Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

...Science, liberal democracy, and capitalism do in fact constitute an uncontested center of gravity for institutional design in our day, and in the foreseeable future...

...Having paid my tribute, I must state my reservations...

...To his credit I should add that it bears little resemblance to the abstract economics we learn in the standard textbooks...

...In conventional economics, success is attributed to the vast structure of capital that the system accumulates, together with the immense division of labor that this makes possible...

...Fukuyama defines capitalism pragmatically, with emphasis on the relative strengths of the public and private sectors: "It is evident," he writes, "that there are many possible interpretations of this rather broad definition of economic liberalism, ranging from the United States of Ronald Reagan and the Britain of Margaret Thatcher to the social democracies of Scandinavia and the relatively statist regimes in Mexico and India...

...With Fukuyama, the development of full personhood has a much more matter-of-fact character...

...This is a strong presentation of the economic pressures of a market system on community life...

...Fukuyama is quick to note, however, that although initial social givens are important, these capabilities can change over time...

...In Fukuyama's paraphrase of Hegel: Men seek not just material comfort, but respect or recognition, and they believe that they are worthy of respect because they possess a certain value or dignity...

...To repeat, Fukuyama is not blind to the presence of fundamentalist beliefs, dictatorial governments, and anticapitalist mentalities...

...Having myself harbored similar sentiments at the time (and for the same reason), I would like to begin this consideration of that infamous book, and of Trust, its newly published successor, by examining what they actually say...

...What is left of the relevance of capitalist national economies if their real-world counterparts are increasingly defenseless against economic penetration, to the point at which they can no longer even exercise effective control over so fundamental a means of self-regulation as the quantity of money within their national control...

...Yet, where are the impacts of falling real wages, of disappearing employments, of the stupefaction of relentless advertising on the capacity to cultivate one's own dignity, much less to respect that of others...

...I need hardly add that these views have changed as a consequence of the disasters in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba...

...In similar fashion, even when Fukuyama acknowledges the relation of capitalism's dynamism to the question of thymos, his treatment lacks vitality...

...Not very long ago such a thesis would have been laughed out of court, or at the very least asked to take its place in line behind socialism...

...Francis Fukuyama's The End of History predictably earned him a skeptical response when it appeared a few years ago, especially from critics on the left, many of whom, one suspects, had not read the book...

...In the author's words: It is not the mark of provincialism but of cosmopolitanism to recognize that there has emerged in the last few centuries something like a true global culture, centering around technologically driven economic growth and the capitalist social relations necessary to produce and sustain it...

...Fukuyama writes: "Apart from fast-disappearing tribes in the jungles of Brazil or Papua New Guinea, there is not a single branch of mankind that has not been touched by the Mechanism, and which has not become linked to the rest of mankind through the universal economic nexus of modern consumerism...

...The thesis that underlies these books is nothing less than an effort to discover the meaning of human history, which is to say, the core of significance behind the tragedies, disappointments, and occasional successes that assail us daily in the newspapers or that we find retrospectively in the great narratives of Thucydides, Gibbon, and the like...

...The bulk of Trust consists of an analysis, part historical, part contemporary, of both ends of the spectrum...

...For example, in assessing its negative effects he writes: The possibility of strong community life is also attacked by the pressures of the capitalist marketplace...

...As we shall see, this seemingly uncritical approach to capitalism ultimately leads Fukuyama into serious difficulties...

...There is none of this in Fukuyama's book...

...Perhaps more telling, the passage occurs a mere fourteen pages before the book's conclusion, in which the gravest danger to the End of History is seen as thepolitical uncertainty as to "what constitutes man and his specific dignity...

...Wealth is thereby "spiritualized"— not perhaps the most fortunate term, but one that dramatizes the point Fukuyama wants to make with regard to capitalism as a source of increased mutual respect...

...All these social formations are obviously inimical to the development of a climate of generalized trust...

...In Fukuyama's economics, the secret lies in the growth of "social capital"— the ability of people to work together—and this social capital, in turn, derives from the capability of individuals to share norms, to respect the dignity of others, and to join hands in common goals—in short, from the system's capacity to generate trust...

...Nonetheless, the contradictions of a world economy of capitalisms suggest that at some imaginable time in the future another set of institutional structures may become necessary to create a durable setting for humanity's journey...

...Not surprisingly, here Fukuyama mentions Tocqueville's amazement at the network of civil associations he saw in America, so different from the French system of carefully determined place and privilege...

...Economics," he tells us on the first page, "is grounded in social life and cannot be understood separately from the larger question of how modem societies organize themselves...

