At the start of the 20th century people thought of energy in terms of oil, coal, wood, etc. Then Einstein comes up with e=mc2 and within 40 years we have a bomb and a decade later reactors producing quantities of energy unimagined in 1900.
Things can change fast in physics. Same with socio-economic orders.
People have been dunking on Fukuyama since I was in college in the 90s, but once you start to grapple with his thesis it’s really hard to argue against. After the financial crisis of the oil shocks in the 70s and the Volker shock in the 80s, there was no serious challenge to liberal capitalist democracy. In the 60s & 70s, there were mainstream political parties that sought to move past capitalism, there is no equivalent now. As Thatcher put it, there is no alternative. In all Western democracies, all of the parties accept this, so the debate has shifted to culture wars, where the left/right split doesn’t make much sense.
It’s not my original thought (I’m paraphrasing the Bungacast hosts here), but the neoliberal consensus is breaking down. However, there is still no indication of a counter force to neoliberal capitalism. This doesn’t mean that history in the Hegelian/Marxist sense has restarted, but rather that we are at the End of the End of History.
We see this culturally as well. Nobody is offering utopian visions of change. We are obsessed with apocalyptic fiction, because in the words of Mark Fisher “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Nobody is writing the future history of a post-capitalist society. Dismissing Fukuyama is just cope, we need to reckon with how stunningly durable his thesis is
That’s not entirely true. The singularity people are optimists. Except for the ones who think the AI will replace us with paperclips.
I grew up in a Marxist leaning family. What I realised from reading Marx is that most of the problems he had with capitalism (see alienation, commodification etc) were problems of modern society. Marx left the form of the communist society open of course, so he can’t be falsified, but most of his followers were pro worker or state appropriation of enterprise. Neither of which solves much or changes much of the society we live in. It’s still industrial, still growth orientated, still environmentally destructive without some kind of intervention. The USSR was all of these and so is China.
I mostly agree with your statement, but I don’t see how that disproves Fukuyama’s thesis. It just reinforces the idea that there is no alternative, existent or imagined
I don't have anything to add to your content here, except to say that I love Michael Hobbes's two podcasts, Maintenance Phase and If Books Could Kill, but my god he is an insufferably smug motherfucker. He's unbearable. I feel like I can only tolerate him because he is smart, and at least on Maintenance Phase, I love his co-host, Aubrey Gordon. Can't say as much about Books, except I like the concept and their takedowns can be really interesting. But overall, yeah, Hobbes seems like the kind of guy you would desperately try to get away from at a party while he talks your ear off about how smart he is.
Forever is a long time. It requires quite some conceit and hefty recency bias to believe that the current order is the apex iteration of all time, for all time. As well as that it applies to everyone.....even with the many many in many parts who don’t currently subscribe to the social structure that we have....and that’s just today, nvm tmr.
Fukuyama's thesis shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. His point isn't that no political order could ever succeed liberalism. He's saying that any political order that does will represent a reaction or regression with respect to liberal-democracy.
The success of the Chinese system of Marxist-Leninist State Capitalism is the only real challenger to liberal-democracy still. It remains to be seen whether the system is replicable outside of China at any scale. The other challengers are manifest failures (Islamism) or else Bonapartist distortions within liberal-democracy itself (Putin, Erdogan, Modi). These latter aren't really challenger systems yet, they're perversions of the dominant liberal-democratic framework, and they all still have to borrow liberal-democratic legitimations of authority.
Could Fukuyama turn out to be wrong in the future? Well duh. Anyone could turn out to be wrong in the future. That's how the future works.
But right now, I wouldn't too easily dismiss the thesis that liberal-democracy, having defeated Socialism, still represents the highest attainment in the development of Freedom in History.
Fukuyama can't be blamed for the poor reading comprehension skills of everyone else. The idea that he thought no historical events could occur after 1991 is just a silly strawman.
Feminism (and we can anchor among its beginnings Mary Wollestonecraft's 1792 "Vindication of the Rights of Women), gay rights, and abolitionism developed almost co-termenously in the 18th through 19th century.
They are largely the creation of what is now called "whiteness" and in effect, prtectorates of industrialization and Capitalism.
