If one name dominates the popular understanding of international relations it is that of Francis Fukuyama, a former RAND employee and State Department official turned intellectual guru. What the three authors of Francis Fukuyama and the End of History offer the reader is a semi-hagiographical work, compensated for by an exhaustive study of their subject’s main thesis, and the intellectual influences that lie behind it – Kant, Hegel and Marx all figure prominently.
The book is actually a second edition which contextualizes Fukuyama’s work in the broader trends in the philosophy of history. Two new chapters discuss the ways in which Fukuyama’s thinking has developed – his criticism of the neo-conservatism which he once espoused, and which led him to support the invasion of Iraq (2003); and his complex intellectual relationship with his old Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, and open disagreement with the influential thesis of the latter’s The Clash of Civilisations. All of these issues relate to the ‘end of history’ – the big idea of the 1990s – but the authors are keen to insist that there is much more to Fukuyama’s thinking than a neo-Kojevian spin on the meaning of history.
Kant was the first modern philosopher of history. He never claimed that history (as events) would come to an end, but he did believe that there might be a purpose behind events, a significance immanent in the process of history itself which, if uncovered, would allow human beings to find meaning in their lives as they experienced the present. This view is to be found in the nine propositions which are central to his essay ‘An Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784), a classic Enlightenment text. Some of these propositions, such as that regarding ‘asocial sociability’, have found contemporary champions (see Robert Wright’s Non-Zero World, a work which Bill Clinton encouraged his staff to take to heart). And the idea of an ‘evolutionary process’ in history is developed by writers such as Matt Ridley in his recent book The Evolution of Everything (2015). Of course, Ridley has no teleological end in mind, though Kant did: as he made clear in his essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795), he believed that history’s end would include the end of war. He believed that the republics of Europe would one day create a single ‘civic commonwealth’ which would be self-sustaining. Although his republics were not strictly democracies, as we understand the term today, that is part of Fukuyama’s vision – the world’s advanced democracies have established a ‘Pacific union’ which has changed human nature. Perhaps not, but the Czech writer Milan Kundera for one believes that those old protagonists, France and Germany, are now ‘anthropologically incapable’ of going to war against each other. It is a conviction that is deeply held in the European Commission. Convictions, of course, can be dangerous. As Kundera (Reference Kundera1995: 175) himself once remarked, a conviction is ‘a thought which has come to a stop’.
Whatever their differences, Fukuyama is in broad agreement with Kant that, although no philosophy of history can actually predict the future, it can serve a moral purpose (and it was the apparent lack of a moral element in Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilisations which was at the heart of his critique). Many commentators have come to see his thesis as the most significant alternative to the ‘end of history’. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the authors defend Fukuyama’s objection to Huntington for diminishing the involvement of the American people in the fate of those who, for Fukuyama, still live within history, and are eager to remove themselves from it. How this is to be achieved in a country like Syria, or in Palestine, remains to be seen. The Palestinian people, as the late Ulrich Beck once remarked, seem condemned to find ‘autobiographical solutions to systemic contradictions’ (Beck Reference Beck2007: 697) – a German academic’s ponderous way of saying that they are on their own. Obama’s America is no longer, surely, a ‘historical nation’ in the Hegelian sense; instead it is coming to terms with living in what another writer calls the ‘post-American world’ (Zakaria Reference Zakaria2008). At the heart of Fukuyama’s disagreement with Huntington is his unqualified belief in democracy. He accepts that there are three Asian states that may be more successful than the West: China, Japan and Singapore. The China Wave is the title of a recent book; the title says it all. Singapore too has developed a model of paternal authoritarianism in which there is little place for the radical individualism that marks out Western capitalist societies. Japan’s political culture is also very different from the West’s. Its present Prime Minister is anxious to revive ‘moral education’ by redoubling national pride and downplaying war crimes like the Rape of Nanking; he also wishes to replace references in the constitution to universal rights by reference to Japan’s ‘unique culture’. Fukuyama is critical of the authoritarian model for keeping societies in ‘prolonged childhood’ and denying them what he considers all human beings intrinsically want: recognition of their own dignity. What is absent from his account (as well as this book) is the brave new world that we are entering, the world of Google and Facebook, one latent with ‘post-human possibilities’. It is a world which Yuval Harari warns us against in his new book Homo Deus (2016). Hannah Arendt told us that Homo sapiens has always been Homo Faber. The work which we do for our fellow citizens is the key to the Hegelian master/slave dialectic. But what of a world in which artificial intelligence has rendered us ‘useless’? It is not especially comforting to be told by Harari, almost as an afterthought, that ‘useless’ is not a moral category, only an economic one. For Harari this future is already in the offing: what do you study at college when you suspect that the skills you learn at 20 will be irrelevant at the age of 40? The emphasis on human dignity by democratic pundits, like the emphasis on community and family values by the new authoritarians, may both be rendered supernumerary by the scientific advances in which Fukuyama places so much trust.
