The End of History and the Last Man

Reading Francis Fukuyama's book (in the 2020 reissue of this 1992 published book) is an exercise in head-scratching perplexity and fist-on-wall-banging frustration.

Making Hegel's thymos (the Homeric/Platonic quest for status and recognition) a motor for historical change is certainly an improvement over basing your theories of history on that poor, selfish, solitary creature, homo economicus, with its purely consumerist motivations.

But that's like going from crass to merely poor.

In his 1975 book, "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis", Edward O. Wilson expressed a strong belief that the future of social sciences lay in their integration with evolutionary biology, specifically through the lens of sociobiology. Surely Fukuyama might have noticed this? We have advanced our understanding of human nature quite a bit since Hegel, who was writing only twenty years after the French Revolution of 1789.

Still, as a clear and coherent philosophical introduction to Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche and Hegel, Fukuyama's chosen intellectual resources, this book could hardly be bettered.

Such a clever man, Mr Fukuyama. One could almost believe his attempts to stay Overton Window-adjacent might be… Straussian?

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Substantively, Fukuyama argues that capitalism - in its ‘bourgeois democratic‘ form - is truly the stable endpoint in human social organisation (an attractor in dynamical systems jargon). In his 2020 afterword he observes that militant Islam and system-busting populism have, despite widespread fears, not proven to be existential threats to the democratic order.

I am sure he is correct: a strong civil society composed of decentralised and fragmented economic elites welcomes a relatively weak, malleable centre of governance - one which won't get out of control.

Russia and China are examples of strongly-autonomous state structures pursuing nationalistic (thymos-driven?) projects to the detriment of their economic interests. It's tough being an entrepreneur in such countries: avoiding being 'disappeared' or worse.

The real (and long-term) threats to Fukuyama’s somewhat optimistic trajectory are twofold: (i) the massive expulsion of the mass of the population from social and economic life by elite-owned total automation; (ii) the entrenchment of a hereditary elite class by genomic engineering - a tech-constructed version of India's caste system (still covertly operational).

I would like to know more about Fukuyama's views on total automation. Meanwhile, his take on bioengineering, “Our Posthuman Future”, is on my reading stack.

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The short-term stability of 'liberal democracy' has its limits. It is worth emphasising just how ultimately fearful capitalist elites are of the masses - and how little they really care for their welfare. Unlike the lords of feudalism, economic and state-apparatus elites are not armed and are relatively few in numbers.

The military, not recruited from the elite in their mass, is not necessarily to be relied upon.

Fukuyama observes in the final chapters of his book just how much degradation and contempt politicians have to suck up in managing and defusing disgruntled mass movements and their cynical demagogue leaders.

It's therefore often the case that key government figures are not themselves socially or economically members of the top elite. No recent British leaders have been scions of the billionaire class; Trump is viewed with disdain by the truly well-off.

As in Tom Wolfe's essay, "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers", politics is theatre and the real stuff happens elsewhere. That's what Fukuyama's ideal of liberal democracy ultimately comes down to.