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"Francis Fukuyama: ‘The End of History"
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Transcript
"Francis Fukuyama: ‘The End of History"
- Francis Fukuyama argued that that the end of the Cold War signals the end of the progression of human history.
- Fukuyama famously argues that
- ‘What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war 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.’
Summary of Main Argument
Hegel and Marx
- We now have the answer to one of the most fundamental questions of political science – ‘how best to organize human society’.
- Fukuyama's thesis is an obvious reference to Marx.
- However, Fukuyama reverts back to the work of Marx's original source, Hegel.
Intellectual Roots of the Argument: Hegel
- Hegel sees history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end (Historical Idealism).
- Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.
- Accordingly, he proclaimed history to be at an end in For as early as this Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality.
Intellectual Roots of the Argument: Hegel
- The Battle of Jena marked the end of history because it was at that point that the vanguard of humanity actualized the principles of the French Revolution. While there was considerable work to be done after like abolishing slavery and the slave trade, extending the franchise to workers, women, blacks, and other racial minorities, etc. -the basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved upon.
- The two world wars in 20th century and their attendant revolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending those principles geographically, and of forcing the vanguard of civilization to implement their liberalism more fully.
A Common Misunderstanding
- The most basic error in discussing Fukuyama's work is to confuse ‘history’ with ‘events’.
- Fukuyama does not claim at any point that events will stop happening in the future.
- What Fukuyama is claiming is that in the future (even if totalitarianism returns, or if fundamentalist Islam becomes a major political force) democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term.
- However, democracy may experience ‘temporary’ setbacks
- Fukuyama argues that ‘the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness, and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world’.
- Fukuyama's thesis consists of two main elements.
- First, Fukuyama points out that the number of democratic states has expanded to the point where the majority of governments in the world are ‘democratic’.
- He also argues that democracy's main intellectual alternatives, which include Nazism, Fascism, Communism, nationalism and religion have been discredited.
Democracy
Thymos
- Second, there is a philosophical argument, taken from Hegel.
- Hegel sees history as consisting of the dialectic between two classes: the Master and the Slave.
- Ultimately, this thesis (Master) and antithesis (Slave) must result in a synthesis, in which both manage to live in peace together.
- This can only happen in a democracy.
- The Platonic idea of ‘thymos’ and the ‘struggle for recognition’ are important here.
- Fukuyama’s thesis is often misinterpreted and misunderstood.
- For example, it is frequently claimed that Fukuyama believes that history ended in (with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War).
- In fact, Fukuyama believes that history ended in 1806, with the Battle of Jena.
- Since the French Revolution of 1789, democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives.
The End of History – When?
- Some critics have suggested that Islamic fundamentalisms offer an intellectual alternative to liberal democracy.
- However, Fukuyama argues that Islam has little intellectual or emotional appeal outside the Islamic ‘heartlands’.
- In order to provide genuine competition for liberalism, a competing belief system must have global appeal.
- Moreover, when Islamic states have actually been created (for example in Afghanistan), they were easily defeated militarily by the powerful democracies.
Criticisms of the End of History
- Marxism is another End of History philosophy.
- Therefore Marxists have been amongst Fukuyama's fiercest critics.
- Marxists claim that capitalist democracies are still riven with poverty, inequality and racial tension.
- They also reject Fukuyama's reliance on Hegel.
- According to them, Hegel's philosophy was fatally flawed until Marx ‘turned it on its head’ to create historical materialism (regards material economic forces as the base on which sociopolitical institutions and ideas are built).
- Social structures derive from economic structures and that these are transformed as a result of class struggles, each ruling class producing another, which will overcome and destroy it, the final phase being the emergence of a communist society.
The Collapse of Communism
- Why was it that China and the USSR moved away from central planning in the 1980’s?
- The deep defects of socialist economies (material causes) cannot be an answer because this was evident even years ago.
- The answer must be found in the consciousness of the ruling elites.
- That change was in no way made inevitable by the material conditions, but instead came about as the result of the victory of one idea over another.
Conclusion
- The end of history does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. For the world at that point would be divided between a part that was historical and a part that was post historical. Conflict between states still in history, and between those states and those at the end of history, would still be possible.
- There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post historical world.
- This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing form that scene.
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