Francis Fukuyama has recently published a new article vindicating his "End of History" thesis. I wrote about this recently and I thought that this is an opportune moment to look briefly again at his theory and its roots in the philosophy of GWF Hegel.
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, 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.
Back in 1992 when he published his book, The End of History and the Last Man, there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. Communism had been defeated and a wave of countries embraced free markets and liberalism. Thirty years later, the debate over the book’s conclusions rages on.
The main challenge in the present era to liberal democracy comes from authoritarian states such as China and Russia. They have seemingly been able to shape global events and act decisively and robustly, whilst liberal democracies seem in deep-rooted decline, conflict and bogged down with culture wars, Brexit and Trump. Across the globe countries such as Brazil, Hungary, Burma, Tunisia and El Salvador have also reversed democratic gains.
"We’ve seen frightening reversals,” Fukuyama writes, “to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years.” Does this mean his thesis is wrong? No: “setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better."
Fukuyama sees two issues with China and Russia: "First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences. Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice."
We are still at the End of History then. But what does the End of History mean? Fukuyama writes: "The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending."
One would search in vain for the phrase "the end of history" in Hegel's writing. It actually comes from Fukuyama himself, via the French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve. It was Kojeve’s reworking of Hegel’s theory that provided Fukuyama with the philosophical underpinning of the thesis in his 1992 book. It is worth looking at Hegel’s philosophy on its own as there are plenty of misconceptions surrounding it.
The closest Hegel comes to the phrase “end of history” is in the Philosophy of History, a book complied from his lecture notes after his death. In it he writes that after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, his analysis arrives at "the last stage in History, our world, our time." (p. 442)
For Hegel, history is a contingent, messy affair, but it is also a discernibly rational process. The story of human history is the unfolding of freedom in the world. From the Oriental world, where only the emperor was free, through to the Greek and Roman worlds where citizens (but not slaves) gained more liberty, and into the modern era, where at last the conditions emerge in which fully fledged freedom can flourish.
In spite of the persistent myth that Hegel was an apologist for the Prussian state, he was vague on precisely what the final form of the state should look like. In the Philosophy of Right, his 1821 work on political philosophy, it contains much that criticises the existing order, only outlining what would constitute the necessary elements for freedom. These included the family, a flourishing civil society and social norms of what he termed "Sittlichkeit", or "ethical life".
In an ideal outline, a state should be capable of supporting through its laws, institutions and norms the realisation of freedom that he claimed to have found in Europe in his own time. This is not a totalitarian system involving the total surrender of individual rights, the erasure of personal differences and subservience to the state. Instead, we find a picture of a market economy regulated by the state.
"The owl of Minerva", Hegel famously expressed, "takes flight only at the fall of dusk". In other words, it is only after the end of an epoch can we look back and see how reason has unfolded through the chaos of human affairs. In this way we can, Hegel thinks, come to comprehend the underlying rational structures in human affairs. History isn't just one thing after another, nor is it simply a miserable story of bloodshed and violence.
There is no sense in Hegel that the past is a guide to what is to come, but he did make a slight nod towards America, "the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself." (p. 86)
It turns out he was correct. "It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe." (ibid.) But Hegel was only concerned "with what is, which has an eternal existence - with Reason." He left out of his picture America and the New World "and the dreams to which it may give rise" (p. 87)
Hegel did not think in his own time that history had come to end in the sense of a close. Neither does Fukuyama in ours: "Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf." Just because we can grasp what a rational society can look like, it does not guarantee that its realisation is an automatic process. Nor does it infer that once achieved it will last forever.
Still, in the twentieth century and beyond, the liberal state has seen off communism, fascism, the Great Depression, military dictatorships and banana republics, Islamic fundamentalism and all sorts of other economic shocks. In fact, it is a testament to the strength of liberal democratic societies that millions every year leave dictatorships and head to a better life in the west.
That is not to say that these states are perfect, that there is no conflict within or between them, and nor that there is a settled template for what they should look like. Liberal states could be social democracies or lean more to free market libertarianism.
Part of the negativity that Fukuyama’s book attracted must boil down to its perceived triumphalism. At the fall of the Berlin Wall, he seemed to be saying that neoliberal capitalism had won the day and that large-scale wars would be a thing of the past, but that wasn’t the case.
History could go catastrophically wrong. Indeed, there is a more real chance now than in the last few decades of a nuclear conflict in which mankind could wipe itself out in a reckless act of collective suicide. We could bomb ourselves into oblivion, and that really would be the end of history.
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GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by J Sibree, Dover Publications (1956)