The End of History and the Last Man
Fukuyama, Francis
THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN Francis Fukuyama The Free Press/418 pages /$24.95 reviewed by AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD Mindless" and "hopelessly naive" were the words used to describe the...
...featism...
...Fukuyama argues that the progress of science leads ineluctably to the free-market economy...
...The diffusion of economic power deprives the ruling party of economic patronage—the control over access to jobs, trading licenses, houses, cars, and even food—that has always been the mainstay of party power, not only in the Soviet bloc but also in scores of Third World regimes of the mercantilist or monopoly variety...
...Will they show the same cohesion when there is no external threat...
...It was the communications revolution that finished off the Stalinists...
...The characterizations were unfair, of course, but it has to be said that Fukuyama invited his fair share of invective when he published his seminal article "The End of History...
...All this is highly persuasive at the moment, but again Fukuyama is relying too much on his snapshot of the world in 1991...
...Ultimately, though, if all else fails to prevent the end of History, we can be sure that liberal society itself, rotting from within, will keep the process going...
...I must confess that I suspected the book, The End of History and the Last Man, would be a padded amplification of his 1989 article, an attempt to cash in on celebrity...
...Not enough democracies have been around long enough to test that proposition...
...In countries like France and Italy, where the population is falling, the gene pool of talent is literally extinguishing itself...
...Calcutta, Mexico City, and Cairo may have destitute quarters where life is rough, but they do not harbor castes in which moral values have collapsed...
...In the middle of this century political scientists were still assuming that mass communications, which could be used for the purposes of propaganda and mind control, worked to the advantage of totalitarian regimes...
...In fact, it is a whole new departure...
...Fukuyama dismisses the totalitarian nightmare of the mid-twentieth century as a disease of transition, or as he puts it, "a pathological condition arising out of the special political and social requirements of countries at a certain stage of socio-economic development...
...It is extremely doubtful that a society once held together by custom, conscience, prejudice, and religious values can be regulated by government alone...
...But Fukuyama argues that this cannot happen again...
...Liberal democracy, on the other hand, resolves all contradictions, and though it may not yet be perfectly implemented, it cannot be improved upon as an idea...
...CI 58 The American Spectator March 1992...
...Yet Fukuyama skates through this question with a few loose observations about European history, noting at one point that "the two Western European countries to invent fascist ultranationalism, Italy and Germany, were also the last to industrialize and to unify politically...
...But events have since turned the argument upside down...
...It would be folly for conservatives to suppose that statists, thick on the ground and ever zealous, have resigned themselves to permanent defeat...
...Litigation is out of control...
...Even if it could work culturally, it could not work economically because there is no price mechanism to send signals to producers and consumers...
...I suspect that, deep down, Fukuyama does not really trust History...
...This is the most cavalier passage in the book...
...In hindsight, he was premature...
...The article was superb, in both senses of the word, but it was flawed because it did not explain convincingly why History should, necessarily, be going anywhere, why there should be progress, direction, or improvement of any kind, instead of the usual cyclical relapse into violence and nastiness...
...No other idea will wash these days...
...Further, free-market development, whether in Chile, South Korea, or Turkey, creates an educated middle class that tends to demand political representation...
...But let us assume that the great nations all establish enduring democracies: Can we therefore conclude that the world will be a peaceful place, safely beyond the reach of History...
...The German infatuation with Hitler is surely the paramount invalidation of his whole thesis, for Germany was perhaps the best educated country in the world in the inter-war years and it had enjoyed a considerable tradition of democracy, partial under the Kaisers and total under Weimar...
...One only has to read Shakespeare—"Now all the youth of England are on fire"—or Petrarch on Italy, or indeed Julius Caesar on the Alemani, to appreciate the antiquity of nationalist fervor in Europe, or look at the ascendant neo-fascist youth movements on the same soil today, to appreciate its eternal appeal...
...It is an arid place, this liberal world of ours, where families form and break according to convenience, where the elderly are sent away to end their years in nursing homes...
...Arid, desiccated, and brittle...
...He offered a snapshot of the world taken at a moment when the liberal idea was enjoying a second wind after an interlude of deAmbrose Evans-Pritchard, former Washington correspondent of the London Spectator, is an editorial writer at the London Daily Telegraph...