To me, fukuyama’s boomk The Origins of Political Order is almost a masterpiece, full of analysis and evidence and smart speculation.
But The End of History gets worse every day, he just missed how society would evolve in all the most important ways. His theories didn’t account for multinational institutions that would grow to overshadow the states themselves. Like most of the rest of us missed that china’s top down authority and civil obedience would give them certain advantages in a world of internet and large scale manipulation.
I don't think the growth of multinational institutions threatens Fukuyama's thesis at all. They represent the liberal part of liberal-democracy. They also express in a concrete form liberalism's universalist aspirations.
China's success and lack of liberalisation could threaten Fukuyama's thesis, but only if their system proves to be in some way universalizable in the way that liberal-democracy has proven itself. Small islands of resistance to liberal-democracy don't refute F's thesis that liberalism represents the highest stage in the development of freedom in history.
I never read the entire End of History, but did read Hegel and Kojeve, though long long ago. Definitely agree that Origins of Political Order is a better book. Both books are attempts to ground political analysis in an "anthropology". In End of History, it's Kojeve's "struggle for recognition" and the idea of EoH as I remember it is that the combination of welfare state capitalism and representative democracy is the most workable way to meet these psychic needs. In this framework, maybe the Chinese state capitalist system gives material advantages but less psychic satisfaction, so it will have a tendency to move toward democracy. The counter argument is - well what if Hegel and Kojeve are wrong? I read Political Order as retrenching to more modest claims using empirical anthropology with more historical grounding.
Saying liberal democracy is the end of history is like saying the Kansas City Chiefs will win the Superbowl every year til the end of time and that you have to become a fan of them even if they beat your team every time.
Fukuyama wrote his original EoH article and book in the context of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR and the unravelling of Eastern Europe and Soviet communism. Some three decades after those events, it behoves us to recognise the significant contingent and sui generis elements of those events, and how foolish was the neoconservative conceit that they were the intended and inevitable consequences of hawkish US foreign policy in the 1980s. Even more foolish was the disastrous inference drawn from this conceit that democratic "regime change" could be replicated at will whenever and wherever a US administration so decided.
I found it easily intelligible, but then I was taught the phrase "not even wrong" in early youth, as I work in the same field as the person who first said it.
An argument that is "not even wrong" does not require any work of refutation, whereas one that is "wrong" does; I think that's what Freddie's use of "just" means.
When I was in third grade, we had to write a "paper" that began with this prompt: "In the future, I want...." One of my classmates wrote, "In the future, I want a future" -- that's all, while the rest of his went on about having families, homes, cars, snowmobiles, etc. I remember it because I thought it was brilliant, and wished I'd come up with it. I also think it provides a suitable "end" or purpose of history: a history that has a future, that has legs, that resists and defeats entropy. A history that ends with our extinction, while almost certainly true, gets us nowhere, in my opinion. Seems to me we need to make the Jamesian leap.
I feel like I was lucky to live through the period where we were comfortably smug enough that a concept like The End of History actually made sense to us (and I really do remember feeling like that was true, when I was younger - I even vividly remember saying something quite similar to a friend in high school, before I had even heard of the book).
But conversely - I also feel quite lucky to live through a time where it seems more obvious how truly arrogant and naive we were to believe that.
Because while change is often unsettling and far too interesting, this is both absolutely true and ultimately what makes life worth living:
"The entire sweep of human experience tells us that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable; not just change at the level of details, but changes to the basic fabric of the system."
For once me and deBoer are philosophically aligned. Old Testament has a lot of prophecies that clearly talk about events that are unimaginable from our current perspective. Change is inevitable.
At the start of the 20th century people thought of energy in terms of oil, coal, wood, etc. Then Einstein comes up with e=mc2 and within 40 years we have a bomb and a decade later reactors producing quantities of energy unimagined in 1900.
Things can change fast in physics. Same with socio-economic orders.
Fukuyama's going to look in a hundred years about how Olaf Stapledon looks today.
