On Francis Fukuyama

Chris Hughes 50655 – Dissertation (809L3) – MA Social and Political Thought
Francis Fukuyama and

The End of History and the Last Man:
interpreting the thesis of history today
Contents
Dissertation:
1. The End of History and The Last Man: introducing the book (p.02)
2. Reconstructing the Mechanism (p.07)
3. The Development of Fukuyama's Views (p.16)
4. Hegel, Kojève, and the Struggle for Recognition (p.23)
5. “The Argument” (p.30)
6. Fukuyama, Neoconservatism, and US Foreign Policy (p.36)
7. Conflicting Themes (p.41)
8. Summaries, Reservations, Conclusions (p.42)
Endnotes (p.46)
[Appendix] Literature Review (p.55)
Bibliography (p.58)
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Francis Fukuyama and The End of History and the Last Man: interpreting the thesis of
history today
The essay is divided into eight sections. The first section introduces the themes of The End of
History and the Last Man (EHLM) – with its idea to renew the project of a Universal History of
humankind, as it is expounded in Part I. In the second section, where Part II of the book will be
explained, all the main aspects of the first 'motor' of history – which Fukuyama calls the
'Mechanism' – will be introduced. In the third section, we see how the development of Fukuyama's
views – through the policy recommendations he gives on state building and development –
continues the argument of the Mechanism, re-enforcing the dominance of the Mechanism as the
fundamental explanatory logic of history in the interpretation of EHLM. The third section then
returns to Part III of EHLM, and investigates the influence of Alexandre Kojève on Fukuyama, as
Fukuyama outlines the struggle for recognition (as the alternative 'motor' of history). The fourth
section brings the main argument of the essay together, attempting to fully explain and defend it:
the argument is that EHLM, containing many confusions, is plagued by an ambiguity at the centre
of the explanation of the movement of history: the result being that, over time, the 'Mechanism'
becomes reasserted over the struggle for recognition in order to 'cover up' the ambiguity. In the fifth
section, Fukuyama's review of the neoconservative movement in After the Neocons, and his views
on foreign policy, are explored, and one possible contributing reason for the shift in argument in
EHLM is suggested. This leads to a shorter segment, which touches very briefly on the conflicting
or alternate themes in Fukuyama interpretation, and then finally, the sixth section is a conclusion.
The End of History and The Last Man: introducing the book
Fukuyama introduces the subject of the book as a question. He asks, “Whether, at the end of the
twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History
of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy?” 1. The
answer he arrives at it 'yes'', and for “two separate reasons”: “One has to do with economics, and
the other has to do with what is termed the 'struggle for recognition'”2 (this latter reason can be set
aside for now). Fukuyama claims that “liberal democracy remains the only coherent political
aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe”. Assuming this is true, this
needs explanation. After Part I of the book, which tries to justify the re-raising of this typically 19th
century question again today, in Part II Fukuyama proposes an initial answer by “attempting to use
modern natural science as a regulator or mechanism to explain the directionality and coherence of
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History”3, which becomes the first 'motor' of history.
In the first chapter, Fukuyama examines the overriding political 'mood' at the end of the 20th
century, which he labels our 'pessimism'. “The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of
us into deep historical pessimists”4. This pessimistic mood – and it appears to signify principally a
pessimism about the progress of history – has a deep grounding in the tragic events of the 20th
century. These tragic events not only put into question the fact of progress, but cut deep down into
the very understanding of modernity itself. There is a resulting “intellectual crisis of Western
rationalism”5, which is another cause of out pessimistic mood6.
In the 19th century, Fukuyama claims, historical progress was universally believed in, and this
progress was taken to mean that humanity would advance toward liberal democracy (and, in what
was regarded as exactly the same thing, an advancement to a more rational set of political
institutions.) But, with the coming of the Cold War, the world was split in two by the monumental
ideological conflict between Soviet Communism and American capitalism, and Fukuyama believes
this world conflict was responsible for throwing into radical doubt the certainty of progress that
once existed. A victory for communism would discredit the idea of progress because it would signal
both a defeat for democracy and for rationalism. Fukuyama discusses the belief of the foreign
policy 'realists' – principally among them Henry Kissinger – that the US should learn to
accommodate itself to the Soviet Union as a permanent fixture of the international scene, and he
interprets this as a lack of confidence in any future world progress7. Thus, our 'pessimism'.
In the next 3 chapters of Part I, Fukuyama wants to show that today our pessimism may be
unwarranted: “despite the powerful reasons given us by our experience in the first half of this [20th]
century, events in its second half have been pointing in a very different and unexpected direction”8.
With the shadow of the Cold War lifted, and as humanity drew toward the new millennium, “the
world as a whole has not revealed new evils, but has gotten better in certain distinct ways”. The
communist totalitarian experiment – which represented an attempt, in Fukuyama's view, to bypass
the “natural and organic processes” of “social evolution” with “large-scale social engineering”, as
the state dictated to the society below through “a series of forced evolutions from above”9 – failed.
(Communism was not the culmination of history, but a failure to play by it.) And neither was
communism's failure a stand-alone event, but rather the culmination of a larger late-20th century
pattern of the collapse of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes (this phenomenon being summed
up by Fukuyama through what he calls the 'weakness of strong states'10). The end of communism
was the consummation of a gradual historical pattern, a pattern of all the remaining alternatives to
the Western liberal democratic idea being thoroughly discredited.