There is much in this book to mull over. There is a chapter on Hegel’s discussion of the spirit and the state and Fukuyama’s over-indulgent reading of Hegel’s supposed ‘liberalism’. There is an essay on his selective reading of philosophers like Marx – ‘it is a dialogue carried out with only half an ear to what the other’s saying’, an observation which adds force to the criticisms of his work by John Dunn and Joseph McCarney. And there is an especially interesting chapter on his ideas of religion. As a writer who claims to have been influenced by Leo Strauss, it is surprising that he ignores a significant element in Strauss’s thought. Strauss acknowledged that in seeking universal truth philosophy would always be in conflict with religion, but this did not lead him to think that religion would disappear; rather, he thought, religious belief would be displaced by metaphysical knowledge.
Perhaps the critical chapter is the last on the philosophy of history. Most of Fukuyama’s informed readers would conclude that he is a Hegelian and they would be right. Our authors insist that if his thesis is to be buttressed against its many critics then he might dig deeper into the work of Immanual Kant. Indeed, there are some essential aspects of Fukuyama’s thought which they believe bring his thinking closer to Kant’s. His emphasis on the importance of individual freedom (his account of recognition, though Hegelian in origin, is in important respects deeply indebted to Kant’s injunction to treat people as ends in themselves); his theory of international politics (which is much closer to the liberal democratic peace theory than to Hegel’s realism); and more broadly, the anti-metaphysical temper of his mind: these all indicate a strong Kantian element in his thinking.
What is largely absent from this volume, as indeed from Fukuyama’s own work, is reference to non-Western thought. It is the non-Western world, after all, that will have a large voice in determining whether history moves on in directions congenial to what its critics like to call, somewhat dismissively, the Enlightenment Project. Is a universal history possible by sticking only to Enlightenment texts to which Fukuyama is very much in debt?
Fukuyama’s thinking is reminiscent of Kant’s universalism – that much is clear – but that may be the problem, concludes Hamid Dabashi (Reference Dabashi2013). What about those other thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical tradition – in South Asia, figures like Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty? What about Muslim thinkers such as Azmi Bishara, Fawwaz Traboulsi and Abdolkarim Soroush? In his Prison Notebooks, Dabashi tells us, Antonio Gramsci has a short discussion about Kant’s famous phrase in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) that is quite critical in our understanding of what it takes for a philosopher to think of himself as a universal figure. ‘Kant’s maxim “act in such a way that your conduct can become a norm for all men in similar conditions” is less simple and obvious than it appears at first sight. What is meant by similar conditions?’ Actually, Gramsci misquoted Kant – he never used the term ‘similar conditions’, but the principle, called the Categorical Imperative, is the very foundation of Kantian ethics.
The misquoting is quite critical here for it led Gramsci to conclude that the reason Kant could say what he says and offer his own principle as the measure of universal ethics is that the maxim presupposes a single culture, a single religion and a single ‘world-wide’ conformism. As a southern Italian imprisoned in Mussolini’s Italy he saw this as irredeemably arrogant. Dabashi concludes, ‘as with all other people, the Europeans are perfectly entitled to their own self-centrism’. Other people, of course, may have ideas of their own about the end of history.