...Capitalisms thus inherit varying degrees of precapitalist propensities to form relatively more or less trusting societies...

...but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness...

...On the positive side, he argues convincingly that capitalism initially breaks down the barriers of kinship orders, the suspicions characteristic of peasant communities, and the rigidities of precapitalist command societies...

...Perhaps wishfully, I can imagine one in which each of the three legs of Fukuyama's design have been changed in significant fashion...

...Thus Fukuyama offers hopes, but no assurances, with regard to the attainment of thymos in the liberal capitalist setting he favors...

...Surely the last two of these constitutive forces depend on strong and stable national entities within which to exert their social influence...

...This is a view of history not merely as a vehicle for emancipation from oppression, but as a process by which humanity gradually becomes aware of a deeper need...

...and the teachers to whom we must turn not the dramatists of the adult spirit, but the explorers of the infantile imagination—not Hegel or WINTER • 1996 • 111 Books Koj eve or Nietzsche, but Sigmund Freud...

...This brings me to Fukuyama's second book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, which he describes as an economic sequel to his first...

...While not every country is capable of becoming a consumer society in the near future, there is hardly a society in the world that does not embrace the goal itself...

...It is surely to the point, as Fukuyama himself points out, that the highly trust-directed relationships of Japanese capitalism, with its lifetime employment, have been seriously challenged by its recession of 1992-3, while the frail ententes of American labor-management relations have been ruthlessly discarded under the pressures of ever more fierce world competition...

...Here the question that remains unasked is whether this emerging supranational aspect of capitalism does not call into question the plausibility of an end of history posited on the triad of science, democratic government, and capitalism...

...This is a far cry from Hegel's heroic awakening, but it is equally—perhaps much more—effective...

...To be sure, capitalism is described as deeply and by no means always constructively transformative, but somehow this recognition is never fully realized...

...The world economy, in a word, is an entity whose sole unifying attribute is a commitment to an economic system that erodes the longevity of its presently constituted members...

...I should add, however, that I suspect even such a much-hoped-for future will be not so much an end to human history as another resting place...

...A second criticism is much more predictable...

...In a word, whatever we know about the process of personality formation is left out in a book in which personhood is given center stage...

...Lest this only deepen our suspicion of Fukuyama's work, it may be helpful to recall that many of us have begun from, or still harbor, such an ambitious overview of history as the gradual movement from the alienating and exploitative life of a class-stratified society to the emancipated existence of a democratic socialist one...

...Indeed, there is an amusing indication of its absence: in the extensive index to The End of History there is one entry for Freud, but when we turn to the indicated page, his name does not appear there (nor on any other page...

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...and (Southern) Italy, France, and China as examples of the opposite...

...Some such an amended triad might form the basis of an End of History better suited to cope with the problems generated by its present supposed terminus...

...The self-consuming aspects of such an institutional framework seem ill-suited to serve as the setting for Fukuyama's vision...

...Specifically, for Hegel, the mechanism for the historical transformation of personhood has a heroic, even mystical quality—" The individual, who has not risked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a person...

...For my own main interest, and I imagine that of most readers of this essay, concerns the connections that Fukuyama finds between trust and the institutions and dynamics of contemporary capitalism...

...Finally, capitalism completes the picture as the economic expression of liberalism...

...How is this tension between individualism as a force for and against trust resolved...

...So, too, with the fact that the favorable influences of capitalism seem to be associated with its initial appearance, and the unfavorable effects with its later development—a matter that is mentioned but never pursued...

...T]he larger theme of this book," he writes, "is that sociability does not simply emerge spontaneously once the state retreats...

...Neither is any work of Freud's, or of other students of the unconscious, cited in the long list of sources...

...With Hegel this idea is finally instantiated in a state governed by an upper class that protects and values the thymos of its citizenry...

...457 pp., $25.00...

...In the background of both his books Fukuyama perceives the growing presence of a vaguely defined, but unmistakably real entity called the World Economy— an entity that begins to surround and overshadow even such powerful national economies as our own, much as ours surrounds and overshadows the state economies of Illinois and California and New York...

...That is to say," Fukuyama writes, "for a very large part of the world, there is now no ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy, and no universal principle of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people...

...Fukuyama is not, however, a simplist in this belief...

...The ability to cooperate socially is dependent on prior habits, traditions, and norms, which themselves serve to structure the market...

...But if the world economy continues its self-generated growth, the consequences for both democratic politics and capitalist economics are likely to be disastrous...

...Trust is vital to the success of capitalism, Fukuyama explains, because it constitutes the ultimate basis of its productive capabilities...

