The Blog

2021-

2021-11-26 g
LEGITIMIZING AN IDEA

On Received Ideas

Puncturing some prominent myths of our age, from neoliberalism to anti-Americanism

[...] Since no one reads Hegel anymore—and it was he who created the formulation in 1806—we mention the “End of History” these days only in connection with the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama. In a famous 1989 article published under this title in the United States, and then in a book that further develops the theme, Fukuyama appeared as a kind of prophet: the fall of the Berlin Wall, which coincided with its publication, announced that the history of political evolution had concluded, with democratic capitalism the victor. But meantime, history resumed, and Fukuyama’s theory is now commonly cited with derision. This is a mistake: Fukuyama was actually right. But we had misread him, just as we had earlier misread Hegel.

Both Hegel and Fukuyama tell us that history has meaning, which remains to be shown, and that ideas govern the world, which annoyed Marx and later the Marxists. Fukuyama observes that contemporary history can be summed up as the confrontation between two ideas—socialism and capitalism—and that, after 1989, only one of these ideas remains viable: this is the End of History, as envisioned by Hegel. All societies are heretofore proceeding toward the same endpoint. More precisely, all try to do so but not at the same speed, and not all will make it there, Fukuyama says. But among the ideologies currently available, there no longer exists an alternative endpoint, or else these alternatives are situated beyond this world, such as the Islamist caliphate, which, moreover, has no universal value, since Islamism is valid only for Muslims. Still, Fukuyama did not exclude the possibility that, in some unforeseeable future, human passions would generate alternative utopias that would put history back on its tracks.

From whatever point of view the End of History thesis is examined, however, it is currently irrefutable; what is surprising is that it remains so contested. It is history’s losers who object to it: those on the right who dislike capitalism because it is materialist and associated with America; and those on the left who deplore the disappearance of the socialist utopia that was so attractive, as long as it was not put into practice.

It’s worth noting, too, that Fukuyama never claimed that the End of History would be all rosy. Between the realists who “won” and the “deniers” of this reality, the fight would go on—as it has. (read more)

______________________

Permission is hereby granted to any and all to copy and paste any entry on this page and convey it electronically along with its URL,
______________________