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One might then argue that the thesis of EHLM can only really make sense at the occasion of the
end of the Cold War. In the book's introduction, Fukuyama himself is only prepared to admit
sheepishly that EHLM is “informed by recent world events”, but insists that it is “least of all” an
“account of the end of the Cold War”11. While it is obviously true that a return to the question of
whether there is progress in history does not need to be prompted by any current political event,
and might arise from a kind of simple philosophical curiosity, this is not persuasive in Fukuyama's
case. It would also ignore the reality that the end of the Cold War was crucial in the discrediting of
the totalitarian alternative, which lays the empirical groundwork for the account of the forward
march of liberal democracy itself. Fukuyama explicitly puts it in these terms: “As mankind
approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central
planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal
validity: liberal democracy...”12
Fukuyama's main empirical claim, which leaves the rest of EHLM to justify its philosophical
significance, is simply that liberal democracies are more numerous today than in any time in
history. In 'The Worldwide Liberal Revolution' he sets out a table of countries13 which is designed to
provide striking, immediate visual demonstration of the global progressive trend toward liberal
democracy he identifies. So far, so good. But for the purposes of his table of democracies,
Fukuyama adopts a “strictly formal definition of democracy”14. A country in the table is classified as
democratic if it “grants its people the right to choose their own government through periodic,
secret-ballot, multi-party elections, on the the basis of universal and equal suffrage”15. Such a
formal judgement is used to avoid unnecessary ambiguity and controversy – “once we move away
from a formal definition, we open up the possibility of infinite abuse of the democratic principle” – a
point not without its merits. Yet this judgement leaves Fukuyama open to two main challenges: first,
that the definition is so formal that it ignores all the significant differences between democracies,
erroneously equating countries and political systems which are too diverse to be classified together
as examples of the same liberal democratic category. From this angle, Fukuyama could only
defend the strong trend toward liberal democracy by viewing the world from so far out into space
as to make any meaningful judgement impossible; and second, that such a formal definition does
an injustice to the good name of democracy, which should be far more substantive.
And it is perhaps too easy to criticise the way Fukuyama so guiltlessly lifts his formal liberal
democratic criteria from the history of the United States. The list of liberal rights is chosen because
it is “compatible with those contained in the American Bill of Rights”16, and we also see Fukuyama
announcing that “before 1776 there was not a single one [democracy] in existence anywhere in the
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world”17. Democracy itself originates with Jefferson's 1776 declaration. But even with a single
constitution running continuously from 1790 to 1900 (any many amendments), this taxonomy is in
danger of ignoring the vast social changes that took place in the US between those dates – that is,
even within one society, let alone across the 61 vastly disparate countries Fukuyama is interested
in for that time period.
Yet while these criticisms – which have been advanced frequently, by multiple critics18 – do hit their
mark, Fukuyama can be defended to some extent. If we examine Fukuyama's characterization of
liberalism again closely, we may be able to delineate the thread that joins all these countries
together – or at least, discover the common horizon that all these countries share (or will share
very soon in the future). Liberalism must, in its “economic manifestation”, include “the recognition
of the right of free economic activity and economic exchange based on private property and
markets”19. And so, we might see it that while there are great differences in the interpretations of
economic liberalism – “ranging from the United States of Ronald Reagan and the Britain of
Margaret Thatcher to the social democracies of Scandinavia and the relatively statist regimes in
Mexico and India” – they are all nevertheless united in being part of one system, global
capitalism. (Fukuyama says it was more useful in designing this categorization to “look at what
attitude the state takes in principle to the legitimacy of private property and private enterprise”,
rather than the degree of its interference in the free market per se.) This may enable us to
acknowledge the vast differences between countries while recognising what binds them together,
and so means the universal concept 'liberal democracy' can be applied.
We must also keep in mind that Fukuyama is here concerned with systematic political types, which
are rationalistic and can be universally applied: the large cultural differences between nations (very
far from being ignored by Fukuyama anyway) are not really the point. And this observation also
goes some way to dealing with the criticism of Fukuyama's neglect of a more substantive vision for
democracy. Fukuyama goes on to write a great deal about the strong communities needed for a
working, healthy democracy, so he cannot be said to be blind to the issue. The problem is rather
that the substantive ideal – this criticism almost largely one advanced by socialists, for whom
socialism is precisely this substantive ideal20 – has been discredited as a universal, systematic
alternative. All that remains are the 'subpolitical' conditions of 'culture', community, moral
understandings, group solidarity etc., greatly divergent across the swathe of all different nations,
which can still improve, but only within the framework of liberal democracy (and, as we have seen,
within capitalism).
Just as impressive as the growth in the number of democracies is the fact that democracy has
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“broken out of its original beachhead in Western Europe and North America”, and has made
“significant inroads in other parts of the world that do not share the political, religious, and cultural
traditions of those areas”21. This strongly suggests the truly universal character of liberal
democracy, proving its appeal to all the world's populations. But this cannot be taken as meaning
that Fukuyama denies that these democratizing countries are having to face great challenges.
Indeed, he is aware that a few countries have lost their democracy, and knows a few of the
recently emerged democracies are likely to again collapse into dictatorship22. He is defiant even in
the face of this realization: “the fact that there will be setbacks and disappointments in the process
of democratization, or that not every market economy will prosper, should not distract us from the
larger pattern that is emerging in human history”23. So then, how can Fukuyama square his thesis
with the evidence of that some countries are 'going backward'?
It is important to understand the argument at this point. The empirical demonstration is supposed
to lend weight to the idea that we need to return to the question of the philosophy of history, and is
provide the support for doing so. But the argument is not just about the existence of liberal
democratic regimes today; this is, in a sense, only one side of the dual character of Fukuyama's
reasoning. For Fukuyama, what is emerging victorious is “not so much liberal practice, as the
liberal idea.”24 The advance of democracy across the world will not be uniform, it will involve many
setbacks and suffer many cycles of bad fortune, its final victory in every country is by no needs
certain (perhaps not even likely). But the horizon of each nation has been set. There is now “no
ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy.”
History has decided upon its final and universal standard by which all will be judged. The idea of a
Universal History is thus not reducible to mere description, but contains a normative dimension
along with the empirical. Since many had misunderstood the point, Fukuyama makes this dualism
explicit when he returns to the subject some years later.25 Fukuyama spells it out: “My book
consists of two distinct arguments : the first an empirical evaluation of various events, both
contemporary and historical, and the second a 'normative' or theoretical one that seeks to evaluate
contemporary liberal democracy.”
The Universal History project consists of an attempt to elucidate universal logics or mechanisms
for explaining the movement of history, but also needs certain theoretical criteria for judging that
the resulting directionality is also, by at least some measure, an improvement. By inscribing these
criteria within history, one can judge both the point at which the best socio-political regime has
been attained, and so – and this necessarily follows – one can judge when history has reached its
end. (Note this is 'end' in both senses – as terminus, and as goal.) History is a narrative, we might
even say: history harbours goals, present in germ at its origin, and progressively realises them.