...He does it with great skill...
...The question is what direction...
...He also advances the half-truth that nationalism is a nineteenth-century aberration without deep roots in the human psyche...
...But hitherto, the democracies have tended to fight on the same side because they were facing a threat from fascism or Communism...
...It is the ever-growing body of scientific knowledge, the product of Man's irrepressible desire to fashion his natural surroundings to his advantage...
...Perhaps the Western world will recover from its moral disease...
...Two years later, Fukuyama has produced a work of magisterial breadth that cannot be dismissed so easily...
...At the time, perhaps, they were right...
...suggesting that democratic capitalism, as a motivating idea, had won a permanent victory over all forms of mass enthusiasm and organized evil...
...Such triumphalism, almost Marxist in character, was bound to offend conservatives, for it goes against the deepest instincts of Tory pessimism...
...For a while this pressure can be resisted, but in the end the political elite itself begins to question its own legitimacy and loses the will to maintain power by repressive means...
...So is loyalty...
...It is a more difficult challenge than Hegel's theodicy, and Fukuyama did not quite pull it off in his 1989 article in the National Interest...
...That is why he turns to Hegelian philo-babble instead...
...The bourgeoisie, too, shows signs of decay...
...But not, I think, wrong...
...Drawing on Hegel's dialectical The American Spectator March 1992 57 process, he argues that all forms of hierarchical government have inherent contradictions, or defects, and therefore contain the seeds of their own destruction...
...Furthermore, it needs to be repeated that Germany was not an autocracy in 1914...
...It has reached the point where it seriously hampers the functioning of a market economy...
...There is nothing democratic about it...
...The Germans voted for Nazism, knowing full well that it was a movement of hate...
...Virtually the entire world belongs to a single scientific community...
...His book, on the other hand, includes no question mark in the title...
...Indeed, to my Anglo-Saxon taste, he does it better than Hegel himself...
...The cyclical chain, if it ever really existed, has been broken forever...
...For those of us who are not Hegelians, that is to say for those of us who never succumbed to the charms of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis schema, it all sounds very silly indeed...
...This is fine if you happen to believe that the dialectical process is a sacred doctrine...
...So is respect...
...This modern phenomenon of the underclass is not to be confused with poverty...
...It does not breed enough...
...Earlier civilizations, notably the Roman Empire, may have lost their science and technology, regressing to a more primitive state as a result of incursions and conquest by warlike tribes...
...In fact, parts of Germany were already industrialized by the mid-nineteenth century...
...Nor are there any barbarians at the gates in the late twentieth century...
...History, therefore, cannot revert...
...Today his prophecy is correct in every particular...
...There were democratic elements in Wilhelmine society, and they were far from pacifist...
...But this is the trend in America, and increasingly in Europe...
...It is a system that is not only cumbersome and expensive, but does not even work...
...But things can change with remarkable speed...
...But as Fukuyama himself acknowledges, the passion for exalted honor and status can easily get out of hand...
...Even if the European Community succeeds in overcoming rivalries between European states, which is extremely doubtful (indeed, it may aggravate tensions, because it provides no airspace between the tribes), it would not prevent the development of continental cultural blocs in opposition to each other, say Europe against East Asia, which could prove equally dangerous in the long run...
...The ignominious fraud-ridden collapse of Lloyds of London, a venerable institution that has traded profitably for more than 300 years, is a triumph of lawyers over gentlemen...
...It does not seem farfetched to imagine that computer software could come to the rescue of dirigiste ideology one day...
...Fukuyama's great mentor, Hegel, also had difficulty answering this question, but supplemented argument with religious faith...
...According to Hegel, man's willingness to risk his life for the sake of honor—or "recognition," as he puts it—is what distinguishes us from animals...
...Commercial contracts, which used to be upheld by codes of honor and trust, are now enforced by little more than law...
...He uses hard empirical reasoning, without recourse to faith, to advance his claim that History is going somewhere...
...THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN Francis Fukuyama The Free Press/418 pages /$24.95 reviewed by AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD Mindless" and "hopelessly naive" were the words used to describe the theories of Francis Fukuyama at a recent meeting of the Constitutional Club here in London...
