on francis fukuyama

Chris Hughes 50655 – Dissertation (809L3) – MA Social and Political Thought

Francis Fukuyama and The End of History and the Last Man:interpreting the thesis of history today

Contents

Dissertation:1. The End of History and The Last Man: introducing the book (p.02)2. Reconstructing the Mechanism (p.07)3. The Development of Fukuyama's Views (p.16)4. Hegel, Kojève, and the Struggle for Recognition (p.23)5. “The Argument” (p.30)6. Fukuyama, Neoconservatism, and US Foreign Policy (p.36)7. Conflicting Themes (p.41)8. Summaries, Reservations, Conclusions (p.42)

Endnotes (p.46)[Appendix] Literature Review (p.55)Bibliography (p.58)


Francis Fukuyama and The End of History and the Last Man: interpreting the thesis of history today

The essay is divided into eight sections. The first section introduces the themes of The End of

History and the Last Man (EHLM) – with its idea to renew the project of a Universal History of

humankind, as it is expounded in Part I. In the second section, where Part II of the book will be

explained, all the main aspects of the first 'motor' of history – which Fukuyama calls the

'Mechanism' – will be introduced. In the third section, we see how the development of Fukuyama's

views – through the policy recommendations he gives on state building and development –

continues the argument of the Mechanism, re-enforcing the dominance of the Mechanism as the

fundamental explanatory logic of history in the interpretation of EHLM. The third section then

returns to Part III of EHLM, and investigates the influence of Alexandre Kojève on Fukuyama, as

Fukuyama outlines the struggle for recognition (as the alternative 'motor' of history). The fourth

section brings the main argument of the essay together, attempting to fully explain and defend it:

the argument is that EHLM, containing many confusions, is plagued by an ambiguity at the centre

of the explanation of the movement of history: the result being that, over time, the 'Mechanism'

becomes reasserted over the struggle for recognition in order to 'cover up' the ambiguity. In the fifth

section, Fukuyama's review of the neoconservative movement in After the Neocons, and his views

on foreign policy, are explored, and one possible contributing reason for the shift in argument in

EHLM is suggested. This leads to a shorter segment, which touches very briefly on the conflicting

or alternate themes in Fukuyama interpretation, and then finally, the sixth section is a conclusion.

The End of History and The Last Man: introducing the book

Fukuyama introduces the subject of the book as a question. He asks, “Whether, at the end of the

twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History

of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy?”1. The

answer he arrives at it 'yes'', and for “two separate reasons”: “One has to do with economics, and

the other has to do with what is termed the 'struggle for recognition'”2 (this latter reason can be set

aside for now). Fukuyama claims that “liberal democracy remains the only coherent political

aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe”. Assuming this is true, this

needs explanation. After Part I of the book, which tries to justify the re-raising of this typically 19th

century question again today, in Part II Fukuyama proposes an initial answer by “attempting to use

modern natural science as a regulator or mechanism to explain the directionality and coherence of


History”3, which becomes the first 'motor' of history.

In the first chapter, Fukuyama examines the overriding political 'mood' at the end of the 20th

century, which he labels our 'pessimism'. “The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of

us into deep historical pessimists”4. This pessimistic mood – and it appears to signify principally a

pessimism about the progress of history – has a deep grounding in the tragic events of the 20th

century. These tragic events not only put into question the fact of progress, but cut deep down into

the very understanding of modernity itself. There is a resulting “intellectual crisis of Western

rationalism”5, which is another cause of out pessimistic mood6.

In the 19th century, Fukuyama claims, historical progress was universally believed in, and this

progress was taken to mean that humanity would advance toward liberal democracy (and, in what

was regarded as exactly the same thing, an advancement to a more rational set of political

institutions.) But, with the coming of the Cold War, the world was split in two by the monumental

ideological conflict between Soviet Communism and American capitalism, and Fukuyama believes

this world conflict was responsible for throwing into radical doubt the certainty of progress that

once existed. A victory for communism would discredit the idea of progress because it would signal

both a defeat for democracy and for rationalism. Fukuyama discusses the belief of the foreign

policy 'realists' – principally among them Henry Kissinger – that the US should learn to

accommodate itself to the Soviet Union as a permanent fixture of the international scene, and he

interprets this as a lack of confidence in any future world progress7. Thus, our 'pessimism'.

In the next 3 chapters of Part I, Fukuyama wants to show that today our pessimism may be

unwarranted: “despite the powerful reasons given us by our experience in the first half of this [20th]

century, events in its second half have been pointing in a very different and unexpected direction”8.

With the shadow of the Cold War lifted, and as humanity drew toward the new millennium, “the

world as a whole has not revealed new evils, but has gotten better in certain distinct ways”. The

communist totalitarian experiment – which represented an attempt, in Fukuyama's view, to bypass

the “natural and organic processes” of “social evolution” with “large-scale social engineering”, as

the state dictated to the society below through “a series of forced evolutions from above”9 – failed.

(Communism was not the culmination of history, but a failure to play by it.) And neither was

communism's failure a stand-alone event, but rather the culmination of a larger late-20th century

pattern of the collapse of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes (this phenomenon being summed

up by Fukuyama through what he calls the 'weakness of strong states'10). The end of communism

was the consummation of a gradual historical pattern, a pattern of all the remaining alternatives to

the Western liberal democratic idea being thoroughly discredited.


One might then argue that the thesis of EHLM can only really make sense at the occasion of the

end of the Cold War. In the book's introduction, Fukuyama himself is only prepared to admit

sheepishly that EHLM is “informed by recent world events”, but insists that it is “least of all” an

“account of the end of the Cold War”11. While it is obviously true that a return to the question of

whether there is progress in history does not need to be prompted by any current political event,

and might arise from a kind of simple philosophical curiosity, this is not persuasive in Fukuyama's

case. It would also ignore the reality that the end of the Cold War was crucial in the discrediting of

the totalitarian alternative, which lays the empirical groundwork for the account of the forward

march of liberal democracy itself. Fukuyama explicitly puts it in these terms: “As mankind

approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central

planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal

validity: liberal democracy...”12

Fukuyama's main empirical claim, which leaves the rest of EHLM to justify its philosophical

significance, is simply that liberal democracies are more numerous today than in any time in

history. In 'The Worldwide Liberal Revolution' he sets out a table of countries13 which is designed to

provide striking, immediate visual demonstration of the global progressive trend toward liberal

democracy he identifies. So far, so good. But for the purposes of his table of democracies,

Fukuyama adopts a “strictly formal definition of democracy”14. A country in the table is classified as

democratic if it “grants its people the right to choose their own government through periodic,

secret-ballot, multi-party elections, on the the basis of universal and equal suffrage”15. Such a

formal judgement is used to avoid unnecessary ambiguity and controversy – “once we move away

from a formal definition, we open up the possibility of infinite abuse of the democratic principle” – a

point not without its merits. Yet this judgement leaves Fukuyama open to two main challenges: first,

that the definition is so formal that it ignores all the significant differences between democracies,

erroneously equating countries and political systems which are too diverse to be classified together

as examples of the same liberal democratic category. From this angle, Fukuyama could only

defend the strong trend toward liberal democracy by viewing the world from so far out into space

as to make any meaningful judgement impossible; and second, that such a formal definition does

an injustice to the good name of democracy, which should be far more substantive.

And it is perhaps too easy to criticise the way Fukuyama so guiltlessly lifts his formal liberal

democratic criteria from the history of the United States. The list of liberal rights is chosen because

it is “compatible with those contained in the American Bill of Rights”16, and we also see Fukuyama

announcing that “before 1776 there was not a single one [democracy] in existence anywhere in the


world”17. Democracy itself originates with Jefferson's 1776 declaration. But even with a single

constitution running continuously from 1790 to 1900 (any many amendments), this taxonomy is in

danger of ignoring the vast social changes that took place in the US between those dates – that is,

even within one society, let alone across the 61 vastly disparate countries Fukuyama is interested

in for that time period.

Yet while these criticisms – which have been advanced frequently, by multiple critics18 – do hit their

mark, Fukuyama can be defended to some extent. If we examine Fukuyama's characterization of

liberalism again closely, we may be able to delineate the thread that joins all these countries

together – or at least, discover the common horizon that all these countries share (or will share

very soon in the future). Liberalism must, in its “economic manifestation”, include “the recognition

of the right of free economic activity and economic exchange based on private property and

markets”19. And so, we might see it that while there are great differences in the interpretations 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” – they are all nevertheless united in being part of one system, global

capitalism. (Fukuyama says it was more useful in designing this categorization to “look at what

attitude the state takes in principle to the legitimacy of private property and private enterprise”,

rather than the degree of its interference in the free market per se.) This may enable us to

acknowledge the vast differences between countries while recognising what binds them together,

and so means the universal concept 'liberal democracy' can be applied.

We must also keep in mind that Fukuyama is here concerned with systematic political types, which

are rationalistic and can be universally applied: the large cultural differences between nations (very

far from being ignored by Fukuyama anyway) are not really the point. And this observation also

goes some way to dealing with the criticism of Fukuyama's neglect of a more substantive vision for

democracy. Fukuyama goes on to write a great deal about the strong communities needed for a

working, healthy democracy, so he cannot be said to be blind to the issue. The problem is rather

that the substantive ideal – this criticism almost largely one advanced by socialists, for whom

socialism is precisely this substantive ideal20 – has been discredited as a universal, systematic

alternative. All that remains are the 'subpolitical' conditions of 'culture', community, moral

understandings, group solidarity etc., greatly divergent across the swathe of all different nations,

which can still improve, but only within the framework of liberal democracy (and, as we have seen,

within capitalism).

Just as impressive as the growth in the number of democracies is the fact that democracy has


“broken out of its original beachhead in Western Europe and North America”, and has made

“significant inroads in other parts of the world that do not share the political, religious, and cultural

traditions of those areas”21. This strongly suggests the truly universal character of liberal

democracy, proving its appeal to all the world's populations. But this cannot be taken as meaning

that Fukuyama denies that these democratizing countries are having to face great challenges.

Indeed, he is aware that a few countries have lost their democracy, and knows a few of the

recently emerged democracies are likely to again collapse into dictatorship22. He is defiant even in

the face of this realization: “the fact that there will be setbacks and disappointments in the process

of democratization, or that not every market economy will prosper, should not distract us from the

larger pattern that is emerging in human history”23. So then, how can Fukuyama square his thesis

with the evidence of that some countries are 'going backward'?

It is important to understand the argument at this point. The empirical demonstration is supposed

to lend weight to the idea that we need to return to the question of the philosophy of history, and is

provide the support for doing so. But the argument is not just about the existence of liberal

democratic regimes today; this is, in a sense, only one side of the dual character of Fukuyama's

reasoning. For Fukuyama, what is emerging victorious is “not so much liberal practice, as the

liberal idea.”24 The advance of democracy across the world will not be uniform, it will involve many

setbacks and suffer many cycles of bad fortune, its final victory in every country is by no needs

certain (perhaps not even likely). But the horizon of each nation has been set. There is now “no

ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy.”

History has decided upon its final and universal standard by which all will be judged. The idea of a

Universal History is thus not reducible to mere description, but contains a normative dimension

along with the empirical. Since many had misunderstood the point, Fukuyama makes this dualism

explicit when he returns to the subject some years later.25 Fukuyama spells it out: “My book

consists of two distinct arguments : the first an empirical evaluation of various events, both

contemporary and historical, and the second a 'normative' or theoretical one that seeks to evaluate

contemporary liberal democracy.”

The Universal History project consists of an attempt to elucidate universal logics or mechanisms

for explaining the movement of history, but also needs certain theoretical criteria for judging that

the resulting directionality is also, by at least some measure, an improvement. By inscribing these

criteria within history, one can judge both the point at which the best socio-political regime has

been attained, and so – and this necessarily follows – one can judge when history has reached its

end. (Note this is 'end' in both senses – as terminus, and as goal.) History is a narrative, we might

even say: history harbours goals, present in germ at its origin, and progressively realises them.


“History is a process with a subject (humanity) and a goal (the universal-homogeneous state),

whose developments are to be explained and evaluated, in a retrospective benefaction, by their

contribution to the realisation of that goal.”26

Fukuyama situates his own efforts at the feet of the giants of the tradition, Kant and Hegel. The

question that Kant put to Universal History was “whether, when taking all societies and all times

into account, there was overall reason to expect general human progress.”27 For Hegel, the history

of the world was the progressive realisation of the consciousness of freedom. It meant the joining

together of the moral and historical: the idea of freedom, playing itself out in history, becomes

embodied in human institutions at its end.28 Fukuyama wants to take up the Hegelian mantle.

Yet there is a sense that, today, it is not the feeling of progress, directionality or movement in our

societies that interests us in the question of History, as it did for these two giant occupants of the

19th century. Instead, it seems like it is some opaque feeling of 'ending' that has made us curious

about what it was that ended in the first place. If we look around us today, we “cannot picture to

ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better.”.

While other ages have thought of themselves, with exhilaration, as being at the cutting edge of

history's wave, today we are “exhausted” from “the pursuit of alternatives.”29 We are now at a

melancholic point in which “there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a

fundamental improvement over our current order.”30

In summary: Fukuyama has diagnosed the fact that, as we approached the new century, our mood

was still very much dominated by a historical 20th century pessimism (that is, primarily, an early 20th

century pessimism.) With the end of the Cold War, we should see that this mood is now misplaced:

the collapse of communism had the effect of shinning light back onto the previously missed

positive trend of the discrediting of authoritarian and totalitarian alternatives to liberal democracy.

Now, as only one contender is left standing, the question of History can be asked anew; we will

have to “reconsider once again whether it is possible to write a Universal History of mankind”31.

Reconstructing the Mechanism

The first proposed formulation for the process of History – which we will shorten to simply 'the

Mechanism', as Fukuyama does – tries to reconstruct a set of foundational historical causes by

which the directionality of history can be explained. Fukuyama begins by looking into the

intellectual origins of the idea of a Universal History (chapter 5) for clues. After initially looking at


what might be described as the themes of philosophy of history in embryo in idea of Christian

redemption, Fukuyama is interested in the first, secular attempts at Universal History, which he

traces back to the 16th century and the influence of Galileo, Bacon and Descartes. The first

attempts to write a Universal History were grounded in the emergence of (what has now become

known simply as) the 'scientific method'. This new science was crucial for two reasons. First, it

meant it was possible to accumulate knowledge of the external world. This science does not as

such set out on the recovering of isolated 'facts', but to look for a set of coherent and universal

laws that would explain the uniformity of nature. This required it to attain such levels of rigour and

discipline that later generations could rely upon the discoveries of earlier ones, and push ahead

with new discoveries, etc. This meant that scientific knowledge could be directional and

progressive32. Second, science is inherently practical, in the sense that the thirst for scientific

knowledge comes primarily from the desire to control and master nature. Science now meant that

humanity could significantly dominate its environment: man, no longer just another part of nature,

governed by its laws, could manipulate nature to his will.

So, in chapter 6, after repeating his claims about modern science – that it is the only social

endeavour which is “by common consensus unequivocally cumulative and directional”33 –

Fukuyama links it with the directionality of history – “once discovered, the progressive and

continuous unfolding of modern natural science has provided a directional Mechanism for

explaining many aspects of subsequent historical development”34. Fukuyama then outlines two

basic ways in which modern natural science produces such directional and universal history. The

first is through military competition. As a consequence of international rivalry, states are pressured

into restructuring their social systems. The point is intuitive: modern natural science confers a

decisive military advantage on those nations that can utilize it most effectively, which they can do

through the development, production and deployment of technology. In the almost Hobbesian

state-of-nature that characterizes the international state system, any nation that wants to survive –

to “maintain its political autonomy” – is forced, sooner rather than later, to “adopt the technology of

its enemies and rivals”35. This entails, if necessary, the entire transformation of the socio-economic

base in order to propagate and maintain the conditions for producing (and deploying) this military

hardware. Fukuyama concentrates on how this military competition creates powerful incentives for

countries to push toward political unity, echoing a well-known argument that the grave threat of

inter-state war was the main catalyst for the foundation and consolidation of the nation-state in

Europe. The argument is that war between nations has the paradoxical effect of unifying them:

“Even as war leads to their destruction, it forces states to accept modern technological civilization

and the social structures that support it”36. Once a certain stage is reached, humans do not choose

to develop more technology, it is forced upon them, whether they like it or not.37


But this factor of military competition, one could argue, does not have much grounding in the

fundamental needs or motivations of human nature. It is more something that the lack of

international regulatory mechanisms regarding nation-states forces upon human beings38. So, for

this deeper grounding, we can turn to the second (more important) way that modern science

produces directional historical change: through “the progressive conquest of nature for the purpose

of the satisfying human desires”39. This process is labelled simply economic modernization. This

does again mean institutionalizing modern methods for building machines and technology, things

that could be used in war, etc. Yet it is not simply a pragmatic response to external demands made

on societies living under the threat of war; it represents the internalization of reason into the very

make-up of societies. It is “the bringing to bear of human reason to problems of social

organization”, which in terms of the great economic changes involved, must express itself with “the

creation of a rational division of labor.”40 Modern natural science establishes and regulates a

constantly evolving horizon of production possibilities, and technology develops in close relation to

the increasingly rationalized organisation of labour.