Siriusly
People have been dunking on Fukuyama since I was in college in the 90s, but once you start to grapple with his thesis it’s really hard to argue against. After the financial crisis of the oil shocks in the 70s and the Volker shock in the 80s, there was no serious challenge to liberal capitalist democracy. In the 60s & 70s, there were mainstream political parties that sought to move past capitalism, there is no equivalent now. As Thatcher put it, there is no alternative. In all Western democracies, all of the parties accept this, so the debate has shifted to culture wars, where the left/right split doesn’t make much sense.
It’s not my original thought (I’m paraphrasing the Bungacast hosts here), but the neoliberal consensus is breaking down. However, there is still no indication of a counter force to neoliberal capitalism. This doesn’t mean that history in the Hegelian/Marxist sense has restarted, but rather that we are at the End of the End of History.
We see this culturally as well. Nobody is offering utopian visions of change. We are obsessed with apocalyptic fiction, because in the words of Mark Fisher “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Nobody is writing the future history of a post-capitalist society. Dismissing Fukuyama is just cope, we need to reckon with how stunningly durable his thesis is
That’s not entirely true. The singularity people are optimists. Except for the ones who think the AI will replace us with paperclips.
I grew up in a Marxist leaning family. What I realised from reading Marx is that most of the problems he had with capitalism (see alienation, commodification etc) were problems of modern society. Marx left the form of the communist society open of course, so he can’t be falsified, but most of his followers were pro worker or state appropriation of enterprise. Neither of which solves much or changes much of the society we live in. It’s still industrial, still growth orientated, still environmentally destructive without some kind of intervention. The USSR was all of these and so is China.
I mostly agree with your statement, but I don’t see how that disproves Fukuyama’s thesis. It just reinforces the idea that there is no alternative, existent or imagined
Oh I just went on a rant. The reply to you was really the first sentence.
I don't have anything to add to your content here, except to say that I love Michael Hobbes's two podcasts, Maintenance Phase and If Books Could Kill, but my god he is an insufferably smug motherfucker. He's unbearable. I feel like I can only tolerate him because he is smart, and at least on Maintenance Phase, I love his co-host, Aubrey Gordon. Can't say as much about Books, except I like the concept and their takedowns can be really interesting. But overall, yeah, Hobbes seems like the kind of guy you would desperately try to get away from at a party while he talks your ear off about how smart he is.
Forever is a long time. It requires quite some conceit and hefty recency bias to believe that the current order is the apex iteration of all time, for all time. As well as that it applies to everyone.....even with the many many in many parts who don’t currently subscribe to the social structure that we have....and that’s just today, nvm tmr.
Fukuyama's thesis shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. His point isn't that no political order could ever succeed liberalism. He's saying that any political order that does will represent a reaction or regression with respect to liberal-democracy.
The success of the Chinese system of Marxist-Leninist State Capitalism is the only real challenger to liberal-democracy still. It remains to be seen whether the system is replicable outside of China at any scale. The other challengers are manifest failures (Islamism) or else Bonapartist distortions within liberal-democracy itself (Putin, Erdogan, Modi). These latter aren't really challenger systems yet, they're perversions of the dominant liberal-democratic framework, and they all still have to borrow liberal-democratic legitimations of authority.
Could Fukuyama turn out to be wrong in the future? Well duh. Anyone could turn out to be wrong in the future. That's how the future works.
But right now, I wouldn't too easily dismiss the thesis that liberal-democracy, having defeated Socialism, still represents the highest attainment in the development of Freedom in History.
"His point isn't that no political order could ever succeed liberalism."
Then he shouldn't have given it such a misleading title.
"He's saying that any political order that does will represent a reaction or regression with respect to liberal-democracy."
Well that's a real nothingburger of a thesis!
Fukuyama can't be blamed for the poor reading comprehension skills of everyone else. The idea that he thought no historical events could occur after 1991 is just a silly strawman.
LOL! "The End of History" is a pretty comprehensible phrase, IMO.
Read the essay ffs
Feminism (and we can anchor among its beginnings Mary Wollestonecraft's 1792 "Vindication of the Rights of Women), gay rights, and abolitionism developed almost co-termenously in the 18th through 19th century.
They are largely the creation of what is now called "whiteness" and in effect, prtectorates of industrialization and Capitalism.
To me, fukuyama’s boomk The Origins of Political Order is almost a masterpiece, full of analysis and evidence and smart speculation.