...One wonders whether technology might not prove a fickle ally in the future as the 56 The American Spectator March 1992 pendulum swings back again...
...He knows it can strike with lightning speed, when we least expect it, and demolish sanity...
...So is virtue...
...His article merely asked the question whether or not History had come to an end...
...Above all, Fukuyama has identified the motive force of History...
...If they could go berserk, and commit the worst crimes in the annals of history, there can be no such thing as moral progress...
...Not even a cataclysmic war could destroy it permanently, unless all humanity were destroyed with it...
...On the contrary, it is more likely to feed the ambitions of a tyrant, and as a matter of historical fact it frequently does...
...Fukuyama, by contrast, does not rely on God to carry him through...
...The evidence is simple: they are willing to tolerate schools that do not raise children to a standard sufficient to maintain an advanced liberal democracy in the long run...
...It takes affluence to provide the resources needed to create a large, dependent, alienated underclass...
...After all, there have been bad times before...
...B ut will this continue to be the case...
...Only liberal democracy can satisfy this passion for recognition, for it is the only system that respects the intrinsic worth of each man...
...There are particularist ideologies, such as Islamic fundamentalism, which may arouse tremendous passion, but they do not have universal appeal...
...Fukuyama is surely correct in claiming, at this particular moment, that only a system of free prices is flexible enough to regulate the millions of different kinds of transactions of goods and services that take place daily in a modern, rich, high-tech society...
...The state sets the price of everything, arbitrarily, without understanding the cost of anything, and twists itself into ever greater knots as production moves from a few dinosaur industries like iron and steel to the diversified production of consumer goods...
...Whether they like it or not, authoritarian regimes have to pay lip-service to the principles of liberal democracy because they are unable to find any other credible source of legitimacy...
...The knowledge accumulated without interruption over the last 600 years is now vast, easily accessible, and widely understood...
...Fukuyama says we can...
...Chivalry is in short supply...
...Eventually, the whole system chokes in the tangled thicket of price distortion...
...He failed to supply a motive force of Universal History...
...Ultimately, Hegel always fell back on his metaphysical premise that History was the life of God, that God realized Himself through man's journey from slave to self-conscious moral being...
...In any case, there is an inconsistency in the Hegelian argument that Fukuyama employs...
...I suspect that fascism will return to curse the world again...
...Apart from the obvious point that Communism stifles innovation, saps the work ethic, invites corruption on a colossal scale, and drives everybody to drink and despair, the system cannot sustain a high-tech economy, which requires a large chunk of the population, as opposed to a tiny elite, to think for itself...
...Science has imposed a direction on Mankind...
...In America, the middle classes have lost their reverence for education, whatever they may say to the contrary...
...It may be religious, ideological, or strictly national, but the willingness to fight and kill for it has been one of the constants of history...
...No such thing exists, or could exist, in the cities of poor countries...
...The fomenters of vexatious litigation took over the government of France in 1789, inspiring Burke, tearful, nostalgic, soaked in claret, to write the words we all know so well: "The age of chivalry is gone, and that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever...
...From the shaky premise that the free market is inevitable, Fukuyama goes on to argue that this in turn ensures evolution toward liberal democracy...
...The evidence of decay is all around us: in a depraved urban subculture, encouraged by state subsidies to behave in a self-destructive way and to reproduce itself at a faster rate than better adjusted, more productive members of society...
...Clearly, people have always felt a sense of loyalty to some kind of community...
...Those that choose to reject it, perhaps for obscurantist religious reasons, necessarily forfeit the military capability required to annihilate it...
...It tries to explain why History has ended and why liberal democracy was ultimately destined to prevail...
...Alas, the planning urge is irrepressible...
...Nor are they free from general moral collapse...
...Nor is there any rival to the liberal idea in the world today...
...Certainly, the number of countries joining the democratic club is increasing all the time, and it has spread well beyond Christendom, debunking the hoary notion of the left that free-market democracy is a "Western" phenomenon of little relevance to other cultures, that it would be "ethnocentric" to try to export it...
Vol. 25 • March 1992 • No. 3