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“History is a process with a subject (humanity) and a goal (the universal-homogeneous state),
whose developments are to be explained and evaluated, in a retrospective benefaction, by their
contribution to the realisation of that goal.”26
Fukuyama situates his own efforts at the feet of the giants of the tradition, Kant and Hegel. The
question that Kant put to Universal History was “whether, when taking all societies and all times
into account, there was overall reason to expect general human progress.”27 For Hegel, the history
of the world was the progressive realisation of the consciousness of freedom. It meant the joining
together of the moral and historical: the idea of freedom, playing itself out in history, becomes
embodied in human institutions at its end.28 Fukuyama wants to take up the Hegelian mantle.
Yet there is a sense that, today, it is not the feeling of progress, directionality or movement in our
societies that interests us in the question of History, as it did for these two giant occupants of the
19th century. Instead, it seems like it is some opaque feeling of 'ending' that has made us curious
about what it was that ended in the first place. If we look around us today, we “cannot picture to
ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better.”.
While other ages have thought of themselves, with exhilaration, as being at the cutting edge of
history's wave, today we are “exhausted” from “the pursuit of alternatives.”29 We are now at a
melancholic point in which “there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a
fundamental improvement over our current order.”30
In summary: Fukuyama has diagnosed the fact that, as we approached the new century, our mood
was still very much dominated by a historical 20th century pessimism (that is, primarily, an early 20th
century pessimism.) With the end of the Cold War, we should see that this mood is now misplaced:
the collapse of communism had the effect of shinning light back onto the previously missed
positive trend of the discrediting of authoritarian and totalitarian alternatives to liberal democracy.
Now, as only one contender is left standing, the question of History can be asked anew; we will
have to “reconsider once again whether it is possible to write a Universal History of mankind”31.
Reconstructing the Mechanism
The first proposed formulation for the process of History – which we will shorten to simply 'the
Mechanism', as Fukuyama does – tries to reconstruct a set of foundational historical causes by
which the directionality of history can be explained. Fukuyama begins by looking into the
intellectual origins of the idea of a Universal History (chapter 5) for clues. After initially looking at
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what might be described as the themes of philosophy of history in embryo in idea of Christian
redemption, Fukuyama is interested in the first, secular attempts at Universal History, which he
traces back to the 16th century and the influence of Galileo, Bacon and Descartes. The first
attempts to write a Universal History were grounded in the emergence of (what has now become
known simply as) the 'scientific method'. This new science was crucial for two reasons. First, it
meant it was possible to accumulate knowledge of the external world. This science does not as
such set out on the recovering of isolated 'facts', but to look for a set of coherent and universal
laws that would explain the uniformity of nature. This required it to attain such levels of rigour and
discipline that later generations could rely upon the discoveries of earlier ones, and push ahead
with new discoveries, etc. This meant that scientific knowledge could be directional and
progressive32. Second, science is inherently practical, in the sense that the thirst for scientific
knowledge comes primarily from the desire to control and master nature. Science now meant that
humanity could significantly dominate its environment: man, no longer just another part of nature,
governed by its laws, could manipulate nature to his will.
So, in chapter 6, after repeating his claims about modern science – that it is the only social
endeavour which is “by common consensus unequivocally cumulative and directional”33 –
Fukuyama links it with the directionality of history – “once discovered, the progressive and
continuous unfolding of modern natural science has provided a directional Mechanism for
explaining many aspects of subsequent historical development”34. Fukuyama then outlines two
basic ways in which modern natural science produces such directional and universal history. The
first is through military competition. As a consequence of international rivalry, states are pressured
into restructuring their social systems. The point is intuitive: modern natural science confers a
decisive military advantage on those nations that can utilize it most effectively, which they can do
through the development, production and deployment of technology. In the almost Hobbesian
state-of-nature that characterizes the international state system, any nation that wants to survive –
to “maintain its political autonomy” – is forced, sooner rather than later, to “adopt the technology of
its enemies and rivals”35. This entails, if necessary, the entire transformation of the socio-economic
base in order to propagate and maintain the conditions for producing (and deploying) this military
hardware. Fukuyama concentrates on how this military competition creates powerful incentives for
countries to push toward political unity, echoing a well-known argument that the grave threat of
inter-state war was the main catalyst for the foundation and consolidation of the nation-state in
Europe. The argument is that war between nations has the paradoxical effect of unifying them:
“Even as war leads to their destruction, it forces states to accept modern technological civilization
and the social structures that support it”36. Once a certain stage is reached, humans do not choose
to develop more technology, it is forced upon them, whether they like it or not.37
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But this factor of military competition, one could argue, does not have much grounding in the
fundamental needs or motivations of human nature. It is more something that the lack of
international regulatory mechanisms regarding nation-states forces upon human beings38. So, for
this deeper grounding, we can turn to the second (more important) way that modern science
produces directional historical change: through “the progressive conquest of nature for the purpose
of the satisfying human desires”39. This process is labelled simply economic modernization. This
does again mean institutionalizing modern methods for building machines and technology, things
that could be used in war, etc. Yet it is not simply a pragmatic response to external demands made
on societies living under the threat of war; it represents the internalization of reason into the very
make-up of societies. It is “the bringing to bear of human reason to problems of social
organization”, which in terms of the great economic changes involved, must express itself with “the
creation of a rational division of labor.”40 Modern natural science establishes and regulates a
constantly evolving horizon of production possibilities, and technology develops in close relation to
the increasingly rationalized organisation of labour.
Fukuyama details the ways in which economic growth produced “certain uniform social
transformations in all societies, regardless of their prior social structure”41. New technological
possibilities entail improvements in communication and transportation, allowing for the expansion
of markets. This facilitates in turn the realization of economies of scale, and specialization
becomes more viable (when selling takes place over a much wider market, as opposed to, lets say,
just a couple of local villages) which all results in a general trend toward increased productivity.
This process also induces more far-reaching social changes: industrial societies become
predominantly urban42 and increasingly mobile (labourers moving around the country looking for
work), and these changes seriously undermine traditional social groupings (tribes, extended
families, religious sects, etc.) What replaces these traditional groups are modern bureaucratic
forms of business organization, which employ individuals on no basis other than their skills, ability,
and willingness to do the job. These modern bureaucratic forms complete the institutionalization of
such rationalized forms of work.
