesn't create any more major contradictions. So the engine of history just kind of winds down. And that's the end of it. That is the theoretical framework that Fukuyama is working with. And now I want to apply it to world history.

Hegel lived at a pretty exciting time for liberal democracy. When he was a little kid America declared independence. When he was a student, the French revolution happened and he was really excited about it and followed it and talked about it with his roommates. And then, when Hegel was a young prof in Vienna, Napoleon started conquering Europe and spreading around the new political principles of liberty and equality. In the 1906, Hegel actually saw Napoleon in person, Indiana, right before a huge battle. He was really excited, he wrote a letter to a friend talking about how great Napoleon is and how Napoleon could do anything. And he described him as the world's spirit, on horseback.

And for Hegel, that was it. He called The End of History in 1806, because that's when the principles of the French Revolution, represented by Napoleon, defeated the pre modern forces of tradition, represented by the Prussian monarchy, that Napoleon beat. Obviously, there was plenty left to do. There were other monarchies that needed to be toppled, you still had to abolish slavery and extend the franchise. But as far as Hegel was concerned, at that point, liberal democracy had reached a kind of critical mass in the world, and there'll be no turning back, we were headed in the right direction.

hindsight, however, 1806, may have been a little premature, because eventually Napoleon was stopped. And even though he did a good job of spreading liberty and equality around a bit, they did not become dominant. liberal democracy was just one ideology out of many that for the next 200 years or so, we're in a messy Battle Royale to determine how to arrange social life.

It was only a few years after Hegel that Karl Marx came along and said, actually, liberalism sucks, because liberal regimes say they're about freedom and equality. But that's just rhetoric, concealing what's really going on, which is capitalism. And capitalism is all about exploitation of the poor by the rich. Mark says, look at the new industrial cities, you have a few really rich factory owning capitalists, and they have armies of workers that are working 16 hour days just to have enough for bear miserable survival. There boom, bust cycles that cause constant crises. And there's always an army of unemployed people that keep wages at barely subsistence level. Sure, liberal democracy gives you legal rights. But unless you're lucky enough to be born rich, that just means the right to be exploited, and the right to vote, that's just the right to vote for whatever stage of capital is going to dominate you Next, you have no real power.

Hegel said that liberal democracy was the end of history because it solves all the major contradictions that drive history forward that Marx says that's all wrong. Actually, liberalism has a massive contradiction, which is the contradiction between the capitalists and the working class. And the only way to solve that contradiction is to remove the economy from the control of the capitalists, and put it in the hands of the workers represented by the state.

Remember, from the communist perspective, free markets are a chaotic, wasteful arena for exploitation. But if the state controls production, you can organize it in a rational way to provide for everyone's needs, instead of just whatever the capitalist can use to turn a profit that quarter. Eventually, this ideology catches on, you get the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese revolution and a whole bunch of other revolutions in different forms of Marxism, become the official ideologies of a lot of powerful states in the world. And it starts to look to a lot of people that communism, not liberalism, is the future of humanity.

And communism wasn't the only challenger to liberalism, fascism was also hugely popular for quite a few decades. And it took a lot of doing by liberals and communists to finally put it down. N

owadays, liberal democracy is totally dominant. Nobody is out there campaigning for non democratic government. And it's hard to imagine any national group of people wanting to live under some other kind of government. But it wasn't always like this. And that's easy to forget. But if you ask people in the early 20th century, in the 1920s, and 30s, let's say, a lot of them would have told you that they thought that liberal democracy was an obsolete and broken and maybe even unjust form of government, and that some other system, like communism, or fascism, was the future. And that's true. Even in the big democracies, like the UK in the US, they had lots of communists and fascists. And the history of the 20th century was, in large part, a big bloody contest over which of these ideologies should rule and it wasn't obvious at the beginning that liberalism would wind up on top. This is why Hegel was too early when he called the end of history in 1806. Because we still had nearly 200 years of violently hashing out these big existential questions. And that is exactly what he and Fukuyama mean by history.

But after those 200 or so years, in 1989 Fukuyama is taking another look around the world. And he's asking, who's left? fascism is gone. It was completely discredited by World War Two, both because we all found out the nasty things that the Germans and the Japanese were up to, but also because we beat them badly. And both of these countries became successful liberal democracies, not entirely voluntary at first, but they did. And they now show no signs of wanting to change back. And other right wing authoritarian regimes were also moving in the same direction. After World War Two, the only real rival to liberal democracy was communism. And by 1989, Fukuyama thought that contest was over two.

Yes, a lot of the world was still officially communist. But Fukuyama says their heart wasn't in it anymore. He points to China and he says, maybe they were for real back in the 60s and early 70s when they were doing a cultural revolution, and exporting Maoist uprisings abroad. But those times are gone. because ever since the mid 70s, when Nixon visited China, there's been a big rightward shift in Chinese policy. They stopped supporting foreign revolutions, and they started liberalizing their own economy. And Fukuyama says that at that point, the elites in the Chinese Communist Party, were basically acting like bourgeois consumerists, and he predicted that political liberalization wouldn't be too far behind.

