Fukuyama, Francis, “Have We Reached the End of History”.rtf

1HAVE WE REACHED THE END OF HISTORY? 1Francis FukuymaThe RAND CorporationI.In watching the flow of events over the pan decade or so. it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history. The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact that peace seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world. Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble 10 announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict. And yet, all of these people sense dimly that there is some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and order to the daily headlines. The Twentieth Century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an end of ideology or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism. The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the worlds two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague. Rangoon and Teheran. What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankinds ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairss yearly summaries of international relations, for 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. But there are powerful reasons for believing that the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. To understand how this is so, we must first consider some theoretical issues concerning the nature of historical change. II.The notion of the end of history is not an original one. Its best known propagator was Karl Marx, who believed that the direction of historical development was a purposeful one determined by the interplay of material forces, and would come to an end only with the achievement of a communist Utopia that would finally resolve all prior contradictions. But the concept of history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For better or worse, much of Hegels historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave-owning, theoretic and finally democratic-egalitarian societies, has become inseparable from modern understanding of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science, insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed natural 1 This article is based on a lecture presented at the University of Chicagos John M. Olin Center for Inquiry Into the Theory and Practice of Democracy in February 19S9. It will appear in the summer 1989 issue of the National Interest. The author would like to pay special thanks to the Olin Center and to Professors Nathan Tarcov and Allan Blocm for their support in this and many earlier endeavors. The opinions expressed in this article are the authors alone and do not reflect those of the RAND Corporation or any agency of the U.S. government.2attributes. The mastery and transformation of mans natural environment through the application of science and technology was originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout court, however Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious. It is Hegels misfortune to be known now primarily as Marxs precursor, and it is our misfortune that few of us are familiar with Hegels work from direct study, but only as it is has been filtered through the distorting lens of Marxism. Only in France has there been an effort to save Hegel from his Marxist interpreters and to resurrect him as the philosopher who most correctly speaks to our time. Among those modern French interpreters of Hegel, the greatest was certainly Alexandre Kojeve, a brilliant Russian migr who taught a highly influential series of seminars in Paris in the 1930s at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes.2 While largely unknown in the United States. Kojeve had a major impact on the intellectual life of the continent. Among his students ranged such future luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre on the led and Raymond Aron on the right: postwar existentialism borrowed many of its basic categories from Hegel via Kojeve. Kojeve sought to resurrect the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806. For this early Hegel saw in Napoleons 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. Kojeve, far from rejecting Hegel in light of the turbulent events of the next century and a half, insisted that the latter had been essentially correct.3 The Battle of Jena marked the end of history because it was at that point that the vanguard, of humanity (a term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the principles of the French Revolution. While there was considerable work to be done after 1806 - 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 stale I could not be improved upon. The two world wars in this century and their attendant revolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending those principles spatially, such that the various provinces of human civilization were brought up to the level of its most advanced outposts, and of forcing those societies in Europe and North America at the vanguard of civilization to implement their liberalism more fully. The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law, mans universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed. For Kojeve, this so-called universal homogeneous state found real-life embodiment in the countries of postwar Western Europe -precisely those flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward-looking. weak-willed states whose grandest project was nothing more heroic than the creation of the Common Market.4 But this was only to be expected. For human history and the conflict that characterized it was based on the existence of contradictions: primitive mans quest for mutual recognition, the dialectic of the master and slave, the transformation and mastery of nature, the struggle for the universal recognition of rights, and the dichotomy between proletarian and capitalist. But in the universal homogeneous |state, all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs are satisfied. There is no struggle or conflict over large issues, and consequently no need for generals or statesmen; what remains is primarily economic activity. And indeed. Kojeves life was consistent with his teaching: believing that there was no more work for philosophers as well, since Hegel correctly understood had already achieved absolute knowledge, he left teaching after the war and spent the remainder of his life working as a bureaucrat in the European Economic Community, until his death in 1968. To his contemporaries at mid-century, Kojeves proclamation of the end of history must have seemed like the typical eccentric solipsism of a French intellectual, coming as it did on the heels of World War II and at the very height of the Cold War. To comprehend how Kojeve could have been so audacious as to assert that history had ended, we must first of all understand the meaning of Hegelian idealism. 