In chapters 8 and 9, Fukuyama adds more again to his explanation of the Mechanism, adding
theoretical details, and moving the narrative on historically. He is now concerned with showing how
the Mechanism would lead beyond the vast industrial economies of the modern period to
contemporary 20th century capitalism – that is, to capitalism, as opposed to the central planning
model, represented in the 20th century by the Soviet Union. Fukuyama explains this in terms of
capitalism having “proven itself far more efficient” than central planning systems in its “developing
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and utilizing technology”, and in “adapting to the rapidly changing conditions of a global division of
labor”43. The contest between capitalism and the central planning model turns decisively in
capitalism's favour at the point of transition from the mature industrial economy to the 'post-
industrial' economy or society (or 'the information age'). While the great centrally planned and
bureaucratized economies of the East could compete with the capitalist economies of the West
when it came to the age of coal, steel and heavy manufacturing, they fell far behind in an age of
service industries and finance. Fukuyama quips that it was “in the highly complex and dynamic
'post-industrial' economic world” that “Marxism-Leninism as an economic system met its Waterloo”
44
.
The link to liberalism is made within the terms of the Mechanism itself. In the information age, the
economic pressures for the invention and implementation of new technologies becomes far more
acute, far more rapid and urgent, than it was in the clunking age of heavy machinery. This means
the scientific community is put under much greater pressure to innovate, and so the state – to
allow the pursuit of research in the most efficient way possible – must grant scientists certain
protected rights; meaning, both an atmosphere of freedom for the communication and
dissemination of ideas, and the assurance that one's own successes in innovation will be suitably
rewarded45. This atmosphere spreads from the confines of the more hi-tech fields to other areas of
the economy where the spread of information is crucial, like marketing and advertising. The
freedom that previously existed became far more important for the working of the market, and the
expansion of the economy positively required the granting of newer and wider freedoms.
The charges against centralized planning in the information age are threefold: centralized
economies have not (1) succeeded in making rational investment decisions; have not (2)
effectively incorporated new technologies into the production process; and have not (3) been able
to ensure that the feedback received through their (non-market determined) pricing system was
accurate. Added to this was the totalitarian state's undermining of the rational division of labour,
which Fukuyama places as key to understanding the capabilities of an economy. The need for
central planners to “maintain control over prices and allocations of goods” prohibits them from
“participating in the international division of labor, and thereby from realizing the economies of
scale it makes possible”46. And finally, central planning is said to undermine “an all-important
aspect of human capital, the work ethic”47.
Fukuyama then makes the second part of the argument against centralized planning: he maintains
that capitalism is not simply optimal for rich, post-industrial societies (for the above reasons), but
for the newly developing economies as well. Here the task is to defend American 'social-scientific'
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ideas on modernization from the charge of being 'ethnocentric' (and, by doing so, to advance a
critique of 'dependency theory', which Fukuyama believes has had a malignant effect on the
welfare of developing societies). Fukuyama attacks Lenin, who he regards as the “real father of
dependency theory”, citing Lenin's 1914 pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (in
which Lenin claimed, Fukuyama summarises, that Western-developed capitalism postponed its
own demise by exporting its contradictions to the colonies and underdeveloped world.)
According to classical liberal theory, Fukuyama summarizes, “participation in an open system of

world trade should maximize the advantage of all”48. In contrast, dependency theory held that “late
development doomed a country to perpetual backwardness” because of the biases in the system.49
But dependency theory is no longer tenable: while it “lives on among left-wing intellectuals” it has
in reality been “exploded as a theoretical model by one large phenomenon it cannot possibly
explain: the economic development of East Asia in the postwar period”50. Fukuyama believes the
sheer weight of empirical data on the rise of these East Asian economies is enough to bury
dependency theory, and to vindicate economic liberalism (and what Fukuyama sees as the same
thing, contemporary global capitalism). While the wealth gap between the developed and
developing world remains huge, it cannot be the fault of markets; the vast global inequality today
must not be allowed to throw into doubt the modernization thesis. Instead, there must be other
explanations, which largely fall below the level system itself, such as (again) 'culture', or faulty
political traditions51. The central planning model, then, cannot be defended using dependency
theory, and so is no more appealing an option for developing countries than it is for advanced
industrial societies. The Mechanism can now “explain the creation of a universal consumer culture
based on liberal economic principles, for the Third World as well as the First and Second”52. This is
a truly universal development, bringing all of humanity to the final economic stage of History53.
Perhaps the most important chapter in Fukuyama's exposition of the Mechanism – the linchpin that
finally ties the narrative of industrialization and economic growth to the politics of liberal democracy
– is chapter 10, 'In the Land of Education'.Fukuyama wants to prove that there is a “necessary
connection between advanced industrialization and political liberalism” which can account for their
“high degree of correlation” in today's world54. This connection must take the shape of a universal,
structural disposition that will inform the development of all human societies. Fukuyama then
introduces the three alternate types of explanation for this phenomenon. Together, they form a
powerful finale to the main structure of Fukuyama's exposition of the Mechanism in EHLM.
The first possibility is a functionalist explanation, to the effect that “only democracy is capable of
mediating the complex web of conflicting interests that are created by a modern economy”55.
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Fukuyama attributes this view to Talcott Parsons56, and restates what he believes is Parsons's
central point: “democracies are best equipped to deal with the rapidly proliferating number of
interest groups created by the industrialization process”57. Democracy creates an open
environment wherein the diverse assortment of social actors newly emerging can come together to
form a political consensus supporting the state's legitimacy. The economic modernization process,
to put it crudely, pulls society apart: the homogeneity of group self-interest, self-understanding and
culture, is broken up into a multiplicity of different classes and sectors which may not have any
reason to agree with each other on what will constitute an optimal political arrangement58. The
democracy functions – keeping society together – by providing avenues of participation and
representation, in which the interests of these various groups can be publicly expressed; and,
furthermore, the operating principles of the state can be decided through the coming-together of a
significant number of these groups to form a lasting consensus, making it more efficient. In
contrast, dictatorships and other authoritarian forms of government – suffering under “narrow ruling
elites” who are “out of touch with the social changes” occurring “as a result of economic
development”59 – are incapable of adjusting with anything like the same degree of success.
