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Misunderstanding Fukuyama - Not Triumphalist

Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man is disliked mostly by people who can't openly admit their fidelity to the anachronism of Marxism, which Fukuyama aptly characterizes as a reactionary and regressive ideology that sought flight from the challenge of liberal democracy. Readers of, among others, Jean Francois-Revel, Eric Fromm, Eric Hoffer and Paul Berman should recognize in Fukuyama that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism are the Revolution and they are the Revolution because they offer no final answers, leaving man alone to confront himself and shape his own destiny. Fukuyama does not argue that the world must necessarily become democratic and capitalistic; he does argue that there is nothing else it can become unless it goes backwards.

Fukuyama is thus subject to grossly unfair criticism from people who have either not read his book or can't read his book. Thus Pat Buchannan, for example, takes a shot at Fukuyama in pointing that radical Marxism is alive and well in Venezeula and spreading throughout the region - there is nothing in Fukuyama's book that says that such things can't or won't happen.

To the dismay of Marxists, however, Fukuyama says that if they do, then they are regressive and not progressive and bound to fail, not because of illiberal corporate hegemony, but because illiberal governments are bound to produce internal contradictions that cannot address the fundamental human needs that people throughout history have sought to address in constructing their social and political orders.

Fukuyama is not flippantly triumphalist - far from it. He recognizes that flight from freedom is as strong an impulse, and possibly stronger, than any impulse to embrace freedom. This is especially true once the responsibility of freedom falls upon those who haven't had it. Fukuyama's end of history thus leaves man with a perpetual challenge. It is not Fukuyama, but those who believe, not challenges, but challenge itself can be overcome.

Francis Fukuyama - The End of History. Like Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, Fukuyama's book is criticized on the basis of blurbs from hostile book reviewers and is grossly misunderstood.

Eric Hoffer - The True Believer. A classic. Not on any Marxists top ten list for a multitude of reasons, one of which must be that Hoffer was a San Francisco Dock Worker who became a philosopher. An embodiement of the liberaring potential of life in liberal, capitalistic America. I know, I know. He's the Ragged Dick, the exception to the rule, not everyone can do what he did. Well most people don't even try, but that's not the system's fault. In fact, there is no system. There's just individuals, and those who don't try don't try because fear of a failure which would confront them with their own feelings of inferiority.

Erich Fromm - Escape From Freedom. Fromm was a Marxist of sorts, who certainly held out hope for some kind of resolution of man's dilemmas, but this book sympathetically acknowledges the enormous burden of responsibility democracy lays upon man and discusses totalitarianism as not only a flight from that freedom but a flight that involves not only the renunciation of the self, but a regressive flight from the anxiety of individuality to a "paternal" state. Fromm was also a Freudian of sorts. This is a classic. Or should be.

Paul Berman - Terror and Liberalism. Not that I did the other books justice, but in describing this book, I can do it no justice. It is an amazing work that deals with the same challenges but with far greater historical detail. It is a work of profound insight.

Posted on Saturday, May 6, 2006 at 2:06 PM | Comments (1) | Return

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