Lessons in Defending Liberalism
Thirty years after it appeared, Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" remains a model and inspiration
Writing a serious book of nonfiction is never easy. But it takes rare talent and inspiration to write one that remains worth reading and thinking with decades after publication.
Francis Fukuyama has written several books that approach this high standard, but the one that has indisputably attained it is his first, The End of History and the Last Man, published to much fanfare and controversy 30 years ago.
I never fully accepted the book’s thesis—did anyone?—but Fukuyama advanced it with such learning, elegance, and force of argument that it immediately became an enduring challenge to my thinking, like a splinter lodged in my mind, forcing me to question and continually rethink my political judgments.
This was true through the relative placidity of the post-Cold War 1990s. It continued to be the case when that decade of unchallenged American supremacy came to a shocking halt with the September 11 attacks and the Global War on Terror that followed. It persisted through the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. And it’s still there now in the background, amidst the populist challenge to liberalism that has roiled politics across a good part of the world over the past decade.
It’s those recent developments that have me thinking deeply about the book yet again—above all because Fukuyama has written a short new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, that returns to many of the same themes as the earlier one in light of the latter-day rise of the antiliberal left and right.
Liberalism’s Diminished Ambition
Interested in how Fukuyama’s views have evolved since 1992, I listened to and enjoyed his recent podcast conversation with Andrew Sullivan. At one point, early on, Sullivan notes that efforts to delineate liberalism’s virtues have become more modest and “pragmatic” over the last few decades, abandoning the more ambitiously comprehensive defenses that were once more common. (Sullivan doesn’t name it here, but The End of History is in many ways the gold standard of those more ambitious defenses of liberalism.)
Fukuyama agrees with Sullivan’s observation, but then the conversation moves on to highlight various … pragmatic arguments in favor of liberalism. It protects individual rights. It fosters economic growth. It creates a ground for stability in pluralistic societies. People from poorer and more violent parts of the world vote with their feet by moving to liberal countries when they get the chance. And so forth.
Which is fine. It’s good to be reminded that liberalism is preferable to the alternatives in many respects. Yet Sullivan’s initial observation is both true and important—and it definitely applies to Fukuyama’s new book, which is filled with plenty of pragmatic wisdom about the relative virtues and strengths of liberalism but nonetheless falls far short of his early book’s sweeping ambition.
That ambition was nothing less than to claim that liberal democracy satisfies fundamental human longings so fully and completely that no competing form of government or socioeconomic arrangement would arise to pose a serious challenge to it. This was the (limited) sense in which Fukuyama believed history had come to an end in 1989: the drama or tension driving human history forward across millennia—the competition between rival comprehensive ideological systems over which one would do the best job of fulfilling us—had been resolved, and liberalism had prevailed.
Like I said, I never fully accepted the truth of this argument, but there was something necessary about it. It was an expression of extreme confidence in the goodness of liberalism, written at the moment of its decisive victory over Soviet communism, when it had just reached the apex of its global power and influence. Why not revive and revise the argument today to rally liberalism against its professed enemies?
Yet Fukuyama doesn’t do that in his new book, and also doesn’t explain why, or even take note of the diminished ambition. I can’t help but wonder why—just as I can’t restrain myself from speculating about the subterranean cultural connections between this greater degree of modesty and liberalism’s struggles today.
How to Get to the End of History
Fukuyama’s arguments in The End of History were extremely bold. The book contains a lot of pragmatic evidence of liberalism’s strengths, but its core argument goes beyond that, building mainly on observations found in Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and G.W.F. Hegel.
His focus in Plato is on psychology, and specifically the part of the soul the ancient philosopher described using the Greek word for spiritedness (thymos). Whereas desire is the part of the soul that longs for goods outside of the self (food, drink, sex, riches) and reason is the part that calculates the best way to get them, thymos describes something very different. It’s worth quoting Fukuyama at length on the concept:
…in addition to [desire and reason], human beings seek recognition of their own worth…. The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today’s popular language we would call “self-esteem.” The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos. It is like an innate sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger. Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride. The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.
The pivot to Hegel and “the historical process” at the end of this passage is crucial, because it is Fukuyama’s contention that Hegel shows that it is thymos and the longing for recognition that is responsible for driving history toward a terminus in the achievement of liberal democracy.1
Without getting too much into the weeds, Fukuyama suggests that the starkly hierarchical political systems that dominated European life from the ancient world on down through the early modern period sought to satisfy the desire for recognition among a tiny band of elites (wealthy landowners/aristocrats, warriors, priests, bishops, popes, and monarchs) who were recognized for their superiority, distinction, excellence, honor, or glory (megalothymia).
This obviously left most people’s thymos unfulfilled, which created a slowly building reservoir of resentment among the common people that was kept in check by elaborate norms, practices, and beliefs that justified the inequality. That perpetually wounded pride was one source of potential instability. But Fukuyama follows Hegel in claiming that there was another one at play as well: The elites who ran the show devoted their lives to winning the recognition of common people they didn’t respect as equals, which left the elites dissatisfied, too.
This two-front contradiction within aristocratic societies eventually issued in the French Revolution and the many revolutions that followed through the 19th and 20th centuries. These gave birth to a new form of political arrangement oriented toward the satisfaction of isothymia—the desire to be recognized as an equal by equals. This is accomplished by the construction of institutions based on equal rights and equal treatment under the rule of law, as well as by the norms that govern a free and open civil society.