The point seems to be that, when a certain level of development is reached, the distinction
between making decisions purely for the sake of economic efficiency, and making decisions which
are 'value-laden' (where the different social groups have to be organised to perform roles, and are
asked to make certain contributions to the polity, in order to assure the operation of the economy)
becomes untenable. When the modernization process fully matures, the smooth functioning of the
economy “depends on the willingness of its many interdependent social components to work
together”60. The economy requires more than the operation of the market mechanism, but also
needs public administration: the market alone cannot, for example, determine “the appropriate
level and location of public infrastructure investment, or rules for the settlement of labor disputes,
or the degree of airline and trucking regulation, or occupational health and safety standards”61. In
the openness of democracy, not only do these communities become assured some sort of
representation of their interests in public policy decision making, but governments receive accurate
feedback of the effects of these policies.
The second form of explanation has to do with the observed tendency of “dictatorships or one-
party rule to degenerate over time, and to degenerate more quickly when faced with the task of
running an advanced technological society”62. This argument is easy to summarise: as
dictatorships tend to have their support based in either a form of charismatic authority, or (perhaps
at least) on a record of high economic competence, both of which do not directly relate to the form
of government itself but to the appeal or expertise of those people – the class, social clique, or
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even just the particular group of individuals – currently exercising power. In transitional phases
there is no real reason why the new leaders should possess either of these two qualities, and the
state's authority would thereby decay as a result. This second form of explanation appears to be
only a kind of possible contributing factor, subordinate to the first and third forms of explanations. It
is not impossible that non-democratic, non-liberal governments can have strong, enforceable,
institutionalized rules and procedures for selecting new leaders and vetting policies, and thus,
these kinds of dictatorships at least could largely mitigate this tendency for degeneration.
The third, final, and most powerful form of explanation linking development and democracy is, as
Fukuyama outlines it, that “successful industrialization produces middle-class societies, and that
middle-class societies demand political participation and equality of rights”. Economic
development, at least during its mature stages, tends to promote a broader equality of condition,
because “it creates enormous demand for a large, educated work force”. And such equality
“arguably predisposes people to oppose political systems that do not respect that equality or permit
people to participate on an equal basis”63. Fukuyama argues that in meeting the educational
requirements of the modern economy – needing an increasing range of skilled workers,
technicians, managers and intellectuals – a dominant socio-economic class materializes in the
society, this being the much famed 'middle-class'.
It seems best to link this form of explanation with the first, in the following sense: just as the effects
of economic modernization produce a breaking down of the former homogeneity of society,
resulting in various diverse social actors, so does the new high level of education give these social
actors a better understanding of their own self-interest (and so education in this sense can benefit
people by making them more aware of their dignity and need for respect, and so they end up
asking much more for themselves in the political arena, with this whole effect being most
pronounced and acute for the middle-class). Education means both greater technical knowledge
and political enlightenment, Fukuyama argues. The concept of 'education' itself bridges the gap
between economic modernization (education as the acquirement of technical skills) and political
liberalization (education which 'liberates' people from prejudice and unreflective belief in traditional
authority).
Fukuyama does take issue with all 3 forms of explanation, however. The first form of explanation is
true “only up to a point.”64 He argues that the functionalist position is caught within a circularity:
democracy is indeed the best way of resolving conflicts between disparate groups, but it is so
when those groups share at least a bare groundwork of mutual values – that is, when all are
already agreed on the legitimacy of democracy. Democracy can resolve in-fighting between
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interest groups when these groups “share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or
rules of the game”. Democracy works best for democrats. When the conflicts involved concern
more than the protecting of ones interest (whether narrowly defined as economic, or more broadly
defined as being anything one wants represented in policy decisions) like fundamental conflicts
over, for example, the absolutist claims of nationalism, religion, or even natural social hierarchy
(caste), democracy may be of no help. Fukuyama admits that while democracy may work for
American society, this does not imply that it will necessarily be able to resolve antagonisms in other
societies. Fukuyama is also honest enough to admit that the establishment of formal democracy in
a country that is otherwise vastly unequal (with huge disparities in wealth, prestige, status, and
power) may actually mask the inequalities, rather than help to resolve them.
There is also a problem with the third form of explanation. How can we be certain that the current
link between education and democratic values is not merely transitory, an empirical correlation
rather than the required theoretical connection? It may just be that democratic values are the most
functional for today's particular socio-economic climate, which would deny the transhistorical truth-
status of the proposition. Who knows, we may again be learning about the need to revere tradition
and respect our elders in the classroom if, in the long run, we find that capitalism will fare better in
taking a technocratic-paternalistic rather than a liberal-democratic road! Fukuyama even suggests
that there is now “considerable empirical evidence” which could indicate that “market-oriented
authoritarian modernizers do better economically than their democratic counterparts”65 (how this
counts as a qualification or reservation rather than a direct contradiction of the overall argument is
rather unclear). He cites the record of Brazil after the military takeover in 1964, Chile under
Pinochet, and the newly industrializing economies of Asia.
Fukuyama concludes that while there is “an unquestionable relationship between economic
development and liberal democracy”, the “exact nature of that relationship is more complicated
than it first appeared” and it is “not adequately explained by any of the theories presented up to this
point”66. None is able to establish a strict logical connection from the one to the other, and it could
even be the case that “the Mechanism underlying our directional history leads equally well to a
bureaucratic-authoritarian future as to a liberal one”67. And so Fukuyama, after a very brief six page
summary of the argument, concludes Part II of the book with the chapter 'No Democracy without
Democrats' (chapter 12). This is where Fukuyama elaborates on what might be called the 'hole' in
the argument, as we see it so far: the economic interpretation “gets us to the gates of the Promised
Land of liberal democracy, but it does not after deliver us to the other side”68. In the end,
democracy is almost never chosen for economic reasons, Fukuyama claims. Democracies require
democrats, both to fight for those societies and then to live in them, to make them work: “there is
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no democracy without democrats, that is, without a specifically Democratic Man that desires and
shapes democracy even as he is shaped by it”69.