Fukuyama details the ways in which economic growth produced “certain uniform social

transformations in all societies, regardless of their prior social structure”41. New technological

possibilities entail improvements in communication and transportation, allowing for the expansion

of markets. This facilitates in turn the realization of economies of scale, and specialization

becomes more viable (when selling takes place over a much wider market, as opposed to, lets say,

just a couple of local villages) which all results in a general trend toward increased productivity.

This process also induces more far-reaching social changes: industrial societies become

predominantly urban42 and increasingly mobile (labourers moving around the country looking for

work), and these changes seriously undermine traditional social groupings (tribes, extended

families, religious sects, etc.) What replaces these traditional groups are modern bureaucratic

forms of business organization, which employ individuals on no basis other than their skills, ability,

and willingness to do the job. These modern bureaucratic forms complete the institutionalization of

such rationalized forms of work.

In chapters 8 and 9, Fukuyama adds more again to his explanation of the Mechanism, adding

theoretical details, and moving the narrative on historically. He is now concerned with showing how

the Mechanism would lead beyond the vast industrial economies of the modern period to

contemporary 20th century capitalism – that is, to capitalism, as opposed to the central planning

model, represented in the 20th century by the Soviet Union. Fukuyama explains this in terms of

capitalism having “proven itself far more efficient” than central planning systems in its “developing


and utilizing technology”, and in “adapting to the rapidly changing conditions of a global division of

labor”43. The contest between capitalism and the central planning model turns decisively in

capitalism's favour at the point of transition from the mature industrial economy to the 'post-

industrial' economy or society (or 'the information age'). While the great centrally planned and

bureaucratized economies of the East could compete with the capitalist economies of the West

when it came to the age of coal, steel and heavy manufacturing, they fell far behind in an age of

service industries and finance. Fukuyama quips that it was “in the highly complex and dynamic

'post-industrial' economic world” that “Marxism-Leninism as an economic system met its Waterloo”44.

The link to liberalism is made within the terms of the Mechanism itself. In the information age, the

economic pressures for the invention and implementation of new technologies becomes far more

acute, far more rapid and urgent, than it was in the clunking age of heavy machinery. This means

the scientific community is put under much greater pressure to innovate, and so the state – to

allow the pursuit of research in the most efficient way possible – must grant scientists certain

protected rights; meaning, both an atmosphere of freedom for the communication and

dissemination of ideas, and the assurance that one's own successes in innovation will be suitably

rewarded45. This atmosphere spreads from the confines of the more hi-tech fields to other areas of

the economy where the spread of information is crucial, like marketing and advertising. The

freedom that previously existed became far more important for the working of the market, and the

expansion of the economy positively required the granting of newer and wider freedoms.

The charges against centralized planning in the information age are threefold: centralized

economies have not (1) succeeded in making rational investment decisions; have not (2)

effectively incorporated new technologies into the production process; and have not (3) been able

to ensure that the feedback received through their (non-market determined) pricing system was

accurate. Added to this was the totalitarian state's undermining of the rational division of labour,

which Fukuyama places as key to understanding the capabilities of an economy. The need for

central planners to “maintain control over prices and allocations of goods” prohibits them from

“participating in the international division of labor, and thereby from realizing the economies of

scale it makes possible”46. And finally, central planning is said to undermine “an all-important

aspect of human capital, the work ethic”47.

Fukuyama then makes the second part of the argument against centralized planning: he maintains

that capitalism is not simply optimal for rich, post-industrial societies (for the above reasons), but

for the newly developing economies as well. Here the task is to defend American 'social-scientific'


ideas on modernization from the charge of being 'ethnocentric' (and, by doing so, to advance a

critique of 'dependency theory', which Fukuyama believes has had a malignant effect on the

welfare of developing societies). Fukuyama attacks Lenin, who he regards as the “real father of

dependency theory”, citing Lenin's 1914 pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (in

which Lenin claimed, Fukuyama summarises, that Western-developed capitalism postponed its

own demise by exporting its contradictions to the colonies and underdeveloped world.)

According to classical liberal theory, Fukuyama summarizes, “participation in an open system of

world trade should maximize the advantage of all”48. In contrast, dependency theory held that “late

development doomed a country to perpetual backwardness” because of the biases in the system.49

But dependency theory is no longer tenable: while it “lives on among left-wing intellectuals” it has

in reality been “exploded as a theoretical model by one large phenomenon it cannot possibly

explain: the economic development of East Asia in the postwar period”50. Fukuyama believes the

sheer weight of empirical data on the rise of these East Asian economies is enough to bury

dependency theory, and to vindicate economic liberalism (and what Fukuyama sees as the same

thing, contemporary global capitalism). While the wealth gap between the developed and

developing world remains huge, it cannot be the fault of markets; the vast global inequality today

must not be allowed to throw into doubt the modernization thesis. Instead, there must be other

explanations, which largely fall below the level system itself, such as (again) 'culture', or faulty

political traditions51. The central planning model, then, cannot be defended using dependency

theory, and so is no more appealing an option for developing countries than it is for advanced

industrial societies. The Mechanism can now “explain the creation of a universal consumer culture

based on liberal economic principles, for the Third World as well as the First and Second”52. This is

a truly universal development, bringing all of humanity to the final economic stage of History53.

Perhaps the most important chapter in Fukuyama's exposition of the Mechanism – the linchpin that

finally ties the narrative of industrialization and economic growth to the politics of liberal democracy

– is chapter 10, 'In the Land of Education'.Fukuyama wants to prove that there is a “necessary

connection between advanced industrialization and political liberalism” which can account for their

“high degree of correlation” in today's world54. This connection must take the shape of a universal,

structural disposition that will inform the development of all human societies. Fukuyama then

introduces the three alternate types of explanation for this phenomenon. Together, they form a

powerful finale to the main structure of Fukuyama's exposition of the Mechanism in EHLM.

The first possibility is a functionalist explanation, to the effect that “only democracy is capable of

mediating the complex web of conflicting interests that are created by a modern economy”55.


Fukuyama attributes this view to Talcott Parsons56, and restates what he believes is Parsons's

central point: “democracies are best equipped to deal with the rapidly proliferating number of

interest groups created by the industrialization process”57. Democracy creates an open

environment wherein the diverse assortment of social actors newly emerging can come together to

form a political consensus supporting the state's legitimacy. The economic modernization process,

to put it crudely, pulls society apart: the homogeneity of group self-interest, self-understanding and

culture, is broken up into a multiplicity of different classes and sectors which may not have any

reason to agree with each other on what will constitute an optimal political arrangement58. The

democracy functions – keeping society together – by providing avenues of participation and

representation, in which the interests of these various groups can be publicly expressed; and,

furthermore, the operating principles of the state can be decided through the coming-together of a

significant number of these groups to form a lasting consensus, making it more efficient. In

contrast, dictatorships and other authoritarian forms of government – suffering under “narrow ruling

elites” who are “out of touch with the social changes” occurring “as a result of economic

development”59 – are incapable of adjusting with anything like the same degree of success.

The point seems to be that, when a certain level of development is reached, the distinction

between making decisions purely for the sake of economic efficiency, and making decisions which

are 'value-laden' (where the different social groups have to be organised to perform roles, and are

asked to make certain contributions to the polity, in order to assure the operation of the economy)

becomes untenable. When the modernization process fully matures, the smooth functioning of the

economy “depends on the willingness of its many interdependent social components to work

together”60. The economy requires more than the operation of the market mechanism, but also

needs public administration: the market alone cannot, for example, determine “the appropriate

level and location of public infrastructure investment, or rules for the settlement of labor disputes,

or the degree of airline and trucking regulation, or occupational health and safety standards”61. In

the openness of democracy, not only do these communities become assured some sort of

representation of their interests in public policy decision making, but governments receive accurate

feedback of the effects of these policies.

The second form of explanation has to do with the observed tendency of “dictatorships or one-

party rule to degenerate over time, and to degenerate more quickly when faced with the task of

running an advanced technological society”62. This argument is easy to summarise: as

dictatorships tend to have their support based in either a form of charismatic authority, or (perhaps

at least) on a record of high economic competence, both of which do not directly relate to the form

of government itself but to the appeal or expertise of those people – the class, social clique, or


even just the particular group of individuals – currently exercising power. In transitional phases

there is no real reason why the new leaders should possess either of these two qualities, and the

state's authority would thereby decay as a result. This second form of explanation appears to be

only a kind of possible contributing factor, subordinate to the first and third forms of explanations. It

is not impossible that non-democratic, non-liberal governments can have strong, enforceable,

institutionalized rules and procedures for selecting new leaders and vetting policies, and thus,

these kinds of dictatorships at least could largely mitigate this tendency for degeneration.

The third, final, and most powerful form of explanation linking development and democracy is, as

Fukuyama outlines it, that “successful industrialization produces middle-class societies, and that

middle-class societies demand political participation and equality of rights”. Economic

development, at least during its mature stages, tends to promote a broader equality of condition,

because “it creates enormous demand for a large, educated work force”. And such equality

“arguably predisposes people to oppose political systems that do not respect that equality or permit

people to participate on an equal basis”63. Fukuyama argues that in meeting the educational

requirements of the modern economy – needing an increasing range of skilled workers,

technicians, managers and intellectuals – a dominant socio-economic class materializes in the

society, this being the much famed 'middle-class'.

It seems best to link this form of explanation with the first, in the following sense: just as the effects

of economic modernization produce a breaking down of the former homogeneity of society,

resulting in various diverse social actors, so does the new high level of education give these social

actors a better understanding of their own self-interest (and so education in this sense can benefit

people by making them more aware of their dignity and need for respect, and so they end up

asking much more for themselves in the political arena, with this whole effect being most

pronounced and acute for the middle-class). Education means both greater technical knowledge

and political enlightenment, Fukuyama argues. The concept of 'education' itself bridges the gap

between economic modernization (education as the acquirement of technical skills) and political

liberalization (education which 'liberates' people from prejudice and unreflective belief in traditional

authority).

Fukuyama does take issue with all 3 forms of explanation, however. The first form of explanation is

true “only up to a point.”64 He argues that the functionalist position is caught within a circularity:

democracy is indeed the best way of resolving conflicts between disparate groups, but it is so

when those groups share at least a bare groundwork of mutual values – that is, when all are

already agreed on the legitimacy of democracy. Democracy can resolve in-fighting between


interest groups when these groups “share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or

rules of the game”. Democracy works best for democrats. When the conflicts involved concern

more than the protecting of ones interest (whether narrowly defined as economic, or more broadly

defined as being anything one wants represented in policy decisions) like fundamental conflicts

over, for example, the absolutist claims of nationalism, religion, or even natural social hierarchy

(caste), democracy may be of no help. Fukuyama admits that while democracy may work for

American society, this does not imply that it will necessarily be able to resolve antagonisms in other

societies. Fukuyama is also honest enough to admit that the establishment of formal democracy in

a country that is otherwise vastly unequal (with huge disparities in wealth, prestige, status, and

power) may actually mask the inequalities, rather than help to resolve them.

There is also a problem with the third form of explanation. How can we be certain that the current

link between education and democratic values is not merely transitory, an empirical correlation

rather than the required theoretical connection? It may just be that democratic values are the most

functional for today's particular socio-economic climate, which would deny the transhistorical truth-

status of the proposition. Who knows, we may again be learning about the need to revere tradition

and respect our elders in the classroom if, in the long run, we find that capitalism will fare better in

taking a technocratic-paternalistic rather than a liberal-democratic road! Fukuyama even suggests

that there is now “considerable empirical evidence” which could indicate that “market-oriented

authoritarian modernizers do better economically than their democratic counterparts”65 (how this

counts as a qualification or reservation rather than a direct contradiction of the overall argument is

rather unclear). He cites the record of Brazil after the military takeover in 1964, Chile under

Pinochet, and the newly industrializing economies of Asia.

Fukuyama concludes that while there is “an unquestionable relationship between economic

development and liberal democracy”, the “exact nature of that relationship is more complicated

than it first appeared” and it is “not adequately explained by any of the theories presented up to this

point”66. None is able to establish a strict logical connection from the one to the other, and it could

even be the case that “the Mechanism underlying our directional history leads equally well to a

bureaucratic-authoritarian future as to a liberal one”67. And so Fukuyama, after a very brief six page

summary of the argument, concludes Part II of the book with the chapter 'No Democracy without

Democrats' (chapter 12). This is where Fukuyama elaborates on what might be called the 'hole' in

the argument, as we see it so far: the economic interpretation “gets us to the gates of the Promised

Land of liberal democracy, but it does not after deliver us to the other side”68. In the end,

democracy is almost never chosen for economic reasons, Fukuyama claims. Democracies require

democrats, both to fight for those societies and then to live in them, to make them work: “there is


no democracy without democrats, that is, without a specifically Democratic Man that desires and

shapes democracy even as he is shaped by it”69.

In this chapter Fukuyama even goes so far as to say that the development of the modern economic

world we have been tracing so far “is not coterminous with history itself”. He now says that to

achieve an understanding of History, and to know whether we have necessarily met an end to

history, we will need to discover what can serve as a transhistorical standard of development.

Fukuyama finds this standard in human nature. This leads us into Part III of the book, as

Fukuyama turns to the Hegelian/Kojèvean account of the 'struggle for recognition'. Through a study

of “Hegel's Universal History”, Fukuyama says, we discover that the struggle for recognition

“complements the Mechanism we have just outlined”: it gives us a “broader understanding of man

– man as man – that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of

irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human

history”70

The trouble is that this turn to Hegel cannot, with much honesty, be described as an attempt to

“complement” the Mechanism. It actually strikes one as an attempt to rewrite the account of

History, to start all over again; not so much complement as replacement. (Indeed, this was

supposed to be what Fukuyama was doing, by his own admission: in the introduction of EHLM he

already answered the question of whether we can talk of the directionality of history by saying 'yes',

and for “two separate reasons”. This implies two attempts at History, not a main account and a

supplement). Yet within a very small space of time, the Mechanism goes from being an overarching

process to explain historical development, albeit with notable gaps in the narrative or chinks in the

argument, to an account with such serious or fundamental flaws that a whole new chronicle must

be attempted. We now learn that it cannot even be guaranteed that the Mechanism matches up

with the procession of History at all!

The transition between narratives here, within the terms with which it is advanced, cannot be

defended. Fukuyama does notice the 'gaps' in final stages of the Mechanism theory, the gaps

which mean it cannot be said to explain each and every discontinuity in history. But to take this as

the failure of the whole enterprise itself is simply an unfair charge when considered what the theory

is supposed to be– that is, a theory of universal and structural causal frameworks by which the

overall patterns of history can be identified. It cannot reasonably be expected to explain every

discontinuity and “sudden eruptions of irrationality.”

Furthermore, one notices that as Fukuyama discusses the alternate forms of explanation in the


final stages of the argument (to link up economic modernization and democracy), before he

apparently rejects all three for the struggle for recognition, he seems to ignore the overall

explanatory effect that the three forms combined achieve. Given that all three forms are roughly

the same type of argument – all seek to link democracy to economic modernization by explaining

the emerging of democracy from out of the processes of economic modernization – they seem to

be of sufficient weight together to complete the Mechanism, even as singularly they cannot. So, if

one combines these two points – (1) the delimitations of what the theory can realistically be

expected to explain; and (2) that all the proposed forms of explanation finally linking democracy

with economic development are just variations of the same theory, which have a greater

interpretive power when combined – one can argue forcefully that the Mechanism does not really

need the 'complement' that Fukuyama offers in the shape of the Hegelian struggle for recognition

(that is, at least in terms of explanation, rather than evaluation). One draws the conclusion that the

two explanations – the Mechanism and the struggle for recognition – do not find their justification in

each other, as harmonious companions on the same journey, but are actually incommensurable

rivals.

Considering all this, we can see how the argument of EHLM seems to hover uncomfortably

between the two motors of history. Fukuyama does seem genuinely undecided on which account

he prefers, and undecided on what is to be their conceptual status or relationship71: (1) do they

represent two sides of what is otherwise the same account of History? (2) Are they dual motors

which deliberately differ in detail, antagonistic to each other but which combined provide a fuller

account of history than they otherwise would separately? Or (3) is one form of explanation really

the primary motor, with the second providing a complementary resource that can help fill in the

gaps? The answer is probably (2), since it is hard to believe Fukuyama could be so naïve as to

think that he had crafted a unified exposition, as in (1). But as Fukuyama's views expand through

his career, with his writings on international relations and public policy across the many years from

1992 to 2006, it almost appeared that the inherent irresolution, the ambiguity right at the heart of

the enterprise, was being unconsciously determined in favour of (3). The modernization thesis is

taken up again, and it isn't always obvious that there ever was any equivocation, or even that there

ever was an alternative motor that had been laid out.

The Development of Fukuyama's views

In After the Neocons , in one of the brief moments he returns explicitly to his thesis on history

(which he usually does with quite the air of reluctance), Fukuyama criticizes the way EHLM has


been interpreted. He claims many people have read his book as arguing that there is “a universal

hunger for liberty in all people” which will “inevitably lead them to liberal democracy”, and that “we

are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of liberal democracy”72.

Fukuyama then coolly dismisses such a narrative as a “misreading of the argument”, adding that

“The End of History is finally an argument about modernization”. He clarifies: “what is initially

universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern society,

with its technology, high standards of living, health care, and access to the wider world”, etc.

