A Defense of Fukuyama

The latest episode of If Books Could Kill — Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri’s podcast about the “airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds” — is dedicated to taking apart Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. On Twitter, I threatened to respond with a defense of the book and Fukuyama’s work more generally, and enough of you liked the tweet that, well, here we are.

I come to this as someone who used to be pretty disdainful of The End of History, particularly when I was in my early twenties and more attracted to the bleak visions of someone like John Gray. It helped that I had only read Fukuyama’s original essay about the end of history—and, of course, I had only read the essay looking for ammunition to dismiss what I considered an obviously risible thesis. So I never really knew what, exactly, I was dismissing.

But more recently I’ve started to get a little interested in Hegelianism, and so about a year and a half ago I found myself finally listening to the audiobook version of The End of History and the Last Man. Contra what you’ll hear if you listen to the If Books Could Kill episode, I found Fukuyama’s style surprisingly accessible, especially given the heady subject matter he tackles. His primary influences — Hegel and Alexandre Kojève — can be pretty abstruse, but Fukuyama does a good job of articulating the broad outlines of their philosophies.

I’ve since chased The End of History with Fukuyama’s more recent The Origins of Political Order. By the end of that one, I was close to fully Fukuyama-pilled.1 But since we’re here to talk about The End of History, let’s talk about the end of history.

The most common misconception about The End of History — one I held before I read The End of History and one that, unfortunately, Hobbes and Shamshiri repeat in If Books Could Kill — has to do with what Fukuyama means by the end of history. He’s not talking about its chronological end; he’s using “end” here to mean something more like a motivating force. He’s talking about the object of history, not the conclusion of history. In other words, he’s saying that political history is progressive or teleological; baked into the logic of history is a sliding scale of sorts by which we can judge political development. Political development at its most advanced resolves into a stable, liberal democratic order with a mixed economy. In Origins, Fukuyama calls this “getting to Denmark.”2

But political development as Fukuyama conceives of it doesn’t follow a linear trajectory; it’s not inevitable (except, maybe, on a very long timeline) and it certainly isn’t irreversible. Political development is instead a messy, halting, and highly contingent process. And Fukuyama acknowledges the very real possibility that liberal democracies could backslide. In The End of History, he writes:

Fukuyama wrote The End of History at a time when liberal democracy was emerging triumphant from an exceptionally blood century. By the early 1990s, fascism and Communism had both collapsed as global threats; formerly fascist and Communist countries were adopting liberal democratic institutions with varying degrees of success. Decolonization is also an important part of this story; for one thing, it led to the establishment of the world’s most populous democracy.3 More countries were at least nominal liberal democracies than at any point in human history.

I think this context helps to explain why so many people think Fukuyama predicted democracy’s swift inexorable march across the remainder of the globe. It also, I think, partially explains why so many people ding Fukuyama for having an excessively sunny view of existing liberal democracies. Hobbes and Shamshiri correctly point out that the United States has never fully lived up to the liberal democratic promise.

But that isn’t the fatal blow to Fukuyama’s argument that they seem to think it is. Whether you think America has ever been a full liberal democracy (whatever that means to you), the country is indisputably governed by a number of liberal democratic political institutions. And there’s a deep vein of liberal democratic thought in the country’s political tradition; indeed, successful protest movements have gained traction in part by invoking this tradition.4 Even Hobbes and Shamshiri seem to take for granted that getting to Denmark should be the end (read: objective) of political struggle.

That’s an important concession, whether they realize it or not. But it’s not a surprising one. The progressive left has largely metabolized something very much like Fukuyama’s central premise — it’s right there in the word progressive. Rejecting that premise is certainly possible, but it leads you toward some pretty radical conclusions.

As I see it, to reject Fukuyama’s argument wholesale, you need to adopt one of three contrary stances. The first is a sort of radical agnosticism about the optimal political order: maybe liberal democracy is the best one, but maybe it isn’t, and there’s no criteria by which we can figure that out conclusively. The second option is to adopt a posture of radical moral relativism: sure, liberal democracy is all well and good for us, but the optimal form of government in other places may well be, for example, authoritarian theocracy. The third option is to accept the teleological view of political development, but argue it resolves at a different end of history: say, fully automated luxury space Communism.

There are plenty of intelligent critics who adopt one of these three positions. I mentioned John Gray above; I view him as one of the most perspicacious modern critics of a progressive philosophy of history. But Gray understands the profound, and profoundly discomfiting, implications of his own position.5 Lots of other Fukuyama critics want to have it both ways, ragging on The End of History while clinging to the belief that there’s such a thing as political progress, and that it points in the direction of Denmark.

Okay, you might say, so maybe Fukuyama’s not wrong exactly. But that’s only because he’s not making any provably true or false claims. All of this high-minded bloviating about the arc of history is completely unfalsifiable. On the one hand it’s not wrong; on the other hand, it’s not even wrong.

To which I say: Look, either you think philosophizing is a socially useful human endeavor or you don’t. I for one don’t subscribe to the vulgar positivism that says all propositions are either empirically falsifiable or totally meaningless. Adopting that stance would cut off our access to vast stores of accumulated wisdom and culture. It would constrict our range of vision and makes us infinitely poorer. More to the point, I don’t think it help us see the world more clearly; it would just take away some of the tools we have for assessing our own premises.

The End of History is not a vision of the future but a frame for helping us understand the present. On that score, I think it performs pretty well. American and European politics in the post-neoliberal era start to make more sense if you think we’re currently suffering from a long post-historical hangover. Liberal democracy does not seem to be working as it should, but no credible replacements have presented themselves. Many parliamentary democracies have entered a period of prolonged deadlock: the existing parties have lost their legitimacy, but popular alternatives have yet to emerge.

Liberal democracy’s enemies to its left and right aren’t faring much better. The illiberal right in particular has had some success in undermining the existing order, but it has struggled to articulate a new vision. The Trump Administration viewed the state as little more than a pocket to be strip mined by private interests; post-liberal intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin are able to simulate novelty by scraping together bits and bobs of long discredited pre-liberal theories, but they’ve failed to offer anything like a compelling post-liberal framework. Even the label “post-liberalism” is something of an intellectual IOU. Thus our options appear to be the status quo, some renewed and revitalized version of liberal democracy (my own preferred outcome), or a kind of cynical cosplay in the garb of dead ideologies.

Maybe you think post-liberalism is coming; it just has yet to be born. I guess that’s possible. But I’m inclined to side with Fukuyama when he says liberal democracy is about as good as it gets. I don’t think that’s a naive or panglossian position; if anything, it’s probably a bit of a letdown to some of you. Still, if liberal democracy is the best we’ve got — for all its prosaic eccentricities and imperfections — it’s worth preserving. What’s more, it’s worth improving.