In this chapter Fukuyama even goes so far as to say that the development of the modern economic
world we have been tracing so far “is not coterminous with history itself”. He now says that to
achieve an understanding of History, and to know whether we have necessarily met an end to
history, we will need to discover what can serve as a transhistorical standard of development.
Fukuyama finds this standard in human nature. This leads us into Part III of the book, as
Fukuyama turns to the Hegelian/Kojèvean account of the 'struggle for recognition'. Through a study
of “Hegel's Universal History”, Fukuyama says, we discover that the struggle for recognition
“complements the Mechanism we have just outlined”: it gives us a “broader understanding of man
– man as man – that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of
irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human
history”70
The trouble is that this turn to Hegel cannot, with much honesty, be described as an attempt to
“complement” the Mechanism. It actually strikes one as an attempt to rewrite the account of
History, to start all over again; not so much complement as replacement. (Indeed, this was
supposed to be what Fukuyama was doing, by his own admission: in the introduction of EHLM he
already answered the question of whether we can talk of the directionality of history by saying 'yes',
and for “two separate reasons”. This implies two attempts at History, not a main account and a
supplement). Yet within a very small space of time, the Mechanism goes from being an overarching
process to explain historical development, albeit with notable gaps in the narrative or chinks in the
argument, to an account with such serious or fundamental flaws that a whole new chronicle must
be attempted. We now learn that it cannot even be guaranteed that the Mechanism matches up
with the procession of History at all!
The transition between narratives here, within the terms with which it is advanced, cannot be
defended. Fukuyama does notice the 'gaps' in final stages of the Mechanism theory, the gaps
which mean it cannot be said to explain each and every discontinuity in history. But to take this as
the failure of the whole enterprise itself is simply an unfair charge when considered what the theory
is supposed to be– that is, a theory of universal and structural causal frameworks by which the
overall patterns of history can be identified. It cannot reasonably be expected to explain every
discontinuity and “sudden eruptions of irrationality.”
Furthermore, one notices that as Fukuyama discusses the alternate forms of explanation in the
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final stages of the argument (to link up economic modernization and democracy), before he
apparently rejects all three for the struggle for recognition, he seems to ignore the overall
explanatory effect that the three forms combined achieve. Given that all three forms are roughly
the same type of argument – all seek to link democracy to economic modernization by explaining
the emerging of democracy from out of the processes of economic modernization – they seem to
be of sufficient weight together to complete the Mechanism, even as singularly they cannot. So, if
one combines these two points – (1) the delimitations of what the theory can realistically be
expected to explain; and (2) that all the proposed forms of explanation finally linking democracy
with economic development are just variations of the same theory, which have a greater
interpretive power when combined – one can argue forcefully that the Mechanism does not really
need the 'complement' that Fukuyama offers in the shape of the Hegelian struggle for recognition
(that is, at least in terms of explanation, rather than evaluation). One draws the conclusion that the
two explanations – the Mechanism and the struggle for recognition – do not find their justification in
each other, as harmonious companions on the same journey, but are actually incommensurable
rivals.
Considering all this, we can see how the argument of EHLM seems to hover uncomfortably
between the two motors of history. Fukuyama does seem genuinely undecided on which account
he prefers, and undecided on what is to be their conceptual status or relationship71: (1) do they
represent two sides of what is otherwise the same account of History? (2) Are they dual motors
which deliberately differ in detail, antagonistic to each other but which combined provide a fuller
account of history than they otherwise would separately? Or (3) is one form of explanation really
the primary motor, with the second providing a complementary resource that can help fill in the
gaps? The answer is probably (2), since it is hard to believe Fukuyama could be so naïve as to
think that he had crafted a unified exposition, as in (1). But as Fukuyama's views expand through
his career, with his writings on international relations and public policy across the many years from
1992 to 2006, it almost appeared that the inherent irresolution, the ambiguity right at the heart of
the enterprise, was being unconsciously determined in favour of (3). The modernization thesis is
taken up again, and it isn't always obvious that there ever was any equivocation, or even that there
ever was an alternative motor that had been laid out.
The Development of Fukuyama's views
In After the Neocons , in one of the brief moments he returns explicitly to his thesis on history
(which he usually does with quite the air of reluctance), Fukuyama criticizes the way EHLM has
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been interpreted. He claims many people have read his book as arguing that there is “a universal
hunger for liberty in all people” which will “inevitably lead them to liberal democracy”, and that “we
are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of liberal democracy” 72.
Fukuyama then coolly dismisses such a narrative as a “misreading of the argument”, adding that
“The End of History is finally an argument about modernization”. He clarifies: “what is initially
universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern society,
with its technology, high standards of living, health care, and access to the wider world”, etc.
It is true that modernization was a strong thread running through Part II of EHLM, in what we
labelled the Mechanism. While discussing the intellectual history of the idea of the philosophy of
history, covering the main previous traditions73, Fukuyama ended with the work not of an individual
philosopher, but rather with “a collective effort on the part of a group of social scientists.” 74 This
body of work or 'collective effort' was precisely termed by him 'modernization theory'. (Fukuyama
dated this approach back to the birth of modern sociology, and the work of its three 'fathers', Karl
Marx,75 Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim.) Modernization theory, broadly considered, posited that
“industrial development followed a coherent part of growth, and would in time produce certain
uniform social and political structures across different countries and cultures”76. By studying the
countries that “industrialized and democratized first”, such as Britain, one could “unlock a universal
pattern that all countries would eventually follow”. Fukuyama is interested primarily in post-war
versions of the theory, modernization in its optimistic and American cast77. These theorists were
united in believing that “history was directional” and that “the liberal democracy of the advanced
industrial nations lay at its end”78. In effect, then, one could read Part II of EHLM as an elaboration
on this – American, social-scientific – theme of modernization.
But EHLM did seem to strongly imply that the world's path to democracy was inexorable, and –
while there may be isolated setbacks, countries that stall or even fall backward – that the sweep to
democracy many countries experienced after the collapse of the 20th century's totalitarian regimes
would eventually, either within a few years or after some sort of time-delay, catch most of the rest
of the world up with it. History was a story with an overall meaning. If such a reading is fair to
Fukuyama's arguments (especially for the introduction, and the feeling ones gets from Part I of the
book) then Fukuyama's own protestations today over what he actually meant are misplaced,
perhaps even disingenuous.