It is true that modernization was a strong thread running through Part II of EHLM, in what we

labelled the Mechanism. While discussing the intellectual history of the idea of the philosophy of

history, covering the main previous traditions73, Fukuyama ended with the work not of an individual

philosopher, but rather with “a collective effort on the part of a group of social scientists.”74 This

body of work or 'collective effort' was precisely termed by him 'modernization theory'. (Fukuyama

dated this approach back to the birth of modern sociology, and the work of its three 'fathers', Karl

Marx,75 Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim.) Modernization theory, broadly considered, posited that

“industrial development followed a coherent part of growth, and would in time produce certain

uniform social and political structures across different countries and cultures”76. By studying the

countries that “industrialized and democratized first”, such as Britain, one could “unlock a universal

pattern that all countries would eventually follow”. Fukuyama is interested primarily in post-war

versions of the theory, modernization in its optimistic and American cast77. These theorists were

united in believing that “history was directional” and that “the liberal democracy of the advanced

industrial nations lay at its end”78. In effect, then, one could read Part II of EHLM as an elaboration

on this – American, social-scientific – theme of modernization.

But EHLM did seem to strongly imply that the world's path to democracy was inexorable, and –

while there may be isolated setbacks, countries that stall or even fall backward – that the sweep to

democracy many countries experienced after the collapse of the 20th century's totalitarian regimes

would eventually, either within a few years or after some sort of time-delay, catch most of the rest

of the world up with it. History was a story with an overall meaning. If such a reading is fair to

Fukuyama's arguments (especially for the introduction, and the feeling ones gets from Part I of the

book) then Fukuyama's own protestations today over what he actually meant are misplaced,

perhaps even disingenuous.

Returning to After the Neocons: Fukuyama looks again to the “contagious wave of democratic

fervor [that] swept over many parts of the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s” but now says

that “a theory of democratic change emerging out of a broad process of modernization like the one


laid out in The End of History suggests that democratic contagion can take a society only so far; if

certain structural conditions are not met, instability and setback are in store”79. This again refers to

the inherent human desire for liberty that he mentions in the quote above: this inherent desire,

Fukuyama now insists, can only make itself felt in History if “structural conditions are met”. We go

from Fukuyama's argument in chapter 12 of EHLM that there is no democracy without democrats –

an important qualification of the Mechanism, to the effect that democrats shape democratic forms

of government as much as democratic governments mould their citizens into democrats – to what

amounts to the subordination of “democratic fervor” to its the structural conditions. This shift is very

gradual, and is never complete; and one has to reread Fukuyama's own comments in the light of

his changing interests, and in the light of the new things he chooses to pay attention to, in order to

notice it. But we can say that such a shift does occur.

While it is “one thing to say that there is a broad, centuries-long trend toward the spread of liberal

democracy” (which Fukuyama admits is his general thesis of EHLM), it is quite another “to say that

either democracy or prosperity can emerge in a given society at a given time”. This is because

there are “certain critical intervening variables known as institutions that must be in place before a

society can move from an amorphous longing for freedom to a well-functioning consolidated

democratic political system with a modern economy”80. So, we might ask, what are these structural

conditions? What are these “intervening variables known as institutions”? To put it bluntly, these

structural conditions and institutions are what Fukuyama has devoted much of his subsequent

post-EHLM work (at least his published books) to analysing.

In State Building, Fukuyama looks at the structural conditions for functioning states. Although the

point of the book is to look at the international dimension, it first sets up an analytical framework of

'stateness' which can be applied equally to every country across the board. By tracing the contours

of 'stateness' throughout the 20th century, Fukuyama introduces certain concepts from which we

can extrapolate to enrich the original account of the Mechanism.

Fukuyama begins State Building with the minimalist liberal state that has traditionally been

understood to exist in Europe at the start of the 20th century. But as the century proceeded “through

war, revolution, depression, and war again”, the liberal world order crumbled and the minimalist

state was replaced in Europe (and in North America, etc.) by “a much more highly centralized and

active one”81. There were two distinct routes encompassed within this generalized trend of the

extension in state function and increase in government intervention in the economy. The first was

the birth of the totalitarian state (which is defined through its absolutism, in the state's attempt to

abolish civil society altogether) . The second was the centralization and expansion in size and


scope of the non-totalitarian state, which you or I might recognize – in less coldly indifferent

language – as the birth of social democracy. From the state sectors consuming less than 10% of

GDP at the birth of the century, by the 1980s, 50% of GDP was being consumed by the state in

Western Europe and the United States. The politics of the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by

reaction to this trend, and encompassed a fightback to both totalitarian and non-totalitarian variates

of state growth.82

Fukuyama is broadly supportive of the Reaganite/Thatcherite project of state cutbacks. Indeed, he

acknowledges that “there was nothing wrong with the Washington consensus per se”83. But

Fukuyama admits that the impact of neoliberalism (a designation, after all, having its origin in Latin

America) has been mixed for the developing world – for, while their state sectors “were in many

cases obstacles to growth and could only be fixed in the long run through economic

liberalization”84, there was a just-as-important need for state strengthening in other areas.

Fukuyama identifies the problem by inventing the analytical distinction between state scope and

state strength, a vital distinction which he believes went unrecognised (and still goes

unrecognised) by the frenzied liberalizers and state-cutters of the era. The efforts at state-reduction

in the developing world damaged the strength of the state – its ability or capacity to implement

policies, enforce laws, protect property rights etc. – even while they were only aiming at reducing

the scope of the state (its redistributive, welfare measures, etc.) This result often meant that these

states were no better equipped for a future path of economic growth than they were before.

Fukuyama even professes that it is “clear in retrospect” that “under these circumstances, a little

liberalization can be more dangerous than no liberalization at all”85.

This discovery requires us to go back and emend the original narrative. Contemporary evidence of

the damaging effects of indiscriminate state roll-back initiatives in Latin America and Africa (at the

behest of the IMF and World Bank) necessarily points us toward recognizing the importance state

strength must have always had in successful economic development throughout history.

Fukuyama's conclusion that “the strength of state institutions is more important in a broad sense

than the scope of state functions” is really echoing the historical judgement made by many

economists today, that “some of the most important variables affecting development weren't

economic at all but were concerned with institutions and politics”86

These themes are continued again in After the Neocons. In the chapter 'Social Engineering and

Development', Fukuyama castigates the neoconservatives for their almost whole-scale ignorance87

of the leading literature on institutional development and goes on to trace the outlines of this

development theory literature that they were missing out on. What interests us here is the book's


consideration of political development, and whether this supports what Fukuyama says in State

Building.

Fukuyama appears influenced by Samuel Huntington88, when Huntington argues to the effect that

modernization “no longer appeared to be an integrated process of economic, social, and political

change but rather a set of disparate activities that could spin out of control” – the implication of this

being that “development of strong political authority was necessary for economic development” and

so, crucially, “needed to precede democracy”89. This is a critical addition to the way economic

modernization was to be linked with liberal democracy in the Mechanism. American foreign policy

intellectuals concerned with promoting democracy abroad have to realise that 'democracy

promotion' is a subset of 'political development': “Before you can have a democracy, you have to

have a state”. State-building is an activity that “overlaps only partially with democracy promotion”90.

A successful project of state-building (something Fukuyama believes should be central to post-9/11

US foreign policy) must involve “the promotion of good governance, not just democracy”, and the

“creation of effective institutions that are conditions of democratic government but not necessarily

democratic in themselves”91. A strong state with the capacity to enforce the liberal rule of law “is

initially more critical to economic growth than democratic political participation”, and while

“deferring democracy in favor of liberal authoritarianism is not, however, particularly useful as a

general strategy”, it should still be remembered that “modernizing authoritarians might be

preferable in some cases to feckless democracies””92.

This new taxonomy thus represents a gradual evolution of the whole previous modernization

account. Now, we have both – (1) a revision of the economic development narrative, where we

realise economic liberalism does not require simply the trimming back of the state, but needs

reform where state scope is reduced at the same time that state capacity is strengthened (where

required, as is still the case in the developing word today); and, if it is not possible to do one

without the other, state strengthening will often prove more decisive than reducing state scope in

successful economic development; and – (2) what can be taken as a reassessment of the link

between economic modernization and liberal democracy, as it appeared at the end of Part II of

EHLM: democracy cannot just be the result of newly emergent social actors reacting to social

changes; democracy can only establish itself after certain 'structural conditions' are met – that is, it

can only establish itself from within a framework of already-existing strong political institutions.

Fukuyama suggests a new tripartite account of political development (“To the extent that there is a

coherent theory of political development, the process is likely to be based on one of three

drivers”93. The first is to explain the empirical linkage that exists between economic development


and democracy. He cites the study of political scientists Adam Przeworksi and Fernando Limongi,

that “although transitions to democracy occur with equal frequency at any level of development,

they are much less likely to be reversed once a country has passed a level of development of

approximately $6,000 per capita GDP”94. A second 'driver' of political development might be “some

form of evolutionary competition and emulation” whereby “societies observe one another and adopt

institutions that promote broadly desirable goals like economic development or social justice”, and

Fukuyama cites historian Charles Tilly for support95. The third driver of political development “lies in

the realm of ideas”: the admission that there is “simply no other legitimating set of ideas besides

liberal democracy that is broadly accepted in the world today”96.

How do these three 'drivers' compare to the Mechanism, the account of development that we

reconstructed in EHLM? In the first 'driver', the connection between economic development and

democracy is loosened: it is not that economic development stimulates democracy – actually,

democracy can occur at any time. The point now is, rather, that democracy must be sustained by

certain socio-economic conditions (the very specific $6,000 per capita GDP figure) in order for it to

stabilize and last. In terms of the second driver, it is societies or nations that compete, not

economies; and societies choose to “adopt institutions” that “promote desirable goals” might

happen to be something like “economic development”. And lastly, for the third driver, democracy

becomes an idea, rather than the emerging political self-consciousness of the newly dominant

middle classes.

We can read in all 3 of these drivers evidence for the 'political turn' that Fukuyama's theory has

taken in these recent works. The existence of democracy itself is no longer accounted for through

economic development, and so presumably must have some 'political' motivation outside of

economics; societies first adopt political arrangements that serve economic development. Political

development – the creation of a strong and efficient state, with enforceable rules being more

important than keeping the state within a certain minimal scope – assumes the central role in the

modernization process. Fukuyama claims that, in addition to the democratic transition literature,

“there has been among political scientists a revival in the past two decades of institutionalism”, in

which “the state is no longer regarded as a passive object of social pressures but viewed as an

autonomous and active shaper of outcomes”97

We will return to most of these themes – the place of the modernization theory, the significance of

democracy promotion, the ramifications of the 'political turn' – in the fifth section of the essay. For

now, we just have to summarize the main features of Fukuyama's arguments so far.


By reading Part II of EHLM, we have seen how Fukuyama linked science into a directional account

of history powered by technological innovation, which takes place firstly through military

competition, but then most importantly through economic development. He then wanted to show

how industrial development would lead to free market liberalism rather than a centrally planned

model, and suggests mechanisms for explaining the linkage between economic development and

liberal democracy. Now, in 2004 and 2006, Fukuyama returns to many of the same themes through

his work as a political scientist and policy intellectual, and so we get a new, distinctly political,

emphasis on the narrative. There are critical similarities between EHLM, on the one hand, and

State Building and After the Neocons, on the other, in that both are attempting the same thing: in

the ten or so years, Fukuyama is still operating with the assumptions that there is such a thing as

development, and that the idea of a directional movement of modernization is as coherent and as

desirable a public policy goal now as it was then. The story being told, in what might loosely be

labelled 'popular' social-scientific terms, attempts to analyse history through industrialization, the

evolution of institutions, deep socio-economic changes, and other observable processes involving,

for instance, the emerging of certain classes, etc. This is even more the case in the last two books,

where the idea that the inherent human desire for material satisfaction drives economic

development is no longer taken seriously.

Yet there are certain subtle differences too, which are important for the purposes of the essay's

overall argument. The teleological element of the former account is never again taken up with

much force or enthusiasm: the origin itself of democracy is inexplicable, and the path of economic

development (that Fukuyama traces through many chapters in Part II of EHLM) now only gets off

the ground when certain structural conditions are already in place; and again, the origin of these

conditions are not fully explicable in theory (Fukuyama says that the areas of institutional

construction, improvement, and of creating 'demand' for institutional competence, are not areas

with high volumes of easily transferable knowledge, etc.) What we are left with is not quite the

project of a renewed philosophy of history that we were promised in the introduction to EHLM.

Fukuyama today insists that he was all along just doing modernization theory: In a 2007 lecture,

while trying to explain the end of history thesis, he claimed “this is basically a theory about

modernization. I guess that's the simplest way to explain it”98. In an online article for the Guardian,

he is firm in insisting that “the End of History thus was essentially an argument about

modernisation”99. In the Afterword to the second edition of EHLM, he had already declared that the

end of history was “a theory of modernization that raised the question of where that modernization

process would ultimately lead”100; and, in a 2008 interview, he said he his whole argument was

simply that “democracy is a result of a broad modernization process”101


But if we were to follow Fukuyama's own lead here, we would miss out the entire second 'motor' of

EHLM – which was, for most reviewers, the more interesting and memorable account. We can now

look at Fukuyama's proposed return to Hegel, a return made through his idiosyncratic French

interpretor Kojève. We will now look at the second 'motor', the struggle for recognition.

Hegel, Kojève and the struggle for recognition

To understand the second motor of history in EHLM, one has to turn to a small section of Hegel's

Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled 'Lordship and Bondage'. What this has to do with writing a

philosophy of history will not be immediately clear (indeed, many Hegel scholars also do not see

the relevance!), but if we can start off by reconstructing Hegel's argument, we can see how it fits

into the interpretation of Alexandre Kojève, since it is Kojève and not Hegel that we are concerned

with here.

The Phenomenology is an introduction to Hegel's system of philosophy, written in 1807.The section

we are looking at traces the dialectic of the subject to the stage of self-consciousness, wherein the

subject attempts to demonstrate to itself that it is free102. It does this by trying to demonstrate that

the object which confronts it is not really separate from it, that it is rather fundamentally a part of

itself. There is a fundamental contradiction at work here: in being conscious of yourself in the

object, there has to be an object for you to be conscious of yourself in, and therefore there has to

be some kind of otherness; and yet, this otherness is supposed to be reducible to the self. Its first

attempt at resolving this contradiction is described by Hegel in the dialectic of Desire. In this stage

of 'desire', the subject tries to overcome its feeling of dependence by literally destroying the

external object, 'consuming' it (as the subject fulfils its animal desires103). But this 'proof' fails,

because such 'animal' desires will always return, and so the act has to be repeated ad infinitum. It

also fails for the more fundamental reason that the subject has not proved its identity with the

object: the result in consuming the object was actually a return to an empty self-identity as an

individual ego. At the stage of Desire, the subject is perpetually caught between the otherness of

the object and its own empty self-identity: the point is to avoid both a subject-object dualism (non-

identity) and a reduction of the object to the subject, the one to the other (simple identity). “In other

words, there is either identity or non-identity but not the required identity of identity and non-

identity”104. So the question is, what can the subject do to overcome this fundamental impasse?

How can it reconcile the object as something other with the idea of an object as part of oneself?

The solution is to find an object that will demonstrate that it is not anything different from the


subject, without the subject needing to destroy it. The only object that can itself take on this

positive demonstrative role must itself be a subject – that is, there must be another subject: “Since

the subject cannot negate the otherness of its object, there can be unity in otherness only if the

object negates its otherness to the subject. What can negate its otherness to the subject must be

another subject, another self-conscious being”105 So, to attain knowledge of itself as all reality – to

establishment absolute independence – the subject must (somewhat paradoxically) seek its own

identity in otherness, in an other: Hegel writes that “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction

only in another self-consciousness”106.

Hegel then moves from the standpoint of the philosopher and adopts the participant-position of

consciousness itself, in order to reconstruct the process by which this realization comes about. The

subject realises that to prove its independence, it must gain the recognition of others. But, at this

preliminary stage, the subject does realise that the recognition it requires must come from another

equal, rational, independent self-consciousness – that what is required is mutual recognition107.

Instead, at this stage, the subject attempts to overpower the other, to force it to obey its

commands. The two subjects are then forced into a life and death struggle, whereby each subject

attempts to prove its independence; it seeks to demonstrate its rational status by proving it has the

power over mere biological life and animal desire. It must risk death.

This life-or-death struggle ends in the relationship of master and slave. The dominant subject

realises that he cannot get the recognition he needs if the other ego is killed, so he has to grant the

defeated subject his life. This is an important step outside the immediate circle of consciousness:

the master has to respect the separateness of the slave, even if he does not grant the slave the

rational or free status that he ascribes to himself. But it becomes obvious that this master/slave

relationship is inherently unstable, since the recognition that the master looks for – recognition of

himself as autonomous and independent – cannot come from a subject that the master does not

respect, the slave; the recognition must be freely given, not coerced. It is this dialectic, this volatile

instability between master and slave, that Kojève extrapolates as the dynamic of History in his own

interpretation of the Phenomenology.

