Last Man to Lords

Last Man to Lords

In 1992, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a seminal book The End of History and the Last Man. It was an extension of a key piece he wrote in The National Interest in 1989. Here is a link to the latter article, "The End of History?":

http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm

For Fukuyama, the context was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the beginning of the end for communist states from East Germany to the Soviet Union, and the unleashing of processes of German unification. In both works, Fukuyama made this stunning hypothesis: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

In short, Fukuyama, like Marx and Hegel before him, saw 1989 as a key event in the "end of history" and universal triumph of liberalism. In this blog post, I challenge Fukuyama's Last Man thesis and show how alternative political "lords" have sought to challenge liberalism's post-Cold War triumphalism in different parts of the globe. These alternative ideological "lords" include both secular and religious ideologies: ecologism, Islamism, authoritarian regimes of various ideological hues, ultra-nationalism, neo-fascism, and Traditionalism. Liberalism is Fukuyama's "lord," as well as the lord of the liberal democratic nations of the West. While it is true that processes of globalization and political unification have adopted liberal institutional norms (World Trade Organization, European Union, United Nations, International Criminal Court, etc.), we might re-evaluate Fukuyama's claim that liberalism will sweep the planet. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone point to the difficulties in imposing a liberal model on regions of the globe without a history of democratic governance.

In fairness to Fukuyama, liberalism has become the reigning hegemonic ideology in the Western democracies. Fascism and Bolshevik communism have been definitively defeated, while ideological tension has declined in the post-World War Two era. The growth of Eurocommunist parties and Third Way Labour formulations from Italy to Britain suggested that even radical, anti-capitalist leftists eventually rejected violence and sought a gradual parliamentary avenue towards socialism. The radicalism that remains in the West revolves around the extreme right-wing political parties, which have stolen the anti-capitalist mantra from the left in the context of welfare chauvinism (i.e., welfare benefits to those that belong to "our" nation biologically and culturally). Given the grave threats to environmental health on a planetary scale, the ecological parties should be a greater political force throughout Europe. Yet, they cannot come to power in one EU country, except as part of a broader coalition like in Germany.

Moreover, it is true that dictatorships or non-democratic regimes fell in numerous countries from Chile and Argentina to apartheid South Africa. We have seen a flowering of elections around the world and well over 100 countries have substantive, representative democracy. It is also true that there is growing global homogenization in terms of a world capitalist economy with its attendant institutions from G-20 to IMF, the spread of Western lifestyles, the Internet, and even common protectionist and bailout responses to the financial crisis. In these respects, Fukuyama was correct.

Yet, history will not end in terms of its grand political struggles. The essence of politics revolves around friends and foes, argued Carl Schmitt. Liberalism, Schmitt opined, sought to abolish the friend-foe distinction through a fixation on economic or technical questions. But try as liberal societies do to banish conflict and politics, they cannot for any length of time. 9-11, radical Islamism from Iran to Algeria, a resurgent authoritarian Russia, communist China, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the success of leftists Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales in Venezuela and Bolivia all point to the reality that liberalism still has foes. There are alternative political lords that radically reject the liberal, individualist, and egalitarian ethos of liberalism. Tragic genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda also undermined Fukuyama's end of history position.

For Fukuyama, as for Nietzsche before him, the "last man" was the liberal man (woman): An equal among equals with "neither striving nor aspiration." The "last man" is satisfied with peace and prosperity, as well as petty material imperatives. The "last man" does not dream to re-make the world, history, and political institutions. The "last man" kills heroic, aristocratic instincts. Is Fukuyama really just worried that we will one day all be liberals addicted to our technologies and what Marcuse called a "one-dimensional" materialist project? If this is so, then perhaps Fukuyama understands that the end of history for him is a push to re-start history for all those that fundamentally reject liberalism.

Tamir Bar-On