Fukuyama argues that liberal-democratic egalitarianism fulfills the human desire for recognition far better than communist totalitarianism and other modern forms of tyranny, and in a way that leaves individuals fundamentally—one might even say spiritually—contented. On his reading, the West’s decisive triumph in the Cold War confirmed this thesis, but it was already suggested in Hegel’s writings nearly two centuries in the past.
The “Last Man” and his Enemies
One of the things that made Fukuyama’s book so fruitful for future thinking is that he built in a powerful objection to his own thesis, all but gave it the last word, and even included it in his title.
Friedrich Nietzsche insisted that to be fully human is to aspire to greatness. Hence the only people who would be thoroughly fulfilled by the egalitarian, economically prosperous existence offered by liberal democracy would be “the last man,” a creature who had embraced contentment in mediocrity and so stood on the verge of becoming subhuman.
In the Hegelian account Fukuyama laid out through much of the book, those within liberal democracies who feel this persistent aristocratic yearning will fulfill their outsized craving for recognition by running for elective office, or by becoming titans of industry—in contemporary terms, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.2
But Nietzsche would have scoffed at this suggestion, rolling his eyes at the thought of satisfying megalothymia by winning votes from the mediocre masses or by giving in to the bourgeois aspirations behind most entrepreneurial ambition. True greatness aims for more than building the biggest department store in human history or buying a social media platform and tweeting out modestly clever insults for the sake of accumulating “likes.” (Nietzsche might have been somewhat more impressed by the aspiration to colonize Mars.)
Fukuyama closed his book by wondering whether such discontent with the end of history might inspire the most ambitious among us to begin looking for loftier goals than can be achieved within the bounds of peaceful liberal-democratic life. Such discontent could well inspire attacks on liberal democracy itself and the waging of “immense wars of the spirit,” just for the sake of giving potentially great men an occasion to actualize their greatness in acts of valor. The book thus ends with a prediction of a possible future in which history restarts, initiated by those bored by the peace, prosperity, and equal rights offered by liberal democracy.
Fulfilling (and Taming) the Desire for Recognition Today
With 30 years of hindsight, I think Fukuyama’s decision to focus on the desire for recognition as a decisive factor in politics and human affairs more broadly has been thoroughly vindicated. Whether he was right to treat it as a motor of universal and unidirectional historical development toward liberalism is another matter.
For one thing, I doubt the most potent threats to liberal democracy today flow from would-be Nietzschean Supermen plunging the world into war. I think it’s more accurate to say that our politics and culture are increasingly roiled by the demand for different forms of recognition by the members of a wide array of groups. (Fukuyama explored this issue himself in his 2018 book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.)
On the cultural left, groups claiming to speak for blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays, transgender people, the disabled, and others demand not just equal political rights but what might be called positive affirmation. Precisely what kind of affirmation each group seeks can vary quite a lot. Sometimes it’s verbal acknowledgement of past and present injustices along with efforts at institutional or legal reform and gestures of expiation (reparations, for instance). At other times it’s the adjustment of norms to “center” formerly excluded groups. (The insistence that society reject the “gender binary” and affirm its radical fluidity is an obvious example.)
On the right, meanwhile, voters who lack a college education and live outside of major metropolitan areas increasingly feel dishonored by the highly educated urban progressives who play a prominent role in running many elite institutions, including the Democratic Party. Donald Trump tapped into and intensified this feeling of resentment, and now the demand for greater deference and respect appears to have taken on a life of its own within the Republican Party.
Finally, the hard-edged nationalism, including hostility to immigration and free trade, associated with right-wing resentments is itself, on one level at least, an expression of the desire for recognition on behalf of the political community as a whole.
None of these groups/movements is satisfied with equality under the law (isothymia). All of them seek something like positive affirmation from everyone else in the polity (or those outside it in the case of nationalism). The problem is that sometimes this very demand by one group generates resentment and a demand for positive affirmation from other groups as recompense, which the first group doesn’t want to give. That can turn the desire for recognition into a zero-sum game among groups that shreds social cohesion.
The very fact that groups within liberal society appear to have become dissatisfied with enjoying “mere” equal rights directs our attention back to Hegel, who thought liberal democracy would satisfy the longing for recognition once and for all—in part because the longing itself would be transformed by reason through the historical process of winning those rights. The longing would be moderated, Hegel thought, with its expectations lowered so fulfillment could be found within liberal social life and political institutions that are freely constituted.
But what if that assumption was misplaced, based on unwarranted hopes for reason prevailing in human affairs? Or maybe it is unlikely to prevail automatically, through the movement of history, but must be actively inculcated through civic education—in families, schools, and the wider culture?
Whatever the case, this is the kind of thinking, and the level of thinking, we need to foster if we hope to formulate a cogent response to those rising up around the world to express their discontents with life under liberalism. For that task, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man still serves as a model and an inspiration.
Fukuyama’s reading of Hegel is decisively influenced by the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève.
In his concluding chapter, Fukuyama included real-estate developer Donald Trump on a list of potentially dissatisfied businessmen.
Good summation of the there's laid out in the book. Thanks.