2 Kojeves best-known work is his Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris. Editions Gallimard, 1947). which is a transcript of the Ecole Practique lectures from the - 1930s. This book is available in English in a translation by James Nichols entitled Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.3 In this respect Kojeve stands in sharp contrast to contemporary German interpreters of Hegel like Herbert Marcuse who, being more sympathetic to Marx, regarded Hegel ultimately as an historically bound and incomplete philosopher4 Kojeve alternatively identified the end of history with the postwar American way of life” toward which he thought the Soviet Union was moving as well. 3III.For Hegel, the contradictions that drive history exist first of ill in the realm of human consciousness. i.e., on the level of ideas5 - not the trivial election year proposals of American politicians, but ideas in the sense of large unifying world views that might best be understood under the rubric of ideology. Ideology in this sense is not restricted to the secular and explicit political doctrines we usually associate with the term, but can include religion, culture, and the complex of moral values underlying any society as well.Hegels view of the relationship between the ideal and the real or material worlds was an extremely complicated one, beginning with the fact that for him the distinction between the two was only apparent.6 He did not believe that the real world conformed or could be made to conform to ideological preconceptions of philosophy professors in any simpleminded way, or that the material world could not impinge on the ideal. Indeed, Hegel the professor was temporarily thrown out of work as a result of a very material event, the Battle of Jena. But while Hegels writing and thinking could be stopped by a bullet from the material world, the hand on the trigger of the gun was motivated in turn by the ideas of liberty and equality that had driven the French Revolution. For Hegel, all human behavior in the material world, and hence all human history, is rooted in a prior state of consciousness - an idea similar to the one expressed by John Maynard Keynes when he said that all current economic policies were based on the offhand sayings of a forgotten economics professor from the preceding generation. This consciousness may not be explicit and self-aware, as are modern political doctrines, but j may rather take the form of religion or simple cultural or moral habits. And yet this realm of consciousness in the long run necessarily becomes manifest in the material | world, indeed, creates the material world in its own image. Consciousness is cause and not effect, and can develop autonomously from the material world: hence the real subtext underlying the apparent jumble of current events is the history of ideology. Hegels idealism has fared poorly at the hands of later thinkers. Marx reversed the priority of the real and the ideal completely, relegating the entire realm of consciousness - religion, art, culture, philosophy itself - to a superstructure” that was determined entirely by the prevailing material mode of production. Yet another unfortunate legacy of Marxism is our tendency to retreat into materialist or utilitarian explanations of political or historical phenomena, and our disinclination to believe in the autonomous power of ideas. A recent example of this is Paul Kennedys hugely successful The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which ascribes the decline of real powers to simple economic overextension. Obviously, this is true on some level: an empire whose economy is barely above the level of subsistence cannot bankrupt its treasury indefinitely. But whether a highly productive modern industrial society chooses to spend 3 or 7 percent of its GNP on defense rather than consumption is entirely a matter of that societys political priorities, which is in turn determined in the realm of consciousness. The materialist bias of modern thought is characteristic not only of people on the left who may be sympathetic to Marxism, but of many passionate anti-Marxists as well. Indeed, there is on the right what one might label the Wall Street Journal school of deterministic materialism that discounts the importance of ideology and culture and sees man as essentially a rational, profit-maximizing individual. It is precisely this kind of individual and his pursuit of material incentives that is posited as the basis for economic life as such in economics textbooks.7 One small example win illustrate the problematic character of such materialist views. Max Weber begins his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by noting the differential economic performance of Protestant and Catholic communities throughout Europe and America, summed up in the proverb that Protestants eat well while Catholics sleep well. Weber notes that according to any economic theory that posited man as a rational profil-maximizer, raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant accustomed to earning two and a half marks per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more tha