Returning to After the Neocons: Fukuyama looks again to the “contagious wave of democratic
fervor [that] swept over many parts of the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s” but now says
that “a theory of democratic change emerging out of a broad process of modernization like the one
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laid out in The End of History suggests that democratic contagion can take a society only so far; if
certain structural conditions are not met, instability and setback are in store”79. This again refers to
the inherent human desire for liberty that he mentions in the quote above: this inherent desire,
Fukuyama now insists, can only make itself felt in History if “structural conditions are met”. We go
from Fukuyama's argument in chapter 12 of EHLM that there is no democracy without democrats –
an important qualification of the Mechanism, to the effect that democrats shape democratic forms
of government as much as democratic governments mould their citizens into democrats – to what
amounts to the subordination of “democratic fervor” to its the structural conditions. This shift is very
gradual, and is never complete; and one has to reread Fukuyama's own comments in the light of
his changing interests, and in the light of the new things he chooses to pay attention to, in order to
notice it. But we can say that such a shift does occur.
While it is “one thing to say that there is a broad, centuries-long trend toward the spread of liberal
democracy” (which Fukuyama admits is his general thesis of EHLM), it is quite another “to say that
either democracy or prosperity can emerge in a given society at a given time”. This is because
there are “certain critical intervening variables known as institutions that must be in place before a
society can move from an amorphous longing for freedom to a well-functioning consolidated
democratic political system with a modern economy”80. So, we might ask, what are these structural
conditions? What are these “intervening variables known as institutions”? To put it bluntly, these
structural conditions and institutions are what Fukuyama has devoted much of his subsequent
post-EHLM work (at least his published books) to analysing.
In State Building, Fukuyama looks at the structural conditions for functioning states. Although the
point of the book is to look at the international dimension, it first sets up an analytical framework of
'stateness' which can be applied equally to every country across the board. By tracing the contours
of 'stateness' throughout the 20th century, Fukuyama introduces certain concepts from which we
can extrapolate to enrich the original account of the Mechanism.
Fukuyama begins State Building with the minimalist liberal state that has traditionally been
understood to exist in Europe at the start of the 20th century. But as the century proceeded “through
war, revolution, depression, and war again”, the liberal world order crumbled and the minimalist
state was replaced in Europe (and in North America, etc.) by “a much more highly centralized and
active one”81. There were two distinct routes encompassed within this generalized trend of the
extension in state function and increase in government intervention in the economy. The first was
the birth of the totalitarian state (which is defined through its absolutism, in the state's attempt to
abolish civil society altogether) . The second was the centralization and expansion in size and
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scope of the non-totalitarian state, which you or I might recognize – in less coldly indifferent
language – as the birth of social democracy. From the state sectors consuming less than 10% of
GDP at the birth of the century, by the 1980s, 50% of GDP was being consumed by the state in
Western Europe and the United States. The politics of the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by
reaction to this trend, and encompassed a fightback to both totalitarian and non-totalitarian variates
of state growth.82
Fukuyama is broadly supportive of the Reaganite/Thatcherite project of state cutbacks. Indeed, he

acknowledges that “there was nothing wrong with the Washington consensus per se”83. But
Fukuyama admits that the impact of neoliberalism (a designation, after all, having its origin in Latin
America) has been mixed for the developing world – for, while their state sectors “were in many
cases obstacles to growth and could only be fixed in the long run through economic
liberalization”84, there was a just-as-important need for state strengthening in other areas.
Fukuyama identifies the problem by inventing the analytical distinction between state scope and
state strength, a vital distinction which he believes went unrecognised (and still goes
unrecognised) by the frenzied liberalizers and state-cutters of the era. The efforts at state-reduction
in the developing world damaged the strength of the state – its ability or capacity to implement
policies, enforce laws, protect property rights etc. – even while they were only aiming at reducing
the scope of the state (its redistributive, welfare measures, etc.) This result often meant that these
states were no better equipped for a future path of economic growth than they were before.
Fukuyama even professes that it is “clear in retrospect” that “under these circumstances, a little
liberalization can be more dangerous than no liberalization at all”85.
This discovery requires us to go back and emend the original narrative. Contemporary evidence of
the damaging effects of indiscriminate state roll-back initiatives in Latin America and Africa (at the
behest of the IMF and World Bank) necessarily points us toward recognizing the importance state
strength must have always had in successful economic development throughout history.
Fukuyama's conclusion that “the strength of state institutions is more important in a broad sense
than the scope of state functions” is really echoing the historical judgement made by many
economists today, that “some of the most important variables affecting development weren't
economic at all but were concerned with institutions and politics”86
These themes are continued again in After the Neocons. In the chapter 'Social Engineering and
Development', Fukuyama castigates the neoconservatives for their almost whole-scale ignorance87
of the leading literature on institutional development and goes on to trace the outlines of this
development theory literature that they were missing out on. What interests us here is the book's
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consideration of political development, and whether this supports what Fukuyama says in State
Building.
Fukuyama appears influenced by Samuel Huntington88, when Huntington argues to the effect that
modernization “no longer appeared to be an integrated process of economic, social, and political
change but rather a set of disparate activities that could spin out of control” – the implication of this
being that “development of strong political authority was necessary for economic development” and
so, crucially, “needed to precede democracy”89. This is a critical addition to the way economic
modernization was to be linked with liberal democracy in the Mechanism. American foreign policy
intellectuals concerned with promoting democracy abroad have to realise that 'democracy
promotion' is a subset of 'political development': “Before you can have a democracy, you have to
have a state”. State-building is an activity that “overlaps only partially with democracy promotion” 90.
A successful project of state-building (something Fukuyama believes should be central to post-9/11
US foreign policy) must involve “the promotion of good governance, not just democracy”, and the
“creation of effective institutions that are conditions of democratic government but not necessarily
democratic in themselves”91. A strong state with the capacity to enforce the liberal rule of law “is
initially more critical to economic growth than democratic political participation”, and while
“deferring democracy in favor of liberal authoritarianism is not, however, particularly useful as a
general strategy”, it should still be remembered that “modernizing authoritarians might be
preferable in some cases to feckless democracies””92.