...Fukuyama remains distanced before this contest of forces...

...Even more important is his treatment of another ecoWINTER • 1996 • 113 Books nomic development that, were it fully examined, could seriously, perhaps even fatally, challenge his fundamental vision...

...What will be left of the relevance of liberal political structures for an end of history if the world economy makes ever more irrelevant the boundaries of the nation-state—massive ecological effects and unmanageable immigration pressures as examples...

...His point, rather, is that the force of science, the political frame of liberal democracy, and the energizing impetus of capital accumulation and competition have today become ideas beyond which it is very difficult— Fukuyama might even say impossible— to think As we will see, I am doubtful that the triad, as it is defined in Fukuyama's book, constitutes an end to history, but I think he is right that it has created a resting point that may endure for a considerable while...

...It goes without saying that this stress on thymos also serves to separate Hegel and his followers from Marx, who assuredly valued human selfrespect, but rather too easily assumed that political liberty would naturally follow economic emancipation...

...Rather, it mirrors the fact that, like all behavior, thymos is formed in the gauntlet through which all must pass— the long and painful passage through childhood into early adolescence...

...In a word, acquisitiveness loses its combativeness and becomes the more matter-of-fact, although no less important, expression of one's thymos, one's dignity...

...Fukuyama's commitment to thymos is passionate, which does not prevent him from a keen awareness of its potential for conversion into megalothymos, or the desire for collective recognition that leads easily to nationalism or ethnic aggressions...

...Those who were not defeated by superior military technology were seduced by the glittering material world that modern natural science has created...

...A triad of science, political liberalism, and capitalism constitutes the elements of a social order that qualifies as the End of History...

...It is that his depiction ofthymos smacks too much of an adult struggle for virtue and rationality...

...It is the importance of thymos as an indispensable requirement for any envisioned "end of history...

...Our daily exposure toYugoslavian chaos, Russian anarchy, Chinese instability, African decay, and not least, United States retrogression offered ample reason to jeer at what seemed to be the smug conservatism of his title...

...Thus the market serves at first as a great social force for redirecting the search for dignity away from acts of valor or violence to those of material attainment, while at the same time encouraging the development of informal associations of capitalists and, to a lesser extent, of workers...

...This brings me once again to note the incompleteness with which Fukuyama assesses the economic system that he has made one of the legs of his triadic end of history—in this case, his unwillingness to consider the degree to which the dogeatdog necessities for survival in the marketplace can coexist with the trusting patterns of live-and-let-live...

...For I believe that Fukuyama has something of value to teach the left, not the least part of which is the necessity to discover what the left may be able to teach him...

...In Fukuyama the historic process leads to the recognition that democratic institutions are the only possible template for the political life of an advanced society...

...But there is also something here that critics can teach Fukuyama...

...countries that lack this capability do not...

...This leads Fukuyama into an analysis of the social relationship that constitutes the title of his book—a relationship that clearly has its roots in thymos, although that key word no longer appears in the text, perhaps because the sociologist Max Weber now becomes more of a tutelary figure than Hegel...

...while also giving ear to the fears of the right that any such hoped-for equality may simply founder before the reality of human differences...

...Societies which have sought to prevent this unification, from Tokugawa Japan and the Sublime Porte, to the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Burma, and Iran have managed to fight rearguard actions that have lasted only for a generation or two...

...It is here, however, that Fukuyama himself departs sharply from a mere restatement of Hegel's views...

...Dignity may well be a necessary condition for a good society, but the character and intensity of that need—not to mention the ease with which it is turned into racial and other intolerances—does not reflect only the spiritual strengths and weaknesses of mature individuals...

...This is the importance of the idea of freedom...

...In the same reflective vein, he admits that it is uncertain whether the inequality associated with capitalism may not pose a serious threat to the attainment of a society of mutual recognition, as critics on the left would maintain...

...Economies in which there 112 • DISSENT Books is a high degree of mutual regard develop smooth management-labor relations, flexible and adaptive work teams, and highly effective networks of suppliers...

...We have already seen his recognition of the fact that the inner dynamic of capitalism reduces individuals to "a microscopic world" of family relations...

...There are some notable exceptions, such as Perry Anderson's "The Ends of History," a brilliant treatment, at once critical and admiring, in A Zone of Engagement...

...In place of political structures concerned with the rights of individuals within their national boundaries, I could picture the addition of transnational rights—the protection of immigrants as a case in point, the outlawing of international exploitation as a second...

