Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard
But I think "oh bondage, up yours!"
(X-Ray Spex)
It’s common to dismiss Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of History. An historian whom I otherwise greatly admire, Dr. David Starkey, frequently lambasts its conclusions as either triumphalist or premature. I agree, actually, that it is triumphalist, but disagree that it is premature. Many people will be familiar with the main thesis of the book and the “end of history”, but fewer are familiar with the other aspects of the work that arguably go deeper into human society and psychology. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama’s work contains insights that help shed light on some of the major political struggles of today.
In 1992’s The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama does not argue that history has come to a close and that there can be no more events, no more technological change or no more wars. Rather, he takes a deeply philosophical view, drawn from the German philosopher GWF Hegel - and successors such as Alexandre Kojeve - that capital “H” History, conceived as the overall development of humankind, has reached a point in the modern era where we finally have the basis for a rational society, namely in the liberal state.
The book was popular at the time because, with its celebration of free markets and consumer capitalism, and with the collapse of the Soviet alternative, it seemed to transfigure and glorify what existed.
America was in the ascendant. There really did seem to be no alternative to liberal capitalism. There was no military rival, but more importantly, there was no ideological rival. Left wing parties, for example in New Zealand, had fully embraced the market. Even Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China opened the way for capital to develop deep in the heart of communist China.
Not long after the early Nineties, the story changed. On 11 September 2001, the terrorist attacks on the US showed that the world’s superpower was still vulnerable to outside attack. Military incursions into the Middle East were disastrous. Moreover, waves of worldwide protests against globalization, many again in the heart of the US itself, brought into question the idea that there was a worldwide ideological consensus on economic development. A popular slogan at the time was, “Another World is Possible”.
Given all this, and the near-collapse of the global banking system in 2008, Fukuyama’s thesis was looking decidedly shaky. Unsurprisingly, it came in for sustained criticism, the validity of which depends on whether you accept his overall argument, which is that there is no ideological alternative in town to parliamentary democracy and some form of market economy.
As with Hegel himself (and I intend to write about his Philosophy of Right at some point), Fukuyama describes not so much a precise prescription as an overall trend. The PoR was the philosophical and ethical basis, very broadly speaking, for a civil society, state and economy in which reason would coincide with day-to-day life. When it came to the actual nitty-gritty of how it all works in practice, Hegel was vague. That is a strength, not a weakness.
In a famous remark, Hegel wrote that “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the fall of the dusk,” meaning that only after an epoch is over can we look back and survey what has been.
Indeed we can see that liberal capitalism has weathered the challenge from revolutionary socialism, which is now dead as a movement (even if there are a few sects who would try to convince you otherwise). It also adapted itself to the challenges posed by the workers’ reform movements. Although far from perfect, there has been no ideological challenger.
Islamic societies, far from being the existential threat to the West, have proved their openness to markets. The Arab Spring of the early 2010s, although not successful, showed that there is a movement for democratic reform in the Middle East.
Around the same time, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which occurred at the heart of American capitalism also failed, because it could not provide a coherent ideological alternative to liberalism beyond complaints about income distribution (the 1% versus the 99%) and a few demands to reform the system.
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So, Fukuyama can be broadly vindicated then. But the End of History did not stop there. The full title of the book is The End of History and the Last Man. The second part of Fukuyama’s thesis (“the part nobody read”, as he said in a recent interview) concerns the effects of living in these times when the big ideological battles are over and we live in a time of unparalleled prosperity. In this he draws again on Hegel, but also Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the Last Men of the title.
This has some illuminating ideas about the nature of modern politics today, which is composed by many cultural struggles around identity and the desire for mutual recognition.
In a very famous section entitled “Lordship and Bondage”, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes that what we crave besides food and drink is the recognition of another human. Self-consciousness is not just in and for itself, but also for another. It is only through interacting with many other selves that our own individuality emerges.
