Francis Fukuyama

[DOOM]

What do you think about Francis Fukuyama and his perception of the end of history?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Pure delusion. It's fitting that he'll spend the rest of his life squirming over and 'rethinking' something that must have sounded stupid to anyone outside of academia even when he first put forward the idea.

That's not to say that the majority of leftists don't buy into the same delusion painted in a different color re: communism

[Rafiq]

What do you think about Francis Fukuyama and his perception of the end of history?

If anything Fukuyama honestly and shamelessly embodied the prevailing ideas following the collapse of the Left, which were not critically confronted or recognized. These were ideas that people took for granted: Fukuyama embodied them into theoretical text, ripe for criticism. I think that's preferable, to be honest.

For the record, Francis Fukuyama no longer ascribes to the notion of the end of history. I mean I don't know what people could expect form the man. He's an honest bourgeois intellectual who happens to be somewhat uniquely less of a reactionary than the rest of the lot.

[Tim Cornelis]

How is communism not the end of history?

Also, he's provided a good opening line or paragraph for every book on socialism (or the restatement or rediscovery of socialism [of the twenty-first century]) published since the 1990s.

[motion denied]

Communism is the end of prehistory.

[Rafiq]

How is communism not the end of history?


I thought that Marx and Engels believed after class society, history will go on infinitely, albeit mastered by man. In other words, history will be a matter of conscious will whereby the 'highest creative potential' of man would reign supreme unconstrained by the forces of class society (and therefore ideology).

I am unsure of whether they held this view (well, Engels directly posited something along the lines of this) but I remain somewhat skeptical to the notion. What I know is that a proletarian dictatorship is possible, what I don't know is whether the state withering away, or a classless society is more than ideological rhetoric meant to serve the ideas of now (rather than being a prediction, they reinforced Marx's withstanding ideas about capitalism and the class war), rather than later.

In that sense, Fukuyama really borrowed the rhetoric and ideas of those who (falsely) interpreted Marx. To him, yes the glorious end will come, we just happened to already have reached it.

And this isn't an incredibly outlandish idea coming from the ideological climate following the collapse of the Left. The US and its allies reigned supreme, liberal capitalism had come out of the cold war victorious and the bourgeoisie struck a mighty blow at labor, all of which marked the absolute destruction of 20th century Communism and the establishment of a new capitalist order (though one can see the shadow of Communism creeping slowly upon it today, uncanny sounds in the graveyard that will grow louder - could it be the specter of Communism?). Obviously, after the events of 9/11, the financial crises, rising global superpowers like Brazil and India, the Arab spring, the events in Ukraine and the turmoil in the Middle East (the emergence of ISIS) - I think it would be ridiculous to believe history is over. The world is being engulfed by barbarism and madness. We know that history isn't over - but is this a good thing? It doesn't look like it right now. What is very possible is another dark age for civilization whereby the achievements of modernity were a golden flash in history - only to be lost in the coming storm. Unless the world is met with a revival of Communism.

EDIT - not to mention the ecological crises.

[DOOM]

So Fukuyama argued that the dialectic will stop with the synthesis of ultraliberal capitalism and authoritarianism -> liberal democracy.
However, how does he explain this? Does he use some type of Adam Smith theory, believing in the ultimate rationality of the market?

[Red Economist]

Fukuyama argued that the end of the cold war meant the 'univerzalization' of the 'idea' of liberal democracy. He asserted that liberalism did not have internal contradictions, but that it's faults were merely the imperfect application of it's ideas of liberty and equality. Hence, it's liberalism could not be destroyed from outside because it is universal- and could not bring about it's own demise- because it didn't have internal contradictions- it would represent the final stage in human social evolution or 'the end of history'.
The concept of the 'end of history' is a reoccurring one since Hegel proclaimed it with the victory of Napoleon at the Battle of Jena in 1806. Fukuyama repeated it in 1989 and borrowed from contemporary ideas about the superiority of liberalism over other economic and political systems.
In his book The End of History and the Last Man he added that the major threat to liberalism was not from the left because 'egalitarianism' did not correspond to human nature in his view, but from the right- a Nietzschean will to power or dominate. (he included Lenin and Trotsky in this in that they asserted a 'will to power' to lead the russian revolution). So his argument was never an absolute.

my personal opinion, is that he was a fad, who sold a very elegant, logical and well-argued idea to the general public and told the bourgeoisie something they wanted to hear. I believe he was quite sincere in his intentions- and simply found himself on a current of public opinion and got swept up by it (and who doesn't want fifteen minutes of fame). It's only if you're really looking for problems with the idea it that you can see them because he did a fair job of describing the reality and orthodoxy of the times.

The biggest weakness of his argument is that he turns the pessimism of a century of total war and totalitarianism on it's head and argues in the wake of the collapse of communism (and retreat of right-wing authoritarianism) there is a case for optimism, without really examining the social causes for why liberalism collapsed in the early twentieth century in first place. Nor does he really look at how Totalitarianism might actually be the 'new' historical phenomena that supersedes liberalism (as was thought in the 1930's for both fascism and communism). Nor did he really examine the possibility that liberalism won by default because the soviet union collapsed and ignored on-going problems because he felt the market/democracy could solve them.
From the more Marxist perspective, the critical point is he borrows the revisionist idea of class reconciliation as the result of the middle class- so indeed in his view the 'class issue' receded because society wasn't so polarized and by appearances did not have 'internal contradictions'.
I read his essay and a fair amount of his book- and when I switched off my desire to be an ideologue- it was a good argument and the only reason I'd challenge it as a 'dialectical materialist'; the idea of liberalism is not identical with the material reality and ideas don't 'cause' social relations. but that's pretty much it; most of his stuff is mainstream neo-liberal ideas with a bit of Hegel thrown in.

[Luís Henrique]

So Fukuyama argued that the dialectic will stop with the synthesis of ultraliberal capitalism and authoritarianism -> liberal democracy.
However, how does he explain this? Does he use some type of Adam Smith theory, believing in the ultimate rationality of the market?

As far as I understand, he drank from Kojève, who in turn was a certified conservative Hegelian.

Luís Henrique

[RedMaterialist]

What do you think about Francis Fukuyama and his perception of the end of history?

Rarely does history prove a "philosopher" to be such an idiot in his own lifetime. It's a wonder that he can show his face in a college classroom. His wiki page says that he is a scholar at some Stanford think tank. He apparently can only get a job at a right wing propaganda outfit.