...If it lies within our capabilities to create a good society—by no means an assumption to be easily granted—the lessonbooks will have to be those that help us strengthen the psyches of infants and children...

...As a consequence, we find a spectrum of capitalisms whose varying performances reflect, more than anything else, the levels of social capital they can generate...

...On the other hand, Fukuyama recognizes that individualism also destroys trust...

...Liberal economic principles provide no support for traditional communities...

...But it is enough for the moment to complete the argument...

...Indeed, he notes that Tocqueville himself feared that the individualistic basis ofAmerican gregariousness could easily become an egotism that would "[dispose] each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows...

...Fukuyama employs the Greek term thymosroughly dignity or self-respect—for this crucial need...

...It is the inadequate treatment of the dynamism of capitalism...

...In Fukuyama's view, there are powerful tendencies in both directions...

...On the one hand, the expanding exercise of economic activities gradually changes the motivation of its participants from a drive for power to the milder purpose of expressing their roles, of finding their place in society...

...However much reality may depart from this ideal, the ideal itself is now everywhere acknowledged...

...Fukuyama treats Marx with all due respect, but he finds his own inspiration in Marx's own source, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel...

...We find it set forth in the opening chapters of The End of History, where he identifies the transformative Mechanism (with a capital "M") as the growing embrace of natural science, with its enlargement of material abundance...

...quite the contrary, they tend to atomize and separate people . . . ['Jives and social connections are more unstable, because the dynamics of capitalist economies means constant shifts in the location and nature of production and therefore work . . . . The sense of identity provided by regionalism and localism diminishes, and people find themselves retreating into the microscopic world of their families which they carry around with them from place to place like lawn furniture...

...As this passage makes clear, the historic process for Fukuyama is driven primarily by much less inspiring means than is the case with Hegel, but there is, nonetheless, a specifically Hegelian emphasis in Fukuyama's treatment...

...And in lieu of our present range of capitalisms, I could even see a range of "socialisms" that sought to combine the flexibility of markets and the protection of individual property with safeguards against the many negative side-effects of markets and the asocial consequences of both the absence of property among the lower portion of the population and its excessive possession among the topmost portion...

...There is no need to criticize this famous flight of fancy, which stands in sharp contrast to the meaning of history that informs Fukuyama's work...

...Rich in examples and argument, it will amply repay study, but I will not attempt to summarize this portion of the book here...

...A psychology, or a political science, that did not take into account man's desire for recognition, and his infrequent but very pronounced willingness to act at all times contrary to even the strongest natural instinct, would misunderstand something very important about human behavior...

...Instead, capitalism appears as an essentially static framework within which disruptive developments, such as trends toward automation and globalization, appear but are never linked to the momentums and hungers of a social order dependent on ceaseless accumulation...

...The first concerns an issue whose centrality for Fukuyama I have only indicated in passing...

...As a result, one can see why Fukuyama's claim deserves to be taken seriously...

...Thymos plays a central role for him, as it does for Hegel (who does not, however, use its Greek name), because the transcendent importance of dignity leads both to ascribe to political liberty a primary place in the development of complete human beings, ultimately more important for their self-realization even than the satisfaction of "natural"—that is, material—wants...

...As we must have divined from his earlier treatment of capitalism and the development of thymos, Fukuyama is ambivalent in his assessment...

...In place of science guided to an important degree by economic and military incentives, I could picture it guided by the need to protect the fragile ecosphere against further deterioration...

...Having given lip service to the possibility that capitalism may well undermine the attainment of a society of mutual concern and respect, in the end Fukuyama allows himself to be carried away by a conception of that ultimate desideratum as a process determined by high moral and political considerations, to the neglect of lower, but perhaps more powerful, psychological and economic ones...

...Thus, unaccountably, Fukuyama acknowledges but then forgets the role of capitalism as a powerful agency in forming man's conception of his self...

...All contemporary capitalist states have large public sectors, while most socialist states have permitted a degree of private economic activity .. . Rather than try to set a precise percentage, it is 110 • DISSENT Books probably more useful to look at what attitude the state takes in principle to the legitimacy of private property and enterprise...

...To me that candor, itself very typical of this bold but modest thinker, only strengthens his central placement of political and psychological concerns as the underlying requirement for a durable and workable historical model...

...This derives, of course, from Marx's view, celebrated in his much quoted description of a communist society as one in which WINTER • 1996 • 109 Books one could "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner . . . without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic...

...These prospects are still distant, save for the already manifest pressures of international finance and migration...

...Fukuyama cites modern-day Japan and C-mnany, and the United States in its nineteenthcentury heyday, as examples of high trust societies...