Kojève's reading of Hegel does considerable violence to Hegel's philosophy. We can say

conclusively that the struggle for recognition between master and slave has nothing to do with

Hegel's own philosophy of history108. Indeed, it shouldn't be difficult to realise that Hegel's own

account of master and slave as a larger metaphysical agenda which is completely removed from

anything Fukuyama himself deals with, and so falls beyond the scope of this essay. But let us take

what we now know of Hegel to trace the basic themes of Kojève's own argument, since it is this


that provides the framework for Fukuyama's own second 'motor'.

Kojève adds a specifically existential spin on the fight for life-or-death (showing the influence of

Heidegger on his thought109). The master is the one who successfully chooses 'nothingness' over

'given-being'. The slave was the one who feared his own 'nothingness', and choose self-

preservation and existence (Nature or 'given-being') over the possibility of death. The master then

puts the slave to work in his service. But in doing so the master achieves only fleeting pleasure, not

true satisfaction. The master never attains this satisfaction: “To get oneself recognized by a Slave

is not to get oneself recognized by a man”; hence “the Master never attains his end, the end for

which he has risked his very life”110. However, the slave – who submits to and 'works' in the service

of the master – can ultimately find satisfaction in his work: by transforming the natural world

through work, he negates given-being, and the slave initiates the historical process of 'overcoming'

the world: “The man who works transforms given-being”, so “where there is work there is

necessarily change, progress, historical evolution”111.

History is then the story of a double overcoming, the slave's overcoming of the nature of given-

being through work on the external world (in Marxian vein, the slave achieves the complete

technological mastery over nature that brings an end to scarcity) and the slave's overcoming of the

fear that led him to slavery in the first place, his fear of the master and of death. “Man realizes

himself 'at the expense of Being'. History is the story of human action negating the given, and

creating a new reality that satisfies the all-consuming desire for recognition”112 The Slave first

attains the 'abstract idea' of liberty, and attempts to realise this through struggle. History

progresses through various 'slave ideologies', whereby the slave seeks to reconcile the idea of

liberty with the reality of slavery – first, Stoicism; then Christianity. History ends when the slave

dominates nature, chooses his own work, and abolishes all mastery, becoming the citizen of a

state of universal recognition.

The slave ideologies correspond to various stages of societal and economic development. Kojève

begins with the Pagan world, which Kojève associates with mastery. As war threatened the stability

of the Roman Empire, the responsibilities of defence were contracted out to mercenaries. The

Pagan masters, no longer having to fight their adversaries or face the threat of death, descended

into a kind of pseudo-slavery. This created the ideal conditions for the spread and adoption of the

first truly universal slave ideology, an ideology absolutely essential for the creation of a world in

which the equal freedom of all is universally recognised – this slave ideology is Christianity. But

before the ideal of Christianity can be recognised in the world, the theological dogma of Christianity

must be overcome: for Kojève, history is the progression toward the secular realization of the


Christian ideal. The ideal is actualized in history when God is replaced by the state as the concrete

embodiment of the universal principle that each particular individual is of absolute value113. History

will end “necessarily” when “man is perfectly satisfied by the fact of being a recognized citizen of a

universal and homogeneous State, or, if one prefers, of a society without classes encompassing

the whole of humanity”114.

For Kojève, Hegelianism is true because it stands at the end of time and so 'knows' the whole of

reality – so, therefore, Hegelianism can only be true if reality itself has attained to the status of

wisdom115. Kojève reminds us that Hegel, as he was finishing the Phenomenology, had remarked

that he had seen the 'soul of the world' on horseback beneath his windows. This letter, Kojève

insists, is a “revelation”: Napoleon, “the conqueror at Jena, is called 'world-soul'... he incarnates not

the history of the French people, but that of the whole of humanity”116. This completed reality is the

Napoleonic Empire – as an empire, it is universal, and is homogeneous. It is universal because I

am recognised by all (by all other men), and it is homogeneous because I am recognised as an

individual in my particularity (“it is truly I who am recognized, and not my family, my social class,

my nation”117). Kojève says that if history did not end with Hegel and Napoleon at Jena in 1806, it is

at least the case that there has been nothing truly new since Napoleon-Hegel. The question was

now whether the mantle of History would be past to the Left-Hegelians, or to the Right-Hegelians.118 But the composition of Kojève's Universal and Homogeneous State (UHS) is not really Hegelian;

the arguments for it are certainly not to be found among Hegel's own writing (such as his

Philosophy of Right)119. Indeed, Kojève's UHS diverges from Hegel's own state on a number of

points.120

So, what of Kojève's own politics? During the Second World War, Kojève took to the view that

Stalin was the new Napoleon, the World-Spirit on horseback. Kojève, who believed in the Socialist

Empire121, seems to have had faith that the Stalinist USSR could create one universal and

homogeneous system from the East, which would bring history to a close (Kojève, alarmingly,

seems not to have been put off by the accumulating evidence of Stalinist murder and tyranny122.)

But after the War was over, Kojève began to change his thinking. He was to entertain an alternate

prospectus. Kojève turned back to look to Europe once more. The only barrier to the universal and

homogeneous state was the nation-state, which the goal of universality necessarily precluded. The

condition of Kojève's conversion to the West was its supersession of this form. So, “by the time the

European Economic Community, in which he [Kojève] was to play an active role, was formed, the

issue was settled: it was the West, not the East, which held the future of the world”123. The ease

with which Kojève switches sides here – even claiming that capitalism and communism to both be,

in fact, the same stage of history; Kojève being indifferent to the outcome of the Cold War124 –


shows just how abstract and formalistic Kojève's philosophy of history is.125

For now, we have to integrate our retracing of Kojève's philosophy back into Fukuyama's own

account. Fukuyama himself claims that “the Mechanism created by modern natural science” –

which is everything we have traced so far – remains “a partial and ultimately unsatisfying account

of the historical process”. Fukuyama is convinced that free government exercises a positive pull of

its own. It is to understand this resonance that “we need to return to Hegel”126

Fukuyama begins Part III of EHLM with an account of the 'first man' as he would live and behave in

the state-of-nature, a typical scenario for the liberal political tradition. Fukuyama wretches Hegel's

master and slave struggle entirely from the context of its place in the argument of the

Phenomenology, turning it into an anthropomorphic narrative of the human being as he exists in

nature – and in this, Fukuyama is precisely following Kojève's lead.127 Whereas in the Anglo-Saxon

liberal tradition, the emphasis is on the struggle for self-preservation, Fukuyama turns to Hegel as

a resource in trying to comprehend the 'spirited' struggle for honour, respect, and prestige that

often takes place in this situation. In both Hobbes – who notes how the fear of violent death, as

men will fight over 'trifles', provokes to the creation of the strong liberal state – and in Locke – who

advocates education as a means to subordinate one's desire for recognition to the desire to

preserve one's own life (and to the desire to endow life with material comfort) – the 'first man'

chooses slavery over mastery, as Fukuyama puts it. Fukuyama turns instead to Hegel for an

understanding of first man's “longing for self-transcendence” – a longing to blame not simply for

violence but also for the “noble passions of patriotism, courage, generosity, and public-

spiritedness.”128

The central reason for his doing so is to try and find a way of filling-out the missing third dimension

of History – the question now is not of the universality and directionality of History per se, but of the

moral side of history: how can history be said to be a progress, not simply process? Fukuyama

says that by “identifying the master's struggle for recognition as somehow at the core of what is

human, Hegel seeks to honor and preserve a certain moral dimension to human life that is entirely

missing in the society conceived of by Hobbes and Locke”. The struggle for recognition is to be

used to answer the question posed: “It is this moral dimension, and the struggle to have it

recognized, that is the motor driving the dialectical process of history129

Next, Fukuyama is concerned with integrating the specifics of Hegelian recognition – already

wrested away from any meaningful context – with “recognition”, a concept that Fukuyama believes

has been central to all Western political philosophy. Fukuyama lists the various manifestations of


this idea: “Plato spoke of thymos, or 'spiritedness', Machiavelli of man's desire for glory, Hobbes of

his pride or vainglory, Rousseau of his amour-propre, Alexander Hamilton of the love of fame and

James Madison of ambition, Hegel of recognition, and Nietzsche of man as the 'beast with red

cheeks'.”130All these terms supposedly refer to “that part of man which feels the need to place

value on things – himself in the first instance, but on the people, actions, or things around him as

well”.131 The first extended analysis of the desire for recognition in the Western philosophical

tradition is to be found in Plato's Republic: according to Socrates, the chief characteristic of the

class of guardians charged to defend the just city is thymos, meaning basically 'spiritedness'132

Fukuyama then attempts to integrate his burgeoning philosophy of history with Socrates's tripartite

division of the soul, as detailed in Book IV of Republic.133 The human soul has a (1) desiring part, a

(2) rationalizing or calculating part, and finally (3) thymos, the spirited part. Thymos is the part of

the soul that invests objects with value, and so, the desire for recognition is the political activation

of thymos, whereby a human directed by the spirited part of the soul demands that others share in

the same valuation of himself as he does. “Plato's thymos is therefore nothing other than the

psychological seat of Hegel's desire for recognition”134. In chapters 16 and 17 of EHLM, Fukuyama

explores the concept of thymos further, seeing how it can be used to explain certain human

actions, both good and evil – thymos being a deeply paradoxical phenomenon. Fukuyama

captures this paradox by showing how thymos can manifest itself in two contradictory ways – as

either the desire to be recognised as superior to others, which he labels megalothymia or the

desire to be recognised as equal to others, being labelled isothymia. It is these two together that

“constitute the two manifestations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition

to modernity can be understood”135

The basic dynamic of history, from the perspective of the struggle for recognition, can be

summarised as follows: megalothymia, the desire to be recognised as superior, is to blame for the

bloody battles, wars, and struggles to overpower and conquer other societies, that constitutes all

the 'history' of pre-modernity. The social embodiment of megalothymia was in the traditional

aristocratic warrior class. Being uninterested in work, economic rationality, or fulfilling material

desires, the aristocratic warrior amused himself in war; he was concerned merely with behaviour

that accorded him with honour, pride and dignity. But then – closely following Kojève – Fukuyama

traces the overturning of the master/slave relationship in the slave's growing awareness of the idea

of his freedom through his work. In his use of tools and rudimentary technology to meet the needs

of his master, the slave invents science. This invention is the beginning of the process of

modernisation – as we will remember, science is how Fukuyama opens his reconstruction of the

Mechanism in Part II. Science represents the rational part of the soul, the development of which


unleashes the desiring part of the soul. In terms of thymos, Fukuyama combines Kojève's account

of the takeover of the pagan world by Christianity with the gradual replacement of the dangerous

warrior megalothymia with the benign isothymia, which is a more rational (since universal and

homogeneous) form of recognition. The emergence of liberal democracy is explained through (1)

the increasing economization and consumerism of life, through the blossoming of the desiring part

of the soul, allied with reason – this meaning liberal economics; and (2) the replacement of the

destabilizing megalothymia with isothymia, which requires a sweeping egalitarianism in political life

– thus, political liberalism. This is the second 'motor' of History.

Fukuyama's ending of history in liberal democracy mirrors Kojève's universal and homogeneous

state. The 'contradictions' that drive history forward, the slave's continuing demand for more equal

recognition, are finally solved in liberalism. Liberalism provides “recognition on a universal basis” in

which “the dignity of each person as a free and autonomous human being is recognized by all”.136

“What is at stake for us when we choose to live in a liberal democracy is not merely the fact that it

allows us the freedom to make money and satisfy the desiring parts of our souls. The more

important and ultimately more satisfying thing it provides us is recognition of our dignity”. The

liberal democratic state “values us at our sense of self-worth”, and so “both the desiring and

thymotic parts of our souls find satisfaction”137

In what way can we say that modern liberal democracy recognises all human beings universally?

“It does this by granting and protecting their rights”.138 “Popular self-government abolishes the

distinction between masters and slaves; everyone is entitled to at least some share in the role of

master. Mastery now takes the form of the promulgation of democratically determined laws, that is,

sets of universal rules by which man self-consciously masters himself”.139 For Fukuyama, this

Hegelian liberalism comes a lot closer to accurately reflecting what the people of the world actually

feel when they say they want to live in a democracy – they march in the streets, banners raised,

not for an institutional compromise between competing economic sections of a disparate society,

but for a state that values the fundamental dignity and freedom of each human being.

“The Argument”

This finishes our reconstruction of the main body of Fukuyama's philosophy of history, which has

encompassed Parts I to III of EHLM, much of State Building, and one crucial chapter of After the

Neocons. We have identified two 'motors' of history. The first motor, dubbed the Mechanism,

looked first to science – the maturation of which, in technology, meant both the consolidation of the


nation-state (as a response to the threat of war) and an exponentially increased capacity for

economic development. This economic development was to be the mainspring for a vast social

upheaval, which would homogenize the basic socio-political arrangements of the countries of the

world, leading to a global free market; and then this would, in turn, create a structural propensity for

the eventual materialization of liberal democratic politics. The second motor is the struggle for

recognition, comprising what Fukuyama believes is his 'return to Hegel'. It seeks to turn the conflict

between master and slave into the moral dynamic of history, explicating history as progress: the

slave finally triumphs in his historical quest for equal and universal recognition, as the secularized

Christian ideal becomes the formal ethic legitimizing the modern state.

Let us now return to the question (which was raised earlier, in the final paragraph of the

'Reconstruction of the Mechanism' section) of how these two motors relate to each other. Are the

two designed to be equal partners, or is there one primordial motor and one supplement? It is clear

Fukuyama himself never anticipated such problems of cohesion or consistency arising when he

was writing EHLM.

How can we answer this? Part III of EHLM is also where Fukuyama introduces Plato's three

divisions of the soul – desire, reason, and thymos. We will now find that we can use these

concepts to redraw both motors of history; which will allow us to show how Fukuyama's confusion

between the two motors plays itself out, as we subsume both motors into this common language.

The problem of the greater coherence of Fukuyama's philosophy of history, viewed through this

perspective of the clumsy integration of Plato's theory of the soul with the rest of the account, is

precisely what is tackled – in typically adept fashion – by Marxist historian Perry Anderson, in his

essay 'The Ends of History.'

Anderson claims that with Fukuyama's attempted use of Plato to explicate his argument, the

“original logic of the historical dialectic disintegrates”, as the generality of human development

“becomes the field of interplay of three component forces – drives that are persistent and distinct.”140 Anderson then examines the argument of EHLM using these concepts. The starting-point is

science, which “alone has given clear-cut directionality to human affairs”. This means reason

comes first. With the invention of modern scientific method during the Renaissance, reason

unfetters material desire through economic development, and awakens spirit in the need for

recognition in democracy. This sequence “seems unambiguous enough”, but it is “no sooner

advanced than disavowed”. Fukuyama immediately qualifies the place of science in the dynamic:

while modern scientific method “may be regarded as a possible 'regulator' of directional historical

change”, it should “in no way be regarded as the cause of change.”141 Science itself needs to be


explained.

What has always essentially 'driven' science is desire, Anderson observes. This would yield an

economic interpretation of history, not so remote from Marx's own. But there is still a missing

component. If desire explains the stimulus or 'motivation' for the development of reason in science

and technological innovation, it does not show how this happens: what explains desire's sudden,

abrupt ability to galvanize reason at this quite specific historical juncture, the coming of the

Renaissance?

But before this problem can be properly formulated, Fukuyama shifts his emphasis again, now to

“the desire that lay behind the desire of Economic Man.” In what seems like a complete reversal (a

reversal which we touched upon as we ended the section on the reconstruction of the Mechanism),

Fukuyama now looks for “the primary motor of human history” in “a totally non-economic drive, the

struggle for recognition.”142 As Anderson dryly puts it, it is now Hegel who is “given the palm”. The

origin of development “lies in a battle for prestige that creates the bondage which prompts work

that transforms nature”. “After apparent oscillations, the first mover comes to rest, not in desire or

reason, but in thymos”143 Yet it becomes clear that, for the historian Anderson, this new emphasis

makes much less sense than the previous delineations. The historical dynamic of thymos “is not

cashed into any empirical account of pre-modern origins.” A “real macro-history” is “only sketched

from the Industrial Revolution onwards.”144

Anderson shows that some sense can be made of the disorder at the heart of Fukuyama's

philosophy if one assigns importance to that aspect of the history which holds the greater empirical

weight (that aspect which Fukuyama devotes the most time and effort to demonstrating). This can

be pinpointed as the final part of the Mechanism, wherein Fukuyama explains how economic

development makes the emergence of liberal democracy more likely. Anderson looks in particular

at the phase of transition from industrialization to political liberalization, writing that “it is quite clear

from Fukuyama's own account” that “although economic development to high technological levels

is not a sufficient condition of political democracy, it is a necessary one”; whereas “the reverse

does not hold: there can long be remarkably successful industrialization – in the 'market-oriented

authoritarianism' of the ROK or Taiwan, the fastest growth of all – without electoral liberalization.” In

this asymmetry, “the priority of thymos is overthrown.”

The previous affirmation that thymotic passions are what propels history is put aside. The stress

now falls simply on the defensive claim that the advent of democracy cannot be reduced to the

operating of the Mechanism, to the coming of consumerism, or to the age of mass education.


