The Restaurant at the End of History

By Lance Mannion

I'd forgotten about this guy.

Back in the early 1990s, when I read Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, I was aware that he thought he was laying out a triumphalist's manifesto.  We'd won the Cold War and that was that.  The world had gotten to where it had been headed all along, the forces of liberalism and enlightenment and the legions of ignorance and tyranny who had been slugging it out since Archimedes hopped out of his tub had fought their last battle, goodness and niceness had vanquished evil and rottenness, and Western Civilization's favorite child, the United States, stood victorious over the body of the Evil Empire, while the people cheered, fade out.  No more history to write.  Last call, gents. Katie bar the door.

The idea depressed the hell out of me.  And it seemed to me it depressed Fukuyama too.

Of course we were depressed by different things.

I was sunk into lassitude and ennui by the notion that the culmination of 3000 years of Western thought and struggle was America in the time of George Herbert Walker Bush.  I didn't believe it.  But I have a powerful imagination and am prone to nightmares.

I was also irritated by the chauvinism of it all.  History had ended because a small group of 20th Century American intellectual types had lost their raison d'etre?  And even for America, wasn't there still an awful lot left to do---explore Outer Space, cure diseases, end poverty, build better mouse traps, write a few more good poems?  We accomplish a little of that over the next five hundred years or so, I thought, and future historians won't be able to take vacations, they'll be so busy chronicling our achievements.  They'll hate us for how much work we'll have given them to do.

But I was young and my education had been spotty and inadequate.  (I'm being flip but not sarcastic.)  I was thinking of history with a lower case h---the story of the various messes human beings had gotten themselves into and how they manage to wriggle their way out.   I didn't know that History was, not a force exactly, but an expression of the Will to Power.

If I'd understood that History with a capital H was the clash of two competing intellectual elites determined to direct the course of human destiny by force---two forces, really:  the force of their arguments backed up by the force of their guns and tanks---I'd have seen that Fukuyama wasn't sad.  He was mad.

What I took for Fukayama's melancholy struck me as a symptom of the same sense of disappointment that afflicted the sons and younger brothers of heroes through the ages, a combination of resentment and self-loathing because they'd been born too late to prove they could be heroes too.

Instead of enjoying the sunshine of Reagan's Morning in America, Fukuyama was sulking because he felt he'd have to live the rest of his life in his hero's shadow.

I read The End of History as if it was a late 20th Century variation on Frederick Jackson Turner's writings on the closing of the frontier, which I had also misread as a lament for days gone by and not a triumphalist's manifesto.

I didn't see that Fukuyama's "sadness" was just the humorlessness of the idealogogue on a mission.  I missed the fact that he and other neo-cons saw the End of History not as a finish line but a starting point.  The door had shut behind them.  History was the past.  The future was Opportunity.

Freedom was victorious and to the Victor goes the spoils, and since the United States and Freedom were the same thing, the spoils belonged to us.  In other words, with Freedom now triumphant, Freedom got to direct the course of human destiny.

We were Freedom.

And that put us in charge.

We could now remake the whole world over in our image.

In his essay in the Sunday Times, Fukuyama revisits some of the ideas he raised in The End of History, concerned that they may have been misinterpreted.  Not by the likes of me.  By people who might mistake Fukuyama for a neo-conservative, including other neo-cons, and try to associate him and his book with the disaster that is the War in the Iraq.

Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

In other words, says Fukuyama, in no way was I arguing that it was the mission of the United States to try to spread Democracy in the Mideast at the point of a gun.  I was describing a process not advocating a plan of action.  Other neo-conservatives pushed that.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States.

Fukuyama wasn't a neo-con, or at least he isn't one anymore:

Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support....

But Pat Lang isn't buying.  Neither is Helmut at Phronesisaical.  They think Fukuyama is trying some fancy footwork, practicing a bit of self-revisionism not only to avoid sharing blame for Iraq (and the potentially larger, escalating problems in the Mideast) but also to escape a responsibility for thinking up a way out of the mess.

Fukuyama's essay, as summed up by Lang, comes down to this:

...he has no solution for the mess that he and his pals made but is frightened by the result of their sophomoric meddling with the deepest forces in human nature and Middle Eastern history.

Helmut in an extended post (cross-posted at Majikthise)looks at the elitist and Machiavellian intellectual underpinnings of the neo-conservative movement, the neo-cons' moral and intellectual failure to realize during the Cold War that the US couldn't rely on the Soviet Union's obvious evil to be the only argument for our actions, and how that same arrogance went to work in Iraq.  In his essay Fukuyama appears to be trying to say goodbye to all that, but, says helumt, he fails to reject a key idea that keeps him squarely in the neo-con camp:

Fukuyama...saw a fixed end to history in - surprise - his preferred form of governance that just happened to be the tradition of his own country. The logic or illogic of the present, in other words, entails a final outcome of the logic of history. Either way, history runs a linear course ending in liberal democracy. It's largely - with some tweaks here and there - my preferred form too, but it would be illiberal and undemocratic of me to maintain that the logic of history has resulted in my own wise choice.

Fukuyama says he doesn't think it's anybody's business to give History a shove.  But by leaving in place the idea that History has a desirable outcome and that outcome is us, he leaves in place the argument that if the point is to get from here to there and we know where there is, why not help move things along?