In dramatic fashion, Hegel depicts this as a potential fight to the death between master and slave (or servant, as sometimes translated). In relinquishing, according to Hegel’s picture, one consciousness ultimately subordinates itself in bondage to the other, but it doesn’t end there. Throughout history there have been struggles for mutual recognition: workers demanding higher pay, votes for women, anti-colonial struggles and so on. The struggle for mutual recognition as relayed through the parable of lordship and bondage has echoed through the ages. Humans are indeed driven by a desire for acknowledgement, but like with Hegel, this has a dual, and tragic, aspect.
Fukuyama draws on Plato’s concept of “thymos”, a word broadly equating to this desire for recognition. But Plato further distinguished between “isothymia”, meaning a desire to be recognised as an equal, and “megalothymia”, a desire to be recognised as superior.
The desire for equal recognition can take, for example, the form of the civil rights struggles in the US in the 1960s, in which black citizens wanted to be considered the same as their white counterparts (isothymia).
On the other hand, the desire to be recognised as superior can take the form of wanting to be the best in your class with the highest grades and most prestigious college placement (megalothymia).
Centuries on, in today’s world, it is not difficult to see how struggles for recognition are still taking on both forms. In the controversial area of transgender rights, for example, the isothymic desire to be regarded as an equal under the law brings some individuals into conflict with one another, such as in the dispute that biologically born sportswomen and male-to-females transgender athletes can compete equally.
[Indeed, as an aside, much of the “transgender debate” echoes the old philosophical disputes between materialism and idealism. On the one hand, there are those who define a woman biologically as an adult human female; on the other, a woman is a subjective identitarian category.]
In the often ignominious world of internet politics, and in the world beyond, these arguments can degenerate into unedifying displays of megalothymia (“crush the TERFs”). It is not enough to have your opponent concede to you, you have to subjugate them entirely, just like in Hegel’s account of Lordship and Bondage. Hence egregious examples of feminists such as Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer subjected to “cancel culture” mobs of baying activits.
From that perspective, you can see then how the #BeKind crowd and the cancel culture mob are Janus-faced. Both the impulse to be mutually recognised as equal and to be treated with kindness, and the desire to be mutually recognised as superior both originate in the same part of the human psyche.
Indeed, the very exhortation for others to “be kind” implies that you see yourself as already superior to the other side, who must be brutes, and therefore not really worthy of being treated with kindness themselves. This tragic aspect of human nature would have been lost neither on Plato, nor on Hegel.
And what of the Last Men? Where does Nietzsche fit into all this?
In the modern, comfortable society, where we enjoy good living standards and where, for the most part, life is okay, Nietzsche saw a terrible conundrum. This is the world of the Last Men: a smooth, democratic unfreedom. In a comfortable, agreeable world, however, there would, Nietzsche argued, emerge individuals who rebel against being merely equal and who want to be superior. Megalothymia would trump isothymia.
This aspect of the human condition was recognised by Fukuyama. In the risk-averse, safe, even anodyne society, of late capitalism, there must be a safety outlet for those who want to display their megalothymia, whether it is in terms of sporting prowess, intellectual and scientific achievements, or in business.
It is also evident, it seems to me, in the world of culture and politics. It has often been remarked that the student revolutionaries of the 1960s came from affluent backgrounds and that they were rebelling against the boredom of consumer society, rather than from a position as revolutionary proletarians. Indeed, the punk band X-Ray Spex, who provided the inspiration for the title of this piece, were rebels precisely against the conformity that bourgeois plenty offered.
Bondage for them was not the result a life-and-death struggle, but pointed to the absence of meaning in life. It is easy to mock student “woke” activists today for adopting any cause (even ones they have no direct stake in) when they have never had it so good, but that also points to the fact that “they reject life in a society in which ideals [have] somehow become impossible” (Fukuyama).
This is the tragic aspect of humanity that Hegel often touches upon, but which is seldom picked up by many of his readers: that we may create a rational world, but that doesn’t mean it would always be perfect. Nor would we want it to be.