“Silently, the original directionality reasserts itself”, Anderson observes – thymos becomes “in effect

a residue”, the “extra fillip needed to take a society across the threshold from prosperity to

parliaments”145 While there are occasions in EHLM (especially in Part III, but also with later themes

in the book) where thymos apparently takes precedence, beneath the surface much of the legwork

is being done by desire allied with reason. “In its general tendency, Fukuyama's narrative veers

between a rhetorical priority of spirit and a factual priority of desire.”

Yet while we can accept Perry Anderson's suggested reading of Fukuyama, it remains the case

that the overall historical narrative never achieves proper resolution. “The directionality of

technique and the strivings of honour remain competing principles of explanation, whose claims of

precedence are not to be reconciled. In the design of the account, a true concatenation is missing.”146 Anderson ends by remarking on the contrast between Fukuyama's usage of these concepts and

the use made of them by Hegel and Plato. While reason is the most central category for Hegel's

own philosophy of history, it becomes “curiously marginal” in Fukuyama's: “there is a sense in

which reason is displaced to the side of the construction, as little more than the enabler of desire –

as against a spiritedness beyond reason.” And the contrast with Plato is equally noticeable, since

while Fukuyama appears to ally reason with desire, Plato made reason an ally of thymos. The

result of this, Anderson notes, is to “tilt the outcome of the enquiry towards the stark dichotomy

between a rational hedonism and an elemental agonism with which Fukuyama's reflections

conclude.”

The setting up of this 'stark dichotomy' is the solidification of the two distinct motors of history. Let

us now briefly restate them. In terms of the Mechanism, the first two parts of the soul are key.

Science, in technology, is the material actualisation of reason (this part of the soul is also, self-

evidently, present in the rationalization of society – in the organization of labour, business

administration, government bureaucracy, etc.) It is scientific and technological advancement,

through economic development, that 'unleashes' desire (the innate human desire to fulfill material

needs and wants). Finally thymos, were it to be retrospectively added to our reconstruction of

Mechanism, would feature as the 'added ingredient' in Fukuyama's attempt to explain the final link

between economic development and democracy. And thymos is also latent in the discussion of the

last chapter of Part II, forming the background to the sentiment that there can be no democracy

without democrats. In contrast, for the struggle for recognition, it is thymos that powers history. The

other two parts of the soul, reason and desire, only really make their presence felt as modernity

draws to a close, at the end of history. At a certain point of the unravelling of thymos, where

isothymia replaces megalothymia as the primary form of recognition permeating the political order,

reason and desire begin to supersede thymos as the dominant aspects of the soul. It is the


domestication of thymos in isothymia that allows all three parts of the soul to synchronize, more-or-

less, in liberal democracy: without the radical imbalance toward thymos, the drive which propels

human society forward dissipates, and history slowly grinds to a halt.

Perry Anderson's analysis remains by far the best on its subject. However, having been written

back in 1992, the analysis has become, in a sense, outdated. What we now need is an analysis of

how Fukuyama goes on, long after the publication of EHLM, to deal with this indeterminacy at the

centre of his enterprise.

In the section 'The Development of Fukuyama's views', we have already attempted to interpret the

main policy recommendations of State Building and After the Neocons as a continuation of the

Mechanism in EHLM. The governing principle of this continuation, we in effect argued, was to take

the various elements of the first motor of history – which, as we have just seen, includes the

interplay of desire and reason, an account of technological development grounded in science, and

a more social-scientific tendency framing the first motor as a type of modernisation theory – and to

silently reduce the whole account down to the latter. (Although it can certainly be argued that the

modernisation theme is a prominent (perhaps the most prominent) aspect of the Mechanism

anyway, and in many ways this is true – indeed, from the perspective we initially took in our

reconstruction, the whole account could have made sense on its own, without mention of the

struggle for recognition or of Plato's tripartite division of the soul.) But Fukuyama's understanding

of history – laid out in Parts I and II, before Part III – was always more than this. If we recall from

the introduction to EHLM, Fukuyama was never attempting just another run-of-the-mill social-

scientific theory of the current political order and the developments that led to it. It was to be a

“Universal History of mankind” (we will return to this in the Conclusion). Yet now Fukuyama

apparently says he was never concerned with the culmination of history in the realm of human

freedom, nor with the growth of democracy per se, but rather with the 'structural conditions' for

such developments, should they happen to take place. The 'political turn' that we identified, which

revises the account of historical development – now emphasizing the need for a strong, centralized

state, as a condition for both sustained economic growth and for maintaining democracy –

produces exactly this kind of effect. Neither desire nor reason has the kind of background role in

history that it had done in EHLM. And, as we had also previously noticed, the teleology that was

present in the original philosophy is weakened: the idea that there is a universalist mechanism

governing all of human history, where the achievement of certain socio-economic and political

goals can be conceived as sufficient conditions for further development, fades.

This is the smaller preliminary stage for the larger movement that takes place in Fukuyama's


thought. We can observe that the Mechanism, now consolidated as a theory of political

modernisation, has today effectively pushed the struggle for recognition out of sight. Fukuyama's

philosophy of history has become simply mechanism-as-modernisation-theory, and the impression

Fukuyama often gives is that this was how it was all along! The indeterminacy and indecision

within Fukuyama's argument, never acknowledged by Fukuyama himself, is now forcibly resolved

by repressing the second motor – this being, remember, the motor with the moral tinge, the motor

where the story of human progress was more prominent. Fukuyama renounces the moral dynamic

that he believed he had inherited from Hegel. If Fukuyama really had written EHLM the way the

book is nowadays portrayed, it would have been a weaker and less compelling effort than it

actually was. Whatever the intention, the result would seem to be a theory that had less moral

claims against it to answer for.

After EHLM, Fukuyama avoids Hegel, Kojève, and the idea of recognition. They never again play a

serious part in his work. But the problems these concepts sought to address remain pertinent,

indeed vital, for Fukuyama. It is just that the concepts completely change. Instead of thymos and

(struggle for) recognition, we are left with the rather downgraded concepts of trust and social

capital.

Fukuyama begins his 1996 book Trust by returning to 'the human situation' at the end of history. He

does this not to continue the discussion – Fukuyama is not interested in reopening the debate –

but to remind his readers of the conclusion. The essential lesson of EHLM for policy analysts

should have been that, with the convergence of world institutions around the model of democratic

capitalism, further improvements in society “cannot be achieved through ambitious social

engineering”. Acknowledging this fact is, for Fukuyama, an absolute prerequisite for any budding

reformer of Western society who wishes to be taken seriously. As we stand today at the end of

history, “having abandoned the promise of social engineering”, we see that “virtually all serious

observers understand that liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and

dynamic civil society for their vitality.”147 And it is perfectly true that the one follows from the other: if

we have the optimal political institutional arrangements in the West, it must be the case that all its

remaining problems (at least those that can be solved) are social or cultural rather than political,

having to do with the health of communities and civil society, etc.

Fukuyama here invents the concept of 'trust', which is to be a sort of quantitative measure for

comparing the health of various highly disparate cultures and traditions. Fukuyama insists that trust

– “the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior,

based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community”148 – is vital for


the accumulation in turn of social capital, which is “a capability that arises from the prevalence of

trust in a society or in certain parts of it” that is “usually created and transmitted through cultural

mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit.” The central argument of Trust is that there is

a relationship between what Fukuyama terms 'high-trust' societies that have plentiful social capital

– he names Germany, Japan, and the United States – and the ability to create and sustain large,

private business organisations149.

In Fukuyama's 1999 book The Great Disruption, he again discusses the topic of social capital –

which he defines here simply as “an instantiated set of informal values or norms shared among

members of a group that permits them to cooperate with one another”150 – and the same

arguments are repeated. Social capital is vital for the proper and efficient working of the economy,

as an informal reservoir of honest and reliable information and authority. It is also critical for the

creation of a healthy civil society – “the groups and associations that fall between the family and

the state.” These 'informal' groups and associations are crucial for both 'formal' economic

organisations and businesses, as analysed in Trust, and 'formal' political and legal administration,

as analysed in State Building151, to function at their best.

What does this mean for the philosophy of history? It is strongly implicit in both accounts that these

informal groups of embodied values – “virtues like truth telling, meeting obligations, and reciprocity”152 – are not to be explained through their own dynamic or motor of history. There is no struggle for

recognition.153 To re-inscribe this back into the forgotten terms of Plato's substance, we might say

that social capital/trust – as the 'irrational' cultural support for the healthy working of the economy

and the polity – takes the place thymos had had within the Mechanism of EHLM. This replacement

takes two forms: it usually means that social-capital/trust is conceived is the 'residue' or 'extra fillip'

that helps to glue things together after the dialectic of Desire and Reason has fully exhausted itself

in the liberal democratic order. But, on occasion, Fukuyama strangely replicates the relationship

between social capital/trust and socio-economic development through what is clearly the Marxist

base-superstructure metaphor.154 Either way, the second motor of history has clearly evaporated,

even while the impurities left behind are what continue to occupy Fukuyama's interest.

Fukuyama himself, in the preface to Trust, best describes his own career transition. He looks again

at Kojève, who he says believed Hegel was essentially correct in declaring the end of history, and

so had “decided as well that philosophers like himself had no further useful work to do”. And so

Kojève relegated the study of philosophy to weekends, and became a full-time bureaucrat. “In the

light of this progression”, Fukuyama writes, “it seemed only natural that I also should follow my own

The End of History and the Last Man with a book about economics.”155. This is a fair self-


assessment in the immediate sense that Fukuyama still holds to the idea that history has ended,

and so feels able to move on from his more philosophical interests to more earthy issues like

economics and theories of administration. Or it might symbolise the abandonment of the struggle

for recognition, the second motor of history, so that Fukuyama can take leave of EHLM and study

the remaining surplus issues through his public-policy work – the need for thymos or 'recognition'

for the successful functioning of large-scale businesses (Trust), government administration, legal

enforcement, and public sector provision (State Building, After the Neocons), and for the general

health and well-being of society (The Great Disruption).

Fukuyama, Neoconservatism and US foreign policy

We have completed the primary purpose of the dissertation, which was to reconstruct Fukuyama's

philosophy of history, analyse its details and developments, and make explicit its inconsistencies.

We have just argued in the last section that the inconsistency in Fukuyama's argument has been

resolved in favour of one 'motor' over another. The point of this current segment is to sketch one

possible contributing reason of why this switch in Fukuyama's philosophy of history has occurred.

At the outset we will concede that it cannot account for the whole movement; to even attempt to do

so would be unjustifiably reductionist. The mundane, unglamorous truth of the matter is probably

just that Fukuyama was embarrassed at the attention the end of history thesis received, and felt

that the Hegelian and Kojèvean themes were detracting too much from his serious work as a policy

intellectual. It would miss the point, anyway: the philosophy of world history is about a lot more

than contemporary debates in international relations, and about a lot more than America. Still, the

issues are entangled. It is impossible to talk about liberal democracy and capitalism without

mentioning America, and impossible to talk about America without mentioning its foreign policy

Fukuyama has written copiously on issues of foreign affairs, so we cannot claim to deal with the

huge scope and volume of his views here. Rather, we will concentrate our attention on Fukuyama's

After the Neocons, specifically the admirable pocket history of neoconservatism that comprises

chapter 2. The occasion for tracing the genealogy of this fascinating group of thinkers, of course,

was the 2003 war in Iraq – since the neoconservatives were largely recognised as the intellectual

force behind the push for the war, even sometimes being accused of hijacking the White House

itself.156 What interests us here is that we learn both of Fukuyama's previous self-identification as a

neoconservative (“having long regarded myself as a neoconservative....”,157) and his abandonment

of that very label today (“I have concluded that neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a

body of thought, has evolved into something that I can no longer support”158). This relatively


sudden change of heart occurs after 9/11, and emboldens with the subsequent decision to invade

Iraq. What is remarkable about this, however, is that Fukuyama had unambiguously been for

regime change since the mid-1990s: “I started out fairly hawkish on Iraq”, recounts Fukuyama,

“and in 1998 signed a letter sponsored by the Project for the New American Century urging the

Clinton Administration to take a harder line against Baghdad after Saddam Hussein blocked the

United Nations weapons inspectors” (the PNAC being a prominent think-tank with notable

neoconservatives members: Fukuyama had previously signed the group's founding 'statement of

principles' in 1997159). Fukuyama then claims that after participating in a study (unnamed) on US

strategy toward the war on terrorism, he had at that point “decided the war didn't make sense.”160

The opening salvo in Fukuyama's distancing from his previous allegiances came with his essay

'The Neo-Conservative Moment”, directed as a critique of Charles Krauthammer.161 The essay was,

however, only published in the summer of 2004.

Fukuyama begins his critique of the Bush administration using the following device: he manages to

reduce neoconservatism – famously not a complete set or doctrine of beliefs, but rather a sort of

'persuasion' shared by various individuals, otherwise intellectual loners162 – to a 'key' of 4 meta-

principles. During the Cold War something of a concord solidified over what these principles

meant, which “yielded by and large sensible policies both home and abroad”. But during the 1990s,

Fukuyama insists, these principles – wrongly interpreted (though it is far from clear where the cut-

off point lay for Fukuyama) – were used to justify an American foreign policy that “overemphasized

the use of force and led logically to the Iraq war”. At this stage in history, Fukuyama sighs,

neoconservatism has become “irreversibly identified with the policies of the administration of

George W. Bush in its first term, and any effort to reclaim the label at this point is likely to be futile.”163

The four meta-principles of neoconservatism which Fukuyama discerns are: (1) a concern with

democracy, human rights, and more generally the internal politics of states; (2) a belief that US

power can be used for moral purposes; (3) a scepticism about the ability of international law and

institutions to solve serious security problems; (4) and finally, a view that ambitious social

engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends.164 The

mistake of the Bush administration, in Fukuyama's assessment, was to turn these principles into a

kind of closed mindset impenetrable to rational reconsideration in the light of new empirical

evidence. This led to “biased judgment” in three main areas. The administration, firstly,

overestimated or mischaracterised the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism (by

this, Fukuyama appears to mean, Bush wrongly vastly over-hyped the Iraq/WMD issue); next,

Bush erroneously morphed a healthy scepticism about international law and institutions such as


the UN (meta-principle 3) into a stubborn conviction that the US needed to 'go it alone' and choose

a unilateralist approach, which had the effect of deeply angering the rest of the international

community. Finally, the Bush administration tragically failed to anticipate the requirements for

pacifying and reconstructing, and was “wildly over-optimistic in its assessment of the ease with

which large-scale social engineering could be accomplished.”165 As Fukuyama convincingly point

outs, this last 'biased judgment' is not so much an erratic interpretation as a direct, flagrant

contradiction of neoconservatism's fourth meta-principle – the opposition to vastly ambitious social

engineering projects166 (this opposition being a closely-held belief for Fukuyama, something we

had already encountered at the beginning of Trust).

Now that neoconservatism has been forever tainted by the failures of the Bush administration,

Fukuyama undertakes what can only be described as a rescue operation. Far from abandoning the

four neoconservative principles, the task of Fukuyama's newly proposed “Realistic Wilsonianism”167

is to re-stitch neoconservatism with more traditional realist threads. Fukuyama himself explains

that Realist Wilsonianism takes from neoconservatism the premises that the US and the

international community at large “need to concern themselves with what goes on inside other

countries, not just their external behavior, as realists would have it”, that “power – specifically

American power – is often necessary to bring about moral purposes”, and even accept the

“forgotten” neoconservative principle that “ambitious social engineering is very difficult and ought

always to be approached with care and humility.”168 Realistic Wilsonianism differs from

neoconservatism in that it “takes international institutions seriously”169 (But we can see how shallow

a concession this really is when Fukuyama takes a look at the state of international organisations

in chapter 6.)170

One possible way of reading the development of Fukuyama's views here is through the turmoil of

allegiances that has been brought on with the end of the Cold War. One of Fukuyama's bugbears

is what he thinks is the blindness of the new generation {'third age'171) of neoconservatives to the

problems of assimilating US national interests and the interests, if we can put it like this, of 'the

system' – of Western liberal democracy and capitalism per se.

