Francis Fukuyama the National Interest Summer 1989
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The End of History? Francis Fukuyama The National Interest Summer 1989 IN WATCHING the flow of events the intellectual climate of the world's over the past decade or so, it is hard to two largest communist countries, and avoid the feeling that something very the beginnings of significant reform fundamental has happened in world movements in both. But this history. The past year has seen a flood phenomenon extends beyond high of articles commemorating the end of politics and it can be seen also in the the Cold War, and the fact that "peace" ineluctable spread of consumerist seems to be breaking out in many Western culture in such diverse regions of the world. Most of these contexts as the peasants' markets and analyses lack any larger conceptual color television sets now omnipresent framework for distinguishing between throughout China, the cooperative what is essential and what is restaurants and clothing stores opened contingent or accidental in world in the past year in Moscow, the history, and are predictably Beethoven piped into Japanese superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were department stores, and the rock music ousted from the Kremlin or a new enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium Tehran. from a desolate Middle Eastern What we may be witnessing is not capital, these same commentators just the end of the Cold War, or the would scramble to announce the passing of a particular period of rebirth of a new era of conflict. postwar history, but the end of history And yet, all of these people sense as such: that is, the end point of dimly that there is some larger process mankind's ideological evolution and at work, a process that gives coherence the universalization of Western liberal and order to the daily headlines. The democracy as the final form of human twentieth century saw the developed government. This is not to say that world descend into a paroxysm of there will no longer be events to fill the ideological violence, as liberalism pages of Foreign Affair's yearly contended first with the remnants of summaries of international relations, absolutism, then bolshevism and for the victory of liberalism has fascism, and finally an updated occurred primarily in the realm of Marxism that threatened to lead to the ideas or consciousness and is as yet ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. incomplete in. the real or material But the century that began full of self- world. But there are powerful reasons confidence in the ultimate triumph of for believing that it is the ideal that Western liberal democracy seems at its will govern the material world in the close to be returning full circle to long run. To understand how this is so, where it started: not to an "end of we must first consider some ideology" or a convergence between theoretical issues concerning the capitalism and socialism, as earlier nature of historical change. predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism. I The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable THE NOTION of the end of history systematic alternatives to Western is not an original one. Its best known liberalism. In the past decade, there propagator was Karl Marx, who have been unmistakable changes in The End of History? Francis Fukuyama The National Interest, Summer 1989 believed that the direction of historical interpreters and to resurrect him as development was a purposeful one the philosopher who most correctly determined by the interplay of speaks to our time. Among those material forces, and would come to an modern French interpreters of Hegel, end only with the achievement of a the greatest was certainly Alexandre communist utopia that would finally Kojève, a brilliant Russian émigré who resolve all prior contradictions. But taught a highly influential series of the concept of history as a dialectical seminars in Paris in the 1930s at the process with a beginning, a middle, Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes.1 and an end was borrowed by Marx While largely unknown in the United from his great German predecessor, States, Kojève had a major impact on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. the intellectual life of the continent. Among his students ranged such For better or worse, much of future luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre Hegel's historicism has become part of on the Left and Raymond Aron on the our contemporary intellectual Right; postwar existentialism baggage. The notion that mankind has borrowed many of its basic categories progressed through a series of from Hegel via Kojève. primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these Kojève sought to resurrect the stages corresponded to concrete forms Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, of social organization, such as tribal, the Hegel who proclaimed history to slave-owning, theocratic, and finally be at an end in 1806. For as early as democratic-egalitarian societies, has this Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat of become inseparable from the modern the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of understanding of man. Hegel was the Jena the victory of the ideals of the first philosopher to speak the language French Revolution, and the imminent of modern social science, insofar as universalization of the state man for him was the product of his incorporating the principles of liberty concrete historical and social and equality. Kojève, far from rejecting environment and not, as earlier Hegel in light of the turbulent events natural right theorists would have it, a of the next century and a half, insisted collection of more or less fixed that the latter had been essentially "natural" attributes. The mastery and correct.2 The Battle of Jena marked transformation of man's natural the end of history because it was at environment through the application that point that the vanguard of of science and technology was humanity (a term quite familiar to originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists whose historical relativism 1 Kojève's best known work is his degenerated into relativism tout court, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: however, Hegel believed that history Editions Gallimard, 1947), which is a culminated in an absolute moment - a transcript of the Ecole Practique lectures moment in which a final, rational form from the 1930's. This book is available in of society and state became victorious. English entitled Introduction to the Reading of Hegel arranged by Raymond It is Hegel's misfortune to be Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, and known now primarily as Marx's translated by James Nichols (New York: precursor; and it is our misfortune Basic Books, 1969). that few of us are familiar with Hegel's 2 In this respect Kojève stands in sharp work from direct study, but only as it contrast to contemporary German has been filtered through the interpreters of Hegel like Herbert Marcuse distorting lens of Marxism. In France, who, being more sympathetic to Marx, however, there has been an effort to regarded Hegel ultimately as an save Hegel from his Marxist historically bound and incomplete philosopher. 2 The End of History? Francis Fukuyama The National Interest, Summer 1989 Marxists) actualized the principles of struggle or conflict over "large" issues, the French Revolution. While there and consequently no need for generals was considerable work to be done after or statesmen; what remains is 1806 - abolishing slavery and the slave primarily economic activity. And trade, extending the franchise to indeed, Kojève's life was consistent workers, women, blacks, and other with his teaching. Believing that there racial minorities, etc. - the basic was no more work for philosophers as principles of the liberal democratic well, since Hegel (correctly state could not be improved upon. The understood) had already achieved two world wars in this century and absolute knowledge, Kojève left their attendant revolutions and teaching after the war and spent the upheavals simply had the effect of remainder of his life working as a extending those principles spatially, bureaucrat in the European Economic such that the various provinces of Community, until his death in 1968. human civilization were brought up to To his contemporaries at mid- the level of its most advanced century, Kojève's proclamation of the outposts, and of forcing those societies end of history must have seemed like in Europe and North America at the the typical eccentric solipsism of a vanguard of civilization to implement French intellectual, coming as it did on their liberalism more fully. the heels of World War II and at the The state that emerges at the end of very height of the Cold War. To history is liberal insofar as it comprehend how Kojève could have recognizes and protects through a been so audacious as to assert that system of law man's universal right to history has ended, we must first of all freedom, and democratic insofar as it understand the meaning of Hegelian exists only with the consent of the idealism. governed. For Kojève, this so-called "universal homogenous state" found real-life embodiment in the countries II of postwar Western Europe - precisely those flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward-looking, weak-willed states FOR HEGEL, the contradictions whose grandest project was nothing that drive history exist first of all in the more heroic than the creation of the realm of human consciousness, i.e. on Common Market.3 But this was only to the level of ideas4 - not the trivial be expected. For human history and election year proposals of American the conflict that characterized it was politicians, but ideas in the sense of based on the existence of large unifying world views that might "contradictions": primitive man's best be understood under the rubric of quest for mutual recognition, the ideology.