But The End of History gets worse every day, he just missed how society would evolve in all the most important ways. His theories didn’t account for multinational institutions that would grow to overshadow the states themselves. Like most of the rest of us missed that china’s top down authority and civil obedience would give them certain advantages in a world of internet and large scale manipulation.
Multi national institutions existed when he wrote the essay. Same as now.
I don't think the growth of multinational institutions threatens Fukuyama's thesis at all. They represent the liberal part of liberal-democracy. They also express in a concrete form liberalism's universalist aspirations.
China's success and lack of liberalisation could threaten Fukuyama's thesis, but only if their system proves to be in some way universalizable in the way that liberal-democracy has proven itself. Small islands of resistance to liberal-democracy don't refute F's thesis that liberalism represents the highest stage in the development of freedom in history.
I never read the entire End of History, but did read Hegel and Kojeve, though long long ago. Definitely agree that Origins of Political Order is a better book. Both books are attempts to ground political analysis in an "anthropology". In End of History, it's Kojeve's "struggle for recognition" and the idea of EoH as I remember it is that the combination of welfare state capitalism and representative democracy is the most workable way to meet these psychic needs. In this framework, maybe the Chinese state capitalist system gives material advantages but less psychic satisfaction, so it will have a tendency to move toward democracy. The counter argument is - well what if Hegel and Kojeve are wrong? I read Political Order as retrenching to more modest claims using empirical anthropology with more historical grounding.
Saying liberal democracy is the end of history is like saying the Kansas City Chiefs will win the Superbowl every year til the end of time and that you have to become a fan of them even if they beat your team every time.
#gochiefs
Fukuyama wrote his original EoH article and book in the context of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR and the unravelling of Eastern Europe and Soviet communism. Some three decades after those events, it behoves us to recognise the significant contingent and sui generis elements of those events, and how foolish was the neoconservative conceit that they were the intended and inevitable consequences of hawkish US foreign policy in the 1980s. Even more foolish was the disastrous inference drawn from this conceit that democratic "regime change" could be replicated at will whenever and wherever a US administration so decided.
Fukuyama was idiotic back in the '90s, and, yes, still wrong now.
But, for the love of all things holy, your title isn't helping. The simple act of using one word multiple times like that makes it unintelligible.
I found it easily intelligible, but then I was taught the phrase "not even wrong" in early youth, as I work in the same field as the person who first said it.
It is actually odd. He says Fukuyama is wrong not “just” not even wrong. But the latter is more wrong than the former.
An argument that is "not even wrong" does not require any work of refutation, whereas one that is "wrong" does; I think that's what Freddie's use of "just" means.
When I was in third grade, we had to write a "paper" that began with this prompt: "In the future, I want...." One of my classmates wrote, "In the future, I want a future" -- that's all, while the rest of his went on about having families, homes, cars, snowmobiles, etc. I remember it because I thought it was brilliant, and wished I'd come up with it. I also think it provides a suitable "end" or purpose of history: a history that has a future, that has legs, that resists and defeats entropy. A history that ends with our extinction, while almost certainly true, gets us nowhere, in my opinion. Seems to me we need to make the Jamesian leap.
I feel like I was lucky to live through the period where we were comfortably smug enough that a concept like The End of History actually made sense to us (and I really do remember feeling like that was true, when I was younger - I even vividly remember saying something quite similar to a friend in high school, before I had even heard of the book).
But conversely - I also feel quite lucky to live through a time where it seems more obvious how truly arrogant and naive we were to believe that.
Because while change is often unsettling and far too interesting, this is both absolutely true and ultimately what makes life worth living:
"The entire sweep of human experience tells us that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable; not just change at the level of details, but changes to the basic fabric of the system."
It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
Neils Bohr or Yogi Berra? Debate rages!
"Neils Bohr or Yogi Berra?"
My theory is that both of them rode (separately) with the same cab driver, and stole it from the driver.
Works for me!
Does *every* sub stack author need to write the same piece on this book?
I'm in fact writing the opposite piece of two other essays on Substack, linked here.
For once me and deBoer are philosophically aligned. Old Testament has a lot of prophecies that clearly talk about events that are unimaginable from our current perspective. Change is inevitable.