Neoconservatives, who historically never had a set of shared beliefs in foreign policy,172 began to

coalesce around a new collective vision, that vision espoused by a number of young writers in the

1990s – Fukuyama mentions William Kristol and Robert Kagan. For most people, it seems fair to

say, the full history of neoconservatism as a movement, tracing origins back to the 1930s, is now

associated in its entirety with the views typically expressed in the op-ed pages of Kristol's The

Weekly Standard. In journals like this, and in books such as Kristol and Kagan's Present


Dangers173, these neoconservatives took the grounding belief in 'American exceptionalism' to push

for a post Cold War policy of 'benevolent hegemony'. That is, since it was held that the US was the

'exceptional' nation, that it could be trusted to exercise its foreign policy within certain moral

parameters, this thereby meant that if the US was to capitalise on its post-Cold War position to

push forward its military supremacy (rather than return to normalcy – to remould the world in its

name, creating a benign, peaceful, and democratic order – this would not be empire, at least as

traditionally understood, would not be feared by other countries, and could be said to have its own

source of legitimacy. The US would have established itself in a position of 'benevolent hegemony'

But even for Fukuyama, who is far from disagreeing with these presuppositions – who would agree

that US interests were largely coterminous with the interests of the liberal-democractic/capitalism

system during the Cold War, with this system loosely representing human progress – the sheer

chutzpah of this new formulation was simply too much. He is moved to point out that benevolent

hegemony “rests on a belief in American exceptionalism that most non-Americans simply find not

credible. The idea that the United States behaves disinterestedly on the world stage is not widely

believed because it is for the most part not true and, indeed, could not be true if American leaders

fulfil their responsibilities to the American people.”174

How does any of this relate back to our central concern, Fukuyama's philosophy of history? We

should see that it has the effect of refocusing attention on the question of how, through what

means, history is to be advanced. We have a philosophy of history, strong in Marxian-esque

themes throughout, but which is completely absent of any liberal democratic equivalent to Marxian

class struggle and proletarian revolution. And therefore we can ask, what is the historical agent in

Fukuyama's philosophy of history?175 It is far from implausible that the US military could play this

role. Fukuyama is desperate to make it abundantly clear that he will have nothing to do with

'Leninist' interpretations of his history thesis176. (Yet would the alternative to Leninism not be, to

continue the metaphor, a kind of Second Internationalism, where the belief in the end of history

might be unshakable, but the time of the end itself is forever postponed?177)

In terms of the main argument of this essay – that Fukuyama chooses the Mechanism over the

struggle for recognition, which fades from view – the next stage is now deceptively simple: the

terms of such an 'agency', some have noted, can be found in Kojève, who emphasizes the use of

violent struggle and terror in the progression of history.178 And so, because Fukuyama wants now to

draw an (untenable) distinction between using economic and political 'soft power' to induce regime

change, and the use of 'hard power' – the blunt tool of military intervention – to enforce it directly;

and therefore wants to insist that his philosophy of history in EHLM could only possibly entail the


former as a foreign policy option, and not the latter; Fukuyama disfigures his original construction,

eliminating Kojève and the second motor of history. If the Kojèvean vision of the struggle for

recognition “now appears to be something of an encumbrance for Fukuyama”, this might perhaps

be because “it was a theory of mortal conflict. Hegel and Kojève were, each in his own time (Jena,

Stalingrad), philosophers of war. They legacy is too agonistic for the purposes of drawing a line

between the newfound caution of the statecraft Fukuyama now recommends and the democratic

hypomania of former friends at the Standard. The platitudes of modernization theory are safer.”179

Fukuyama's subsequent disavowals, “recapitulating an agonistic philosophy of history as a pacific

theory of modernisation, eviscerate a distinctive thesis by stripping it of its 'primary motor'”180

There is certain amount of truth in these arguments, but they have an inherent limit. It is doubtful

how far the link between Kojève and military intervention can be taken; in fact, it seems to go no

further than noticing that both emphasize 'war' or 'struggle' in some way. However, the argument

can work within the terms it was framed: as a contributing factor to Fukuyama's changing attitudes

toward the two developmental logics at work in his philosophy of history

Finally, to bring some closure to this section, we might perhaps comment on the fact that – despite

the title of the book, After the Neocons181 – taking Fukuyama at his word when he says he is no

longer a neoconservative, that he disavowed his neoconservative leanings “years ago”,182 is not a

straightforward exercise. Realistic Wilsonianism, while “tempering the best of neoconservative

convictions with a more informed sense of the intractability of other cultures and limits of American

power,” would still retain the “need for pre-emptive war as a last resort and the promotion of

democracy across the globe as a permanent goal.”183 Fukuyama believes Bush's means were

ineffective and counterproductive, but holds steadfast to his ends. And, while Fukuyama wants to

distance himself from the Kristol/Kagan belief that the US should push forever forward with its

'benevolent hegemony', it can be argued that his retreat to and defence of the platitudes of foreign

policy consensus still implies a deep agreement with the current US global military dominance

today, which is deep cause for concern, whether this consensus can be deemed 'neoconservative'

or whether it cannot. Indeed, we could even say that, as America pushes ahead with its “strategy of

openness” – as A.J. Bacevich has theorised184 – the US military has been playing the role of

historical agent for the propagation of market institutions and pliable democratic governments for

the past twenty years anyway, perfectly indifferent to whether Fukuyama quietly acquiescences or

speaks out.


Conflicting Themes

Acknowledging the fact that the essay does not encompass the whole of Fukuyama's EHLM

(concentrating on the first half of EHLM – which outlines the mechanisms for a philosophy of

history themselves – thereby ignoring the second half, Parts IV and Part V), and has restricted

itself to one broad line of criticism or interpretation, I will now take three paragraphs to bring up

these other areas for the reader. ,

So, firstly, we have not looked at what Fukuyama has to say on the topic of the last man (and the

way in which the prospect of the last man would completely transform the character of the end of

history). The basic idea is this: from the division of thymos – into megalothymia and isothymia – it

is isothymia that is embodied as the key governing principle in liberal democratic institutions. Then,

over time, isothymia becomes further ingrained into the life and spirit of each community. But

Fukuyama, witnessing this, worries whether we have misunderstood the nature of the end-state we

have reached. Liberal democracy is sustained through an equilibrium of the types of thymos with

the other sides of the soul, reason and desire. Even while a peaceful human order of equality

requires isothymia to be the determining principle, it still requires sufficient 'outlets' for

megalothymia, both to fortify the structure (principally through competition in business, but also in

things like sport, etc.) and to be 'earth' its disruptive effects. If this is not achieved, there is always

the chance that the liberal democratic end-state could be destabilised. Not finished, Fukuyama

then wonders whether even these 'neutered' forms of megalothymia will truly be sufficient for the

highly ambitious and power-hungry. Perhaps there is a part of human nature that will always rebel

against happiness and comfort, that will always prefer struggle and great achievement (who will

save the Übermensch?) With this – as many critics have noticed – he seems strangely to revoke

his whole argument.185 This has spawned a reading of Fukuyama – brilliantly exemplified by

Joseph McCarney186 – to the effect that EHLM is really a kind of replaying of the debate between

Kojève and philosopher Leo Strauss187, and so the book is as much a critique of liberalism and

modernity as a defence of it. Strauss had argued that Kojève's end-state would be less like Marx's

realm of freedom than the period of Nietzsche's last man, and Kojève seems to have come to

agree with Strauss, even while he kept to his philosophy of history.188 This is the source of

Fukuyama's own strange pessimism about the end of history, as it appears in Part V.

Next, there are elements of Fukuyama's thought which suggests that while, yes, he does believe in

the end of history, he is not convinced precisely where that lies. He has claimed, in retort to the

idea that EHLM was simply a defence of the American order, that his vision of the end-state would

in fact be closer to the European model than the American189. There are also threads in the


argument of EHLM that suggest the possibility that the end-state might not even be one of these

two options but rather a third, Asian authoritarian-paternalistic capitalism.190 What are we to make

of these?191 Firstly, it is difficult to know quite how Asian authoritarian-paternalistic capitalism would

fit into the dynamics of Fukuyama's argument. While using the Mechanism, we might see how this

model could prove the more efficient, and might contain an avenue for a kind of group thymos, but

it would seem to dampen the emphasis on individual recognition in EHLM. We might be more

inclined to argue that the differences between them – especially between Europe and America –

are far less than important than their similarities.192

Finally, another form of the argument that Fukuyama's philosophy is designed to defend the

American order has been suggested. This comes not from the 'inconvenience' of the second motor

of history, but from the apologetic – or, we might better say, anaesthetizing – effect the idea of an

'end to history' has on any efforts to change the existing order. Frank Füerdi writes: “By means of a

prefix, 'post-' terms revoke history. By declaring the Western world to be 'post-historical.' If history

has already happened, then change is now excluded... By protecting an immutable present into the

indefinite future such a revocation of history exposes its fundamentally apologetic intent.”193

Fukuyama's distinction between 'post-historical' and 'historical' peoples also seems like it could

easily be used to justify US intervention in the developing world – the language of B-52

humanitarianism (as Hobsbawm has termed it.)

We will now conclude the essay – summarising and consolidating the argument, offering some

self-criticisms or delimitations, and ending with an overall assessment of Fukuyama's philosophy of

history.

Summaries, Reservations, Conclusions

The primary intention of this essay has been to introduce, describe and then analyse Francis

Fukuyama's philosophy of history or project for a 'Universal History', as laid out by Fukuyama in

Parts I, II and III of his book The End of History and the Last Man. We then tried to sketch a

lineage of the argument from EHLM right through to Fukuyama's subsequently published efforts.

In the first section of the essay we tried to accomplish three things. Firstly, we set the historical

context for Fukuyama's claims – the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, which

was to represent more generally the collapse of systematic alternatives to liberal democracy (and

capitalism). Secondly, we set out what can be described as the empirical demonstration for the


ending of history in liberal democracy, which took the form of the table of 61 democracies that

Fukuyama presents. We mentioned some criticisms of Fukuyama's categorizations, but found

them sufficient for the purposes of Fukuyama's presentation. Thirdly, we presented the project of a

'Universal History', what it means, and alluded to the thought of Kant and Hegel. This set the scene

for the rest of the exposition.

In the second section we reconstructed the principal sections of Part II into what was called 'the

Mechanism'. This was initially, for the purposes of the argument, taken as a stand-alone attempt at

explaining the movement and directionality of history alone. We looked at how military competition

forced the consolidation of nation-states, how the advance of science and technology allowed the

capacity for greater economic development, causing vast social upheaval; and why industrial

development was to lead to the modern free market. Next, we introduced three possible

mechanisms for explaining the transition from this larger economic process to the establishing of

liberal democracy, and suggested they were adequate for what they were, even while there was a

'hole' in the argument (as we discussed). Within the terms of the reconstruction at least, there was

no need for turning to the struggle for recognition, and so this switching motionn set up the two

'motors' as rivals for the same space.

For the third section we temporarily postponed the exposition of EHLM for a reading of

Fukuyama's books State Building and After the Neocons, where we attempted to substantiate the

claim that these presented, within them, arguments for a continuation of the Mechanism. We

interpreted the continuation through the their accentuating of the theme of modernization theory,

and through a 'political turn', which downplayed the economic determinism of the previous

account.

In the fourth section, we returned to EHLM to reconstruct the struggle for recognition. This was not

done immediately, however, as we first sought to situate Fukuyama's use of the idea within the

master/slave dialectic of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and then the philosophy of Alexandre

Kojève. We saw that apart from a few Hegelian motifs, the struggle for recognition had very little if

anything to do with Hegel, but more to do with Fukuyama's idiosyncratic use of Plato's divisions of

the soul and the concept of thymos.

The fifth section sought to make explicit the terms of the interpretation that was gradually

crystallizing through the essay: after using Perry Anderson's analysis to show that there was

indeed an extensive confusion or indecision at the centre of Fukuyama's attempt to construct a

mechanism for explaining the movement of history (vindicating what had been lightly suggested at


the end of section two), we then argue that this indeterminacy has been forcibly resolved in favour

of the Mechanism, or the Mechanism-as-modernisation-theory. The interest in the struggle for

recognition morphs into a concern with concepts such as 'trust' and 'social-capital', relics of

Platonic thymos.

This was the argument of the essay's central proposition completed. The next section – on

neoconservatism and US foreign policy – was designed to suggest that a possible contributing

factor in this switching of Fukuyama's philosophy was his unwillingness to be associated with the

'agonistic' implications of Kojève and the struggle for recognition, as he was trying to clear himself

of intellectual responsibility for the disaster in Iraq. To be clear on the status of this argument: it is

not designed to be a sufficient explanation for the shifting emphasis on the motors of EHLM. It is

only supposed to be one contributing factor – albeit the most interesting and attractive one – to the

shift, the others being more mundane: Fukuyama was embarrassed by the attention, his

intellectual interests simply evolved, etc. And secondly, the argument is likewise not designed to

understand the entire project of the philosophy of history, and the prospect of facing an end to

history, by reducing it all down to a defence of the American foreign policy/military consensus.

Insofar as the current world order of liberal democracy and capitalism is an American order, there

is of course a link, but otherwise it is important not to assimilate the two.

This is now the place to offer a few possible reservations on the argument as it stands. Many of

these reservations might be grouped together under one more general self-criticism – the tendency

to over-interpret to make an argument fit. In what sense is it fair to treat all of Fukuyama's written

work as a complete whole, and thereby interpret each new topic or policy position as the

development of one coherent underlying philosophy? The essay may be guilty of trying too hard

and generalising too much in an attempt to fit Fukuyama's books together as one long narrative

stretching out from EHLM. To a certain extent this seems fair, as it is obvious Fukuyama has not

been trying to develop the end of history thesis, but just to say something insightful and useful on a

wide range of disparate topics. Nevertheless, there must likewise be a strong case for trying to

string together these arguments, and make sense of later work by relating it back to the early

thesis, and visa versa. I hope this case has been made during the essay. Otherwise, I ask the

reader to forgive this

A subset of this general problematic tendency would be trying to exaggerate the differences

between the accounts Fukuyama gives over time, in order to make for a more compelling

argument. Possible instances could include: over-interpreting Fukuyama's 'political turn', seeing it

as more pronounced than it really is, while Fukuyama still holds to an economic determinism; and


playing down the extent to which the struggle for recognition, and thymos, was already something

in EHLM – especially in Part IV – akin to the concept of 'trust'.194 To be sure, such criticisms would

not altogether miss the mark. But again, I think a case can be made for each segment of the

essay's developing argument. Perhaps it should only come with the proviso that such an argument,

so broad in scope, need not be wholly exhaustive, but rather be convincing in a way that sheds

some light on the topic, or offers a strong perspective that can prove a worthwhile contribution to

the debate

Finally, there is the issue of where Fukuyama's project for a 'Universal History' stands today. There

are elements of the essay's argument – arguing that there is the weakening of teleology, and the

treating of the EHLM thesis just as humdrum social-science – which might even suggest it wasn't

just the struggle for recognition getting sidelined, but that Fukuyama was gradually abandoning the

philosophy of history, and thus the idea of an end of history, altogether. A few aspects of such a

shift do exist. But no, overall, the idea of history still remains. Fukuyama's thinking is still structured

in these broad terms: he would surely stick to the delineations of the idea – from Part I of EHLM,

the victory of liberal democracy and the defeat of all alternatives, etc. – as firmly now as he did

then.

And so now, finally, we should conclude. Let us remember that Fukuyama's first essay on the

subject of the end of history was published in 1989, and the book in 1992, now making the thesis

some two decades old. Should we still pay attention to it? As a product of the end of the cold war,

its immediate message – the death of communism – no longer has any political resonance. Yet this

could now be the source of its significance. The end of history thesis cannot, in 2010, be castigated

as American or Western triumphalism: in the current political climate, it is more a kind of common

sense, a second nature – no one is interested. Today, even to return to the end of history thesis, to

risk re-celebrating the moment that liberal-capitalism finally vanquished all rivals, might in its own

small way be a kind of refusal, as we remember what the progressive movement of history used to

be.

1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man (EHLM), p.xii2 EHLM, p.xiii3 EHLM, p.xiv4 EHLM, p.35 EHLM, p.116 By this crisis Fukuyama does not mean a crisis of rationalism per se, a critique that would equate the rationalism of

the impersonal totalitarian state bureaucracy with the increasing systematic dominance of purposive or market reason (arguably elements of this are raised later on in the book, with Fukuyama's Nietzschean streak), but a rather less ambitious observation that the horrors of the 20th century could be seen as discrediting rationalism, leaving liberal democracy “without the intellectual resources by which to defend itself”.

7 Henry Kissinger is often comes up in Fukuyama's writings as the principal representative of realism. On the issue of whether the USSR was to be a 'permanent feature' of the world, Fukuyama attributes to Kissinger the view that “it was utopian to try and reform the fundamental political and social structures of hostile powers like the USSR. Political maturity meant acceptance of the world as it was and not the way we wanted it to be...” (EHLM, p.8). He is paraded as “the single most articulate advocate of realism in the past generation” (EHLM, p.246); Fukuyama quotes Kissinger's book A World Restored in support of his view that realists seek to systematic exclude moralism from foreign policy. Kissinger is also discussed in After the Neocons.

8 EHLM, p.129 EHLM, p.3710 Fukuyama follows Jeane Kirkpatrick's well-known distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian states

[ “Dictatorships and Double Standards”, Commentary 68 (November 1979)] devoting a small chapter to each: in the first, Fukuyama looks at regimes whose military rulers have voluntarily decided to surrender power to civilian institutions (two of the examples he gives are the collapse of the military regimes in Greece and Argentina, in 1974 and 1983 respectively, which were not forcibly ousted from power but “gave way to civilian authority instead through inner divisions with their ranks, reflecting a loss of belief in their right to rule” [EHLM, p.19]) which goes to demonstrate the collapse of the very legitimacy of authoritarianism itself, because of the growing belief that only democratically elected government can be legitimate. This was coupled with the widely acknowledged economic inefficiency and social incompetence of such regimes – the military, of course, not known for its expertise in solving endemic social problems – and this lack of ability had much the same de-legitimizing effect. In the next chapter, Fukuyama looks at the collapse of the totalitarian state, and the much wider discrediting of the totalitarian idea that lay behind it. The USSR, Fukuyama believes, is now considered a failure by the standards of liberal democracy and capitalism, and communism has now become forever associated with backwardness.