And then he pointed to the Soviet Union, the leader of the Communist world, and he says that everyone in that country has been completely over communism for at least a generation. He says that the only reason any Soviet still paid lip service to Marxism is just out of a kind of inertia. And things were changing. Gorbachev was in charge. He was doing all sorts of reforms to move away from the planned economy. And he was even introducing some rudimentary measures of democracy. Fukuyama was saying that even though China and USSR are still communist on paper, they low key want to be liberal democracies to fascism is done. communism is done.

liberalism was the only ideology left standing. How did it survive? What about the big contradiction between capitalists and workers that supposedly could only be resolved by communism? Well, food Yama said that actually, you can resolve that contradiction without a revolution. All you need is a lot of money that you get from running a capitalist economy. And you need to spread it around, which you can do with a welfare state or other redistribution programs. And Fukuyama doesn't even think that you need to spread it around very much. Because what makes liberal democracy special is that it satisfies our deep spiritual need for autonomy and recognition. And as long as it does this, by making sure that we all have legal and social equality, then it can actually get away with a lot of economic inequality. Just share enough that everyone gets to participate in the prosperity and things will be fine. Fukuyama summarizes the recipe for a stable state in the end of history as, quote, liberal democracy in the political sphere, combined with easy access to VCRs in stereos in the economic end quote. So it turns out that Hegel was right about liberal democracy. After all, it just needed a little extra dash of welfare capitalism to stabilize it.

Even though history is over, time doesn't stop. So what's next? What's it like to live at the end of history? In the concluding paragraph of his essay, Fukuyama writes,

quote, The End of History will be a very sad time, the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's lives 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. End quote.

Declaring that history was over just because Gorbachev was doing some market reforms was a very bold move, and Fukuyama took a lot of criticism for it. But as time passed, nothing has really proved him wrong yet.

It seems like he was right about the big things. There'll be no huge ideological wars between major powers, no major rival to liberal democracy has emerged. Instead, the 90s and 2000s have been all about consolidating capitalism, globalization, working out those complicated supply chains. And the whole idea of socialism or communism, as an alternative just kind of faded away. Even the left wing parties and big democracies seem to forget about it. The US Democratic Party became a neoliberal capitalist party under clinton, the Labour Party of Britain, which is officially a socialist party, became a capitalist party under Tony Blair. And the same kind of thing was happening all over the place. Politics was no longer about grand ideas, was about finding a third way neither left nor right. It was a competition over who could be the best technocratic managers of capitalism, who could best support our lives of individual consumption. And culturally speaking, it was also a pretty apolitical time, in the 90s. It was in fashion to be apathetic to leave politics to the experts.

And even that last line, I read, the one where Fukuyama says that there's going to be no more art or philosophy anymore, and we're just going to be caretakers in the museum of human history. Well, that is a very dramatic thing to say. But there still may be something to it.

Have there been any major new artistic or philosophical movements since the 90s? I don't know. It probably is too early to say. But I can say that the 90s is when everyone's obsession with retro took off. And it's also when the tendency to make constant reboots of old cultural properties, instead of inventing new stories also took off. So in culture, just like in politics, it seemed like there was no more grand sense of purpose. Fukuyama predicted that the end of history would be peaceful and prosperous, and he still was not looking forward to it. This is how he ends the essay.

Quote, I can feel myself and see in others around me a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia In fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict, even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability. I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that's been created in Europe since 1945. With its North Atlantic and Asian offshoots, Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. End quote.

even this last sentence of the essay is suggestive. Yes, we've had 25 to 30 years of boring End of History, liberalism and cultural exhaustion. But lately, maybe in the past five years or so, things have started to happen, that don't quite fit the End of History mold. There was Brexit, and that was a vote against globalization run by technocratic experts, and in favor of national sovereignty than the US elected Donald Trump. And whatever else that was, it was not a vote of confidence in the kind of politics that had run things since the 90s. More young Americans identify as socialists and ever before, and there's a lot of activity and innovation on the right wing as well. As Fukuyama predicted might happen. People seem to be getting a little bit antsy in the end of history. And they're starting to rattle the cage.

So what's next? Is this kind of malaise, just an integral part of the End of History period, or does it represent a shift to something new? Next episode, I'm going to ask these questions to Philip Cunliffe and George Hoare, along with Alex Hokulea, the host of the alpha bonga bonga podcast and the authors of a new book called The end of the end of history, which picks up where Fukuyama left off. Special shout out today to Roland Scarlett and Megan feekes, who decided to support the show on Patreon. This episode is dedicated to you. If you also would like to support the show, head to patreon.com and find the good in theory page and you can pledge any amount you'd like and I will be very happy and appreciative to receive it if you'd like to support in another way. I'd also really appreciate any ratings and reviews on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you listen to your podcasts on. Catch you next time