11 EHLM, p.xii12 EHLM, p.4213 See EHLM, pp.49-5014 EHLM, p.4315 EHLM, Ibid. Fukuyama, in a footnote (EHLM p.347n5), adds to this list the “qualifications to eighteenth-century

definitions of democracy” made by Joseph Schumpeter: we can say with him that democracy is “free competitions among would-be leaders for the vote of the electorate” [in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, Harper Brothers: 1950) p.284]. Schumpeter is an important thinker for Fukuyama, who returns to Schumpeter's work in his essay “Capitalism and Democracy: The Missing Link”, Journal of Democracy (Vol. 3, No.3, July 1992). Schumpeter also receives numerous other references in EHLM: he is cited in support of the idea that a “market-oriented authoritarian state should do better economically than a democratic one” (EHLM, p.123), as arguing that “democratic capitalist societies were markedly un-warlike and anti-imperialistic because they provided other outlets for the energies that formerly fanned wars” (EHLM, p.260) and he appears numerous times in the footnotes.

16 EHLM, p.4317 EHLM, p.4818 For example John Gray castigates the table for the “Monty Pythonish character” of the characterisation. Paul

Johnson calls the table of democracies “a minefield of misunderstandings, both historical and contemporary”.19 EHLM, p.4420 e.g. Ralph Milliband, see Literature Review21 EHLM, p.5022 e.g. “It is altogether possible to imagine states like Peru or the Philippines relapsing into some kind of dictatorship under the weight of the crushing problems they face” (EHLM, p.45)23 EHLM, p.4524 Ibid.25 'Reflections on The End of History, Five Years Later', in After History26 Gregory Elliott, Ends in Sight (2008), p.52. Elliott criticises the 'mystical kernel of Hegelo-Marxism' in Fukuyama's

philosophy of history, preferring to register “Althusserian accents”27 EHLM, p.5828 Fukuyama himself says exactly this: History is not “a blind concatenation of events” but a “meaningful whole in

which human idea concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out” (EHLM, p.51)

29 EHLM, p.4630 EHLM, p.5131 Ibid.32 This argument has been criticised as a naïve, pre-Kuhnian understanding of science by Fred Halliday. But Fukuyama

anticipates such criticism in his footnotes (p.352n2). He writes that Kuhn's scepticism is “not relevant to our present argument” because “a scientific paradigm does not have to be 'true' in any ultimate epistemological sense for it to have consistent and far-reaching historical consequences. It merely has to be successful at predicting natural phenomena, and in permitting man to manipulate them”.

33 EHLM, p.7234 EHLM, p.7335 Ibid.36 EHLM, p.76. Fukuyama gives a few historical examples of such “defensive modernizations”: the consolidation of

power by the great monarchies of Louis XIII of France and Philip II of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries; the far reaching reforms of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II in reaction to the growing power of the neighbouring Egyptian military; the reforms of vom Stein, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau in Prussia in response to their crushing defeat at the hands of Napoleon; and, finally, Fukuyama interprets Gorbachev's perestroika as a last minute attempt to modernize in the face of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

37 Fukuyama takes this as a “demonstration of the truth of Kant's observation that historical change comes about as a result of man's 'asocial sociability': it is conflict rather than cooperation that first induces men to live in societies and then develop the potential of those societies more fully.” (EHLM, p.76).

38 This might suggest a reliance on a kind of structural realism (and Kenneth Waltz is quoted and referenced frequently in EHLM.) But Fukuyama spends most of his time – in chapters 23 and 24 of EHLM, but also in After the Neocons – attacking realism. Indeed, Fukuyama's insistence that international relations theorists need to take notice of what goes on 'inside' states is plainly in contradiction to a structural realist position.

39 EHLM, p.7640 Ibid.41 EHLM, p.7742 Which is because “it is only in cities that one finds an adequate supply of skilled labor required to run modern

industries, and because cities have the infrastructure and services to support large, highly specialized enterprises” (EHLM, p.77)

43 EHLM, p.9144 EHLM, p.9345 The argument is almost reminiscent of Karl Popper's, in favour of the open society. But Fukuyama is otherwise

fairly scathing about Popper's legacy. He cites The Open Society and Its Enemies as a “superficial misreading of Hegel in the empirical or positivist tradition” (EHLM, p.349n14)

46 EHLM, p.94.47 Fukuyama admits that “the strong work ethic of many societies is not the result of the modernization process” but

says that certain socio-economic arrangements can subjugate any existing work ethic, making it extremely difficult if not impossible to re-create. Fukuyama devotes all of chapter 24 of EHLM to this subject (he cites Kojève to the effect that Hegel believed that Work was the true essence of Man.) Fukuyama attempts to explain the successes of some countries economics against the failures of others by looking at the 'work ethic'. He universalises Max Weber's particularist thesis in The Protestant Ethic, saying that truly productive work is undertaken to satisfy thymos and not simply desire: “The most successful capitalist societies have risen to the top because they happen to have a fundamentally irrational and 'pre-modern' work ethic”, which would suggest that “even at the end of history, some form of irrational thymos is still necessary in order to keep our rational, liberal economic world going...” (EHLM, p.229)

48 EHLM, p.10049 Fukuyama goes on to elaborate this central thesis of dependency theory: “The advanced economies controlled the

world system of trade and, through their multinational corporations, forced Third World countries into what was called 'unbalanced development' – that is, the export of raw materials and other commodities with low processing content. The developed North had locked up the world market for sophisticated manufactured goods like automobiles and airplanes, leaving the Third World to be, in effect, global 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'.” (EHLM p.100). He expands on these points, and introduces some of the key literature (EHLM p.357n2, p.358n8,n10). Fukuyama is also interested in Immanuel Wallerstein, and in critiques which “expose his reading of the historical record”). Wallerstein has famously claimed that “It is simply not true that capitalism as a historical system has represented progress over the various previous historical systems that it destroyed or transformed” (Historical Capitalism, Verso: 1983)

50 EHLM, p.10051 For instance, Latin America – in its newly granted independence – inherited the feudalism and merchantilism of 17th

and 18th century Spain (and Portugal), making it politically slow to adapt to changing economic conditions (capitalism never works because it is never really tried). This long standing disposition was combined in the 20th

century with egalitarian income distributing policies, inspired by the socialist movements, and trade policies such as import substitution, (restricting – Fukuyama claims – the potential for economies of scale) informed partly by the

assumptions of the dependency theorists. The result being that, today, “many Latin American economies are dominated by bloated and inefficient state sectors that either attempt to manage economic activity directly or burden it with a tremendous regulatory overhead” (EHLM, p.104). The vast bureaucratic hurdles often forces economic activity underground

52 EHLM, p.10853 Fukuyama continues: “The enormously productive and dynamic economic world created by advancing technology

and the rational organization of labor has a tremendous homogenizing power. It is capable of linking different societies around the world to one another physically through the creation of global markets, and of creating parallel economic aspirations and practices together in a host of diverse societies” EHLM p.108. This theme of homogenization is taken up by Fred Halliday in his “International Society as Homogeneity: Burke, Marx, Fukuyama”, where he discusses Fukuyama's views.

54 EHLM, p.10955 EHLM, p.11256 Fukuyama quotes Talcott Parsons, “Evolutionary Universals in Society”, American Sociological Review (vol.29 no.3

June 1964).57 EHLM, p.11358 These social actors would likely include a newly fledgling working class (“increasingly differentiated according to

industrial and craft specialities”), managerial personnel, government bureaucrats, even “waves of immigrants from abroad, legal and illegal, who seek to take advantage of the open labor markets in developed countries” (EHLM, p.113)

59 Ibid.60 EHLM, p.11461 EHLM, p.11362 EHLM, p.11563 EHLM, p.11664 EHLM, p.11765 EHLM, p.123 66 EHLM, p.12567 Ibid.68 EHLM, p.13469 EHLM, p.13570 Ibid.71 For instance, Callinicos writes that – while Karl Marx “conceptualizes social contradictions as strains generated

within a unitary process”, Fukuyama “treats his two mechanisms of historical change as in effect heterogeneous to one another, and offers no account of their relationship” (p.40)

72 Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons (AN), p.5473 Fukuyama refers to Fontenelle, to Machiavelli (“the father of the modern notion of social progress”), to Voltaire,

Turgot, and Condorcet. The main thinkers for Fukuyama are of course Kant, Hegel, Marx and Kojève.74 EHLM, p.6875 Fukuyama quotes Capital itself, where Marx observes that “the country that is more developed industrially only

shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”. This line is for Fukuyama the beginning premise of modernization theory. (Fukuyama attributes this line to “the preface to the English edition of Das Kapital”, but of course the author of this preface was Engels. It is the source and not the author that is misattributed: the quote actually comes from Marx's preface to the first 1867 German edition)

76 EHLM, p.6877 For what Fukuyama considers the most important variations of these modernization theories, see the relatively

detailed survey in EHLM p.351n34. He also goes into more detail on how he believes European sociology mutated into American modernization theory in After the Neocons, pp.125-6. For a further historical overview, Fukuyama refers us to Nil Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press: 2003) (p.209n15)

78 EHLM, p.6979 AN, p.5780 AN, p.11681 Francis Fukuyama, State Building (SB), p.482 Fukuyama's account could have been lifted straight from Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Indeed, Fukuyama

indirectly acknowledges the debt, observing that “Friedrich A. Hayek, who was pilloried at midcentury for suggesting that there was a connection between totalitarianism and the modern welfare state” saw his ideas “taken much more seriously by the time of his death in 1992” (p.5)

83 SB, p.684 SB, p.785 SB, p.2486 SB, p.25. Fukuyama quotes a comment made by the “dean of orthodox free market economists”, Milton Friedman.

He noted in 2001 that a decade earlier he would have had three words for countries making the transition from

socialism: “privatize, privatize, privatize”. “But I was wrong”, he continued. “It turns out that the rule of law is probably more basic than privatization”

87 Fukuyama says that while “there is today a huge academic- and practitioner-based literature on democratic transitions, and an even larger literature on institutions and economic development”, the prominent neoconservatives “stood largely outside this debate” – a judgement that in hindsight seems rather excessively generous. (AN, p.117)

88 He cites Huntington's 1968 “landmark work” Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press: 1968). Fukuyama sums up the central message of the book as being that “political decay was as likely as political development” for the developing world, since “excessively fast socio-economic modernization could outrun political development and produce disorder and violence” (AN, p.126)

89 AN, p.12690 AN, p.12591 AN, p.14092 Ibid. But it is not clear how seriously we are supposed to take the possibility that modernizing authoritarians might

be preferable. Fukuyama echoes his ideas on the weakness of dictatorships and authoritarian states as he elaborated them in EHLM: on the next pages of After the Neocons, he argues that “good governance is ultimately not possible without democracy and public participation” and so “without democratic legitimacy, authoritarian rulers will not survive inevitable setbacks and crises” (AN, p.141)

93 AN, p.12894 Ibid. See Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and

Material Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge: 2000)95 AN, p.129. See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Blackwell: 1990)96 AN, p.13097 AN, p.130. Fukuyama also gives examples of such work by political scientists (AN, p.210n23)98Francis Fukuyama, “Francis Fukuyama: The End of History Revisited” (Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, Jun. 28Th 2007) http://fora.tv/2007/06/28/Francis_Fukuyama_End_Of_History_Revisited99Francis Fukuyama, “The history at the end of history”, The Guardian (April 2007) [online article for Comment is Free] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/03/thehistoryattheendofhist100 Afterword to the Second Paperback Edition of The End of History and the Last Man (2006)101Francis Fukuyama, interview with Matthew Philips for Newsweek, (Sept 20, 2008)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5053194139940095896102 Or, in Frederick Beiser's words, the subject is aiming to “prove its absolute independence” through its “power over

the world” (Frederick Beiser, Hegel, p.185)103See Hegel, p.182. Beiser writes that “The ego's first experience is that it cannot attain absolute independence on the

level of animal desire”; “desire destroys its object by consuming it, by forcing it to conform to its life-processes (digestion, excretion)”. See also Robert Stern, p.73.

104Hegel, p.183105Beiser, Hegel, p.183106Phenomenology of Spirit, p.110 / ¶175107There are two things to note here: Firstly, as Robert R. Williams points out, Kojève is wrong to frame the

master/slave struggle as the model of recognition in Hegel. Williams shows that Hegel sets up a distinction between an analysis of “the general structure(s) and patterns of intersubjectivity” and “empirical analyses of their potentially endless contingent variations in determinate actualizations” (Williams, p.48). The master/slave is a 'deficient realization' of recognition, which does not embody all of its essential features. Contra Kojève, Hegel actually believes that recognition can be achieved not through the struggle of the slave, but by both egos renouncing violence. Recognition cannot be forced or coerced, but is only attained through a 'letting-be', a leaving of the other in his freedom (Williams, pp.56-57). Second, we can see that Fukuyama's use of recognition has none of the intersubjective character of Hegel's. For Fukuyama, the individual seeks recognition simply so he can be secure and comfortable within the state, and feels that his fundamental dignity as a human being is respected. An isolated individual ego or cognito confronts another individual, and both confront the state, etc. Whereas, for Hegel, the relation to the other is at the same time a self-relation. Hegelian recognition implies that subjectivity is intersubjectivity.

108McCarney, when discussing Kojève, says that the textual basis for Kojève's interpretation is “slight”, and that there is “little warrant” for thinking that Hegel himself cast recognition in the role (McCarney 2000, p.92). He goes on to say that “there are textual grounds, backed by theoretical considerations, for concluding that the struggle for recognition cannot, for Hegel, be the driving force of history (p.95). Callinicos also delivers an unambiguous verdict: for Hegel, history is “emphatically not to be characterized as a struggle for recognition. It is rather 'the progress of the consciousness of freedom'.” (p.27)

109Shadia Drury devotes a whole chapter to this debt, see chapter 5 'The Lure of Heidegger' in Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics. The main point is that Kojève disputes what he himself deems as Hegel's 'monism', prefering the dualism of Sein (space, static Being, Nature) and nicht-Sein (non-Being, nothingness, negation, history, Man). Michael Roth argues that Kojève's usage of Heidegger is key to establishing the finitude of History: Kojève projects Heidegger's “conception of the essential finitude of man onto the historical plane, arguing that

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history, since it is the product of human action, should likewise be finite”. “If this were not the case – and here Kojève accepts Heidegger's critique of the dominant version of Hegelianism – men could flee from the consciousness of their morality by identifying themselves with part of the story of the infinite progress of History” (Michael S. Roth, “A Problem of Recognition: Alexandre Kojeve and the End of History”, p.297. Alex Callinicos summarises that “the shadow of Heideggerian Being-toward-death undoubtedly hangs over Kojève's version of the historical process” Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History, p.23

110Kojève, quoted in Patrick Riley, “Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre Kojeve”, Political Theory (1981; 9; 5). Riley also explains that for Kojève, mastery is therefore ultimately “tragic” and “an existential impasse”. Shadia Drury disputes Kojève's verdict on the sorry state of mastery (p.21)

111Kojève, quoted in Patrick Riley112Drury, p.19113This account of Kojève's history is based on Shadia Drury's interpretation. See chapter 3, 'The Age of Slavery'114From Kojève's “Hegel, Marx and Christianity”, quoted in Riley, p.9115 To fully explain this we would need to outline the Hegel interpretation of Koyré, and show the ways in which

Kojève tends to rely on Koyré's assumptions. In 1953 Koyré published a pioneering essay on the concept of time in Hegel's Jena Logik and Realphilosophie, which had concluded that for all its majesty Hegel's philosophy was a failure because its system was only possible if history was completed, which was just what its dialectic of time, as perpetual negation of the present by the future, precluded. This diachotomy necessarily means, for Koyré, that the project of a philosophy of history is incoherent while time continues. Thus Kojève argues that in order for Man to know his history, time must stop (the future must be impossible): this is the 'end of history'. See Michael Roth, 'A Problem of Recognition'

116Kojève, quoted in Patrick Riley, p.9117Kojève, quoted in Patrick Riley, p.10118Quoting Kojève: “if there has been from the beginning a 'left' and a 'right' Hegelianism, this is also all there has been

since Hegel” ('Hegel, Marx and Christianity', quoted in Patrick Riley, p.13)119Indeed, “it might be argued that Kojève ignores Hegel's actual theory of the state, and advances in its place what

Hegel's theory would have been if Mastery, Slavery, recognition, and satisfaction had been the only political notions which he used (Riley, p.19)

120 i.e. from his treatment of the French Revolution (Hegel's attack on the Terror and its 'abstract universality' in the Phenomenology, that it abolishes all distinctions) to his view on the nation state (central for Hegel, but needs to be surpassed for Kojève) and the substance itself of the ideal state (Hegel's state being differentiated in structure, articulated into corporate divisions etc., with an important role assigned to civil society; whereas, Kojève's state strongly emphasizes the lack of differences within it). Fukuyama himself observes this: “Kojève's universal and homogeneous state makes no room for 'mediating' bodies like corporations or Stande [Estates]; the very adjectives Kojève uses to describe his end state suggest a more Marxist version of a society where there is nothing between free, equal, and atomized individuals and the state” [EHLM p.388 (footnote)]

121This is the term Kojève in his work Esquisse d'une Phenomenologie du Droit. See Anderson, p.321. Kojève's Marxism is discussed in Patrick Riley

122Callinicos writes that Kojève's treatment of Stalin is “thoroughly Hegelian”; his treatment of Stalin “recalls Hegel's conception of 'the great individuals of history' as 'the instruments of the substantial spirit', and implies a view of history as an objective process which, thanks to 'the cunning of reason' realizes its aims through human actors unaware that their subjective schemes are fulfilling deeper purposes” (Theories and Narratives, p.28)

123Anderson, p.322.. He adds: “The 'imperial union' advocated in 1945, recast as 'integration' in 1950, became a reality at Rome in 1957, and Kojève could end his days as counsellor to Giscard and Barre, performing the office of the philosopher as he had wished it” (p.323)

124While Kojève obviously knew there had been wars and revolutions since 1806, he regarded these as merely the “alignment of the provinces.” This meant for Kojève, as Fukuyama spells out, “communism did not represent a higher stage than liberal democracy, it was part of the same stage of history that would eventually universalize the spread of liberty and equality to all parts of the world. Though the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions seemed like monumental events at the time, their only lasting effect would be to spread the already established principles of liberty and equality to formerly backward and oppressed peoples, and to force those countries of the developed world already living in accordance with such principles to implement them more completely” (EHLM, p.66)

125 Perry Anderson explains this in the following way: there is a philosophical coherence behind Kojève's ability to slide seamlessly between communism and capitalism as the end of history, and this lies in the formalism of Kojève's universal and homogeneous state. “It lacks, very pointedly, any specification of property regime or constitutional structure” (“The Ends of History”, in A Zone of Engagement, p.323). This is because the end-state is “deduced all too rigorously from the original figure of a bare dialectic of consciousness, shorn of social or institutional complication. As such, in its abstraction and simplicity, it was always liable to capsizals of reference. Universality and homogeneity – the all and the same – are categories sufficiently wide to accommodate an ample spectrum of contents. There was thus no conceptual barrier to stop Kojève from switching the end of his story from socialism to capitalism, without major adjustment”

126EHLM, p.144127That Kojève's gave an anthropological reading of Hegel is a commonplace observation. Callinicos, citing Jean

Hyppolite, says “Kojeve offers an anthropological version of the dialectic. That is, like all left Hegelians, he gives a reading of Hegel which privileges the Phenomenology...” (p.23)

128EHLM, p.161. In the collection After History,Timothy Burns argues against Fukuyama's dichotomy between Hobbes and Hegel, arguing that Hegel's understanding of man is fundamentally Hobbesian

129Ibid.130EHLM, p.162131EHLM, p.163132 Most of the commentators on Fukuyama's work have complained about his cavalier attitude in using concepts,

principal of those being Hegelian recognition and Plato's thymos, e.g. Halliday, Drury, Anderson,Holmes, Heilbroner133 For an extremely brief exposition of Plato's views on the soul, see Julia Annas, Plato: a very short introduction

(Oxford: 2003), p.68134EHLM, p.165.135EHLM, p.182136EHLM, p.200137 Ibid.138EHLM, p.202139EHLM, p.203140“The Ends of History”, p.348141EHLM, p.80142EHLM, p.135143“The Ends of History”, p.349144 We could have been aware of this in Kojève, whose philosophy of history essentially paints the transition from the

pagan world of the master, to the Christian world of the slave, to the overcoming of the relationship in the secular realization of this ideal. This abstract philosophical account obviously has no credibility as an actual historical explanation. It shares many similarities with the early Marx.

145 Ibid.146 Ibid., p.350147 Francis Fukuyama, Trust, p.4148 Trust, p.26149 For a critical review, see Charles Wolf Jr., “The Limits of Trust” 150 Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, p.16151 Fukuyama, in the second part of State Building, moves on from his discussion of 'stateness' to take a closer and

more detailed look at the requirements of effective public administration. Here he identifies the problem of what he calls 'organizational ambiguity'. This is where the goals of an organization are unclear, contradictory, or otherwise poorly specified – this being especially true in the public sector (since there are trade-offs between various public goods which are difficult to define. The public sector provides services, and service sector productivity is inherently hard to measure). Goals often emerge and evolve through complicated interactions between organizational 'players', and the ambiguity of the goal often results in ambiguities over the place of authority in directing agents in pursuit of these goals. Concerns emerge over what degree of delegation will be most efficient for each particular setting, and it becomes increasingly difficult to enforce formal systems of monitoring and accountability within the quickly expanding administrative bodies of a nation experiencing good economic growth. The point that Fukuyama appears to be making is that much of the time bureaucratic dysfunction is down, at least in part, to disagreements over authority and responsibility, since these things cannot be decided and formalized all-the-way-down. Due to the size and complexity of modern public administration, authority will always necessarily have to be distributed functionally for it to operate; organizational ambiguity will ultimately ensure that “no particular formal specification of an organization will ever fully optimize the organization's goals”. This crystallizes in the identified problem of how to monitor low-specificity activities with high transaction volume. Social capital is in a sense a way of navigating the problem, by being a source of informal authority, or indeed, trust.

152 The Great Disruption, p.17153 My claim here is directly contradicted by what Fukuyama says in Trust, p.7, on the way that the struggle for

recognition has been subsumed from the military to the economic sphere. But I don't really think this plays any operative role in Trust. Still, it is reason to measure the essay's argument at this point.

154 In The Great Disruption, Fukuyama claims that “social norms that work for one historical period are disrupted by the advance of technology and the economy, and society has to play catch-up in order to renorm itself under changed conditions” (p.12). When discussing social capital, he continues with this theme: “in economic life, group coordination is necessary for one form of production, but when technology or markets change, a different type of coordination with perhaps a different set of group members becomes necessary. The bonds of social reciprocity that facilitated production in an earlier time period become obstacles to production in a later period ...”.(p.18). The Great Disruption, in many ways like EHLM, manages to combine a deep conservatism – as it laments the break up of community and family life with the increasing of divorce, illegitimate births, and crime, since the 'sixties – with a strange optimism or progressivism that this shake-up of moral norms will allow something new to emerge through the development from the industrial to the information economy

155 Trust, p.xiii

156 See the chapter by Max Boot, 'Myths about Neoconservatism', in Irwin Stelzer (ed.) The Neocon Reader (Atlantic: 2004)

157 AN, p.xxv158 AN, p.xxvii159 See the statement of principles on their website: http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm160 AN, p.xxvi161 Francis Fukuyama, “The Neoconservative Movement”, The National Interest (Summer 2004). In this piece, even

amongst the criticism of Krauthammer, Fukuyama admits that “there are elements of a different neoconservative foreign policy that are implicit in what I have said”. Fukuyama also refers to Krauthammer in After the Neocons, when the latter began to argue that the United States faced a 'unipolar moment'.

162 See Irving Kristol, 'The Neoconservative Persuasion', in The Neocon Reader163 AN, p.xxvii164 AN, p.4. These principles are later expanded upon, AN pp.48-49165 AN, p.6. Iraq is an example of a “heavy-footprint” approach to state building and post-conflict reconstruction (SB,

p.x). Fukuyama does not think that the neoconservative pessimism and scepticism toward social engineering can or should apply to Afghanistan.

166 Fukuyama in fact cleverly traces the genealogy of neoconservatism using this principle. The anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism of the early Cold War imbued a natural scepticism of 'idealist' or utopian goals, and a reflexive awareness of the problem of unintended consequences. This then eventually asserts itself on these thinkers – coming from the liberal tradition – as they began to analyse US domestic policy. In opposition to Soviet social engineering abroad and in seeing the limits of Sixties radical 'social engineering' at home, the neoconservatives completed their move to the Right. The question would then remain of how all this turned around in the neoconservative foreign policy views of the 1990s.

167 AN, p.9. Fukuyama maps 4 different approaches to American foreign policy:. In addition to the neoconservatives, there are the (2) realists, whose “respect power and tend to downplay the internal nature of other regimes and human rights concerns”; (3) liberal internationalists, who “hope to transcend power politics altogether and move to an international order based on law and institutions; and, there are what Walter Russell Mead labels (4) 'Jacksonian' American nationalists, who “tend to take a narrow, security-related view of American national interests, distrust multilaterialism, and in their more extreme manifestations tend toward nativism and isolationism” (AN, p.7)

168 Ibid.169 AN, p.10170 For instance, Fukuyama insists that a lack of trust in the United Nations cannot be read as contempt for

international opinion; he criticises the UN as being “structurally limited with regard to both [democratic] legitimacy and effectiveness” [AN, p.157] and likewise dismisses the Security Council as too cumbersome and bureaucratic to be taken seriously on major security issues. But of course, while there are “deficiencies in the ability of the United Nations to authorize [the use of] force”, this “does not mean that the organization cannot play an important role in post-conflict reconstruction and other nation-building activities” [AN, p.161]. Once we make the decision, you feel free to join in. When Fukuyama says that the Realistic Wilsonian – unlike the neoconservative – must believe in international institutions, the reader must not be so naïve as to assume he means ones that actually exist. Instead, Fukuyama looks to the construction of new international institutions, following the principle of what he calls 'multi-multilaterialism' Although some existing international institutions are better than others, especially those that have “fewer legitimacy problems than the United Nations”, whose “members are genuine liberal democracies” which “all share important core values and institutions”, and where “the United States has a great many friends.” [AN, p.173] We are of course speaking of NATO, an organisation which – while itself operationally cumbersome, Fukuyama admits – provided legitimacy for military intervention in the Balkans and later in Kosovo in a way the UN could not.

171 See both the introduction and appendix to Justin Vaisse's new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Belknap Press: 2010)

172 This being the case at the end of the Cold War and the early 1990s, before Kristol/Kagan. The National Interest editor Owen Harries proclaimed the need for a return to realism; Irving Kristol began arguing in the 1980s that the United States ought to consider disengaging from Europe; and Jeane Kirkpatrick issued a brief for a return to American 'normalcy'

173 William Kristol and Robert Kagan, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (Encounter: 2000). The book has an expansion of another article they had originally written, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy”, Foreign Policy (75, no.4, 1996). Fukuyama quotes from their book, AN p.56

174 AN, p.111. Perry Anderson elsewhere puts it like this: “For the neoconservative core, American power is the engine of the world's liberty: there neither is, nor can be, any discrepancy between them. For Fukuyama, the coincidence is not automatic. The two may drift away from each other – and nothing is more likely to force them apart than to declare that they cannot do so, in the name of a unique American virtue unlikely to persuade anyone else”. (“Inside Man”, see Literature Review)

175 See Fred Halliday, covered in Literature Review176 Fukuyama writes: “I did not like the original version of Leninism and was skeptical when the Bush administration

turned Leninist. Democracy in my view is likely to expand universally in the long run. But whether the rapid and relatively peaceful transition to democracy and free markets made by the Poles, Hungarians, or even the Romanians

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can be quickly replicated in other parts of the world, or promoted through the application of power by outsiders at any given point in history, is open to doubt” (AN, p.55)

177 Ken Jowitt had offered an interpretation of Fukuyama's views here which Fukuyama himself found very congenial. He writes that, in the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration had “concluded that Fukuyama's historical timetable was too laissez-faire and not nearly attentive enough to the levers of historical change”. This led to an “active 'Leninist' foreign policy in place of Fukuyama's passive 'Marxist' social teleology”. But as Fred Halliday makes clear, such a 'passive' social teleology, without any notion of an agent or moving force, seems inadequate to task. Anatol Lieven puts it like this: “Fukuyama stresses in his latest book that The End of History described a democratic capitalist version of an anti-Leninist Marxian approach – stressing slow cultural, social and economic change, not sudden revolution. He maintains that he is a Gramscian, emphasizing the intellectual and cultural hegemony of capitalist democracy, not claiming that it would inevitably work well everywhere or solve all problems”, in 'The Two Fukuyamas'

178 Gregory Elliott: “history might culminate in a rational hedonism, but the road to that end state was drenched with blood. Hegel had pronounced history had pronounced history a 'slaughter-bench'. Kojeve, in what Vincent Descombes deems 'a terrorist conception of history' [Modern French Philosophy, p.14], embroidered the conceit” (Elliott 2008, p.60) It is worth quoting Kojève at length on this (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p.185):

“Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht ('World History is a tribunal that judges the World'). History is what judges men, their actions and their opinions, and lastly their philosophical opinions as well. To be sure, History is, if you please, a long 'discussion' between men. But this real historical 'discussion' is something quite different from a philosophic dialogue or discussion. The 'discussion' is carried out not with verbal arguments, but with clubs and swords or cannon on the the one hand, and with sickles and hammers or machines on the other. If one wants to speak of a 'dialectical method' used by History, one must make clear that one is talking about methods or war and of work”

Callinicos notices in Kojève's Stalinism an acceptance that terrorism and tyranny may be necessary to advance history; Drury notices how Kojève “places special emphasis on terror as a necessary component of revolution”, that the liberation of the slave is not possible without a fight (Drury, p.36).179 Anderson, “Inside Man”, see Literature Review180 Eliott 2008, p.61181 After the Neocons being the British title of the book, the US title was America at the Crossroads. But again, as we

have seen, whether Fukuyama really believes the US is at an important crossroads, or whether really he is really comfortable with it continuing down its current path, is up for debate

182 In the Newsweek interview, Fukuyama's interviewer Matthew Philips asks “You're a long way from your early neoconservative leanings?”, and Fukuyama replies “I disavowed those years ago”

183 Anderson, “Inside Man”, see Literature Review184 A.J. Bacevich argues that the 'Big Idea' guiding US strategy is “openness”. The four imperatives of the consensus

constituting the substructure of post-Cold War US foreign policy are summed up by Bacevich: (1) the imperative of America's mission as the vanguard of history, transforming the global order and, in doing so, perpetuating its own dominance (the “end toward which history tended under the tutelage of the United States” was “freedom, achieved through the spread of democratic capitalism and embodied in the American way of life”: “America's unique responsibility was to assist others toward history's ultimate destination”); (2) the imperative of openness and integration, given impetus by globalization but guided by the United States; (3) the imperative of American 'global leadership' expressed by maintaining US preeminence in each of the world's strategically significant regions; and (4) the imperative of military supremacy, maintained in perpetuity and projected globally. For other insightful views on US foreign policy, see Gowan (1999, 2001), Chomsky (2003)and Callinicos (2009)

185 e.g. Ryan, Holmes, Mead, Gourevitch186 McCarney, 'Shaping Ends: Reflections on Fukuyama'. See Literature Review187 The important terms here are Strauss's two criticisms of Kojève: that (1) without a teleological philosophy of

nature, history cannot be given the order Kojève seeks of it (Kojève having severed Hegel's philosophy of history from his views on nature); and (2) Strauss argues that it is the quality and not the universality of recognition that counts. Fukuyama takes up both of Strauss's points in his theory of megalothymia. See Strauss 1963. For the full Kojève/Strauss debate, see Michael S. Roth, The Ironist’s Cage, chapter 5; and Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism, chapter 9.

188 Since the primary criterion of Kojève's end of history is the fulfilment of satisfaction rather than the realisation of liberty, he can argue that the end state might see the abolishing of Man as he has all his desires satisfied, returning to nature; becoming animals again. Michael S. Roth describes how Kojève reinscribes Nietzsche into his end-state after his debate with Strauss: “The fantasy of the end of history becomes a nightmare as it is incorporated into a Weberian perspective on the routinization of life. The closure of the end of history is an iron cage in which human animals can engage in a variety of activities without struggle because their essential desires have been satisfied” (1993)

189 Fukuyama writes in the 2006 Afterword that “Anyone familiar with Kojève and the intellectual origins of his version of the end of history would understand that the European Union is a much fuller real-world embodiment of the concept than the contemporary United States. In line with Kojève, I argued that the European project was in fact a house built as a home for the last man who would emerge at the end of history.” Fukuyama also said in the

Newsweek interview that “the European Union represents those ideas [of the end of history] actually”190 Fukuyama says that the “most significant challenge being posed to the liberal universalism of the American and

French revolutions today” is coming from “those societies in Asia which combine liberal economies with a kind of paternalistic authoritarianism” (EHLM, p.238) but then says (“Recognition based on groups is ultimately irrational...”) (EHLM, p.242). Fukuyama actually goes on to dispute the cogency of the idea of a generalised 'Asian model' in Trust

191 Elliott gives 4 possible candidates for the end of history: (1) US liberal democratic capitalism; (2) Asian authoritarian-paternalistic capitalism; (3) European liberal democratic capitalism; and (4) History has not been concluded, and will continue until the contradictions within liberalism resolved (2008, p.50)

192 Which Fukuyama himself argues: “Contemporary Europeans tend to prefer more equality at the expense of liberty, and Americans the reverse, for reasons rooted in their individual histories. These are differences of degree and not principle” (Afterword, 2006)

193 Füerdi, 'The Enthronement of Low Expectations'. See also Fritzsche and Norris, who see the similarities between Fukuyama's ending of progressive history and the postmodernists revoking the cogency of the idea of progress history. Norris also links Fukuyama to the failure of intellectuals to properly resist the US during the Gulf War

194 e.g. in After the Neocons, Fukuyama repeats the argument of chapter 10 of EHLM, rather than emphasising the need for strong states: “Economic modernization, when successful, tends to drive demands for political participation by creating a middle class with property to protect, higher levels of education, and greater concern for their recognition as individuals” (AN, p.54). There is also the idea the capitalist work ethic is a sublimated form of the desire for recognition (see footnote 48, 65-67 )

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