This new taxonomy thus represents a gradual evolution of the whole previous modernization
account. Now, we have both – (1) a revision of the economic development narrative, where we
realise economic liberalism does not require simply the trimming back of the state, but needs
reform where state scope is reduced at the same time that state capacity is strengthened (where
required, as is still the case in the developing word today); and, if it is not possible to do one
without the other, state strengthening will often prove more decisive than reducing state scope in
successful economic development; and – (2) what can be taken as a reassessment of the link
between economic modernization and liberal democracy, as it appeared at the end of Part II of
EHLM: democracy cannot just be the result of newly emergent social actors reacting to social
changes; democracy can only establish itself after certain 'structural conditions' are met – that is, it
can only establish itself from within a framework of already-existing strong political institutions.
Fukuyama suggests a new tripartite account of political development (“To the extent that there is a
coherent theory of political development, the process is likely to be based on one of three
drivers”93. The first is to explain the empirical linkage that exists between economic development
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and democracy. He cites the study of political scientists Adam Przeworksi and Fernando Limongi,
that “although transitions to democracy occur with equal frequency at any level of development,
they are much less likely to be reversed once a country has passed a level of development of
approximately $6,000 per capita GDP”94. A second 'driver' of political development might be “some
form of evolutionary competition and emulation” whereby “societies observe one another and adopt
institutions that promote broadly desirable goals like economic development or social justice”, and
Fukuyama cites historian Charles Tilly for support95. The third driver of political development “lies in
the realm of ideas”: the admission that there is “simply no other legitimating set of ideas besides
liberal democracy that is broadly accepted in the world today”96.
How do these three 'drivers' compare to the Mechanism, the account of development that we
reconstructed in EHLM? In the first 'driver', the connection between economic development and
democracy is loosened: it is not that economic development stimulates democracy – actually,
democracy can occur at any time. The point now is, rather, that democracy must be sustained by
certain socio-economic conditions (the very specific $6,000 per capita GDP figure) in order for it to
stabilize and last. In terms of the second driver, it is societies or nations that compete, not
economies; and societies choose to “adopt institutions” that “promote desirable goals” might
happen to be something like “economic development”. And lastly, for the third driver, democracy
becomes an idea, rather than the emerging political self-consciousness of the newly dominant
middle classes.
We can read in all 3 of these drivers evidence for the 'political turn' that Fukuyama's theory has
taken in these recent works. The existence of democracy itself is no longer accounted for through
economic development, and so presumably must have some 'political' motivation outside of
economics; societies first adopt political arrangements that serve economic development. Political
development – the creation of a strong and efficient state, with enforceable rules being more
important than keeping the state within a certain minimal scope – assumes the central role in the
modernization process. Fukuyama claims that, in addition to the democratic transition literature,
“there has been among political scientists a revival in the past two decades of institutionalism”, in
which “the state is no longer regarded as a passive object of social pressures but viewed as an
autonomous and active shaper of outcomes”97
We will return to most of these themes – the place of the modernization theory, the significance of
democracy promotion, the ramifications of the 'political turn' – in the fifth section of the essay. For
now, we just have to summarize the main features of Fukuyama's arguments so far.
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By reading Part II of EHLM, we have seen how Fukuyama linked science into a directional account
of history powered by technological innovation, which takes place firstly through military
competition, but then most importantly through economic development. He then wanted to show
how industrial development would lead to free market liberalism rather than a centrally planned
model, and suggests mechanisms for explaining the linkage between economic development and
liberal democracy. Now, in 2004 and 2006, Fukuyama returns to many of the same themes through
his work as a political scientist and policy intellectual, and so we get a new, distinctly political,
emphasis on the narrative. There are critical similarities between EHLM, on the one hand, and
State Building and After the Neocons, on the other, in that both are attempting the same thing: in
the ten or so years, Fukuyama is still operating with the assumptions that there is such a thing as
development, and that the idea of a directional movement of modernization is as coherent and as
desirable a public policy goal now as it was then. The story being told, in what might loosely be
labelled 'popular' social-scientific terms, attempts to analyse history through industrialization, the
evolution of institutions, deep socio-economic changes, and other observable processes involving,
for instance, the emerging of certain classes, etc. This is even more the case in the last two books,
where the idea that the inherent human desire for material satisfaction drives economic
development is no longer taken seriously.
Yet there are certain subtle differences too, which are important for the purposes of the essay's
overall argument. The teleological element of the former account is never again taken up with
much force or enthusiasm: the origin itself of democracy is inexplicable, and the path of economic
development (that Fukuyama traces through many chapters in Part II of EHLM) now only gets off
the ground when certain structural conditions are already in place; and again, the origin of these
conditions are not fully explicable in theory (Fukuyama says that the areas of institutional
construction, improvement, and of creating 'demand' for institutional competence, are not areas
with high volumes of easily transferable knowledge, etc.) What we are left with is not quite the
project of a renewed philosophy of history that we were promised in the introduction to EHLM.
Fukuyama today insists that he was all along just doing modernization theory: In a 2007 lecture,
while trying to explain the end of history thesis, he claimed “this is basically a theory about
modernization. I guess that's the simplest way to explain it”98. In an online article for the Guardian,
he is firm in insisting that “the End of History thus was essentially an argument about
modernisation”99. In the Afterword to the second edition of EHLM, he had already declared that the
end of history was “a theory of modernization that raised the question of where that modernization
process would ultimately lead”100; and, in a 2008 interview, he said he his whole argument was
simply that “democracy is a result of a broad modernization process”101
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But if we were to follow Fukuyama's own lead here, we would miss out the entire second 'motor' of
EHLM – which was, for most reviewers, the more interesting and memorable account. We can now
look at Fukuyama's proposed return to Hegel, a return made through his idiosyncratic French
interpretor Kojève. We will now look at the second 'motor', the struggle for recognition.
Hegel, Kojève and the struggle for recognition
To understand the second motor of history in EHLM, one has to turn to a small section of Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled 'Lordship and Bondage'. What this has to do with writing a
philosophy of history will not be immediately clear (indeed, many Hegel scholars also do not see
the relevance!), but if we can start off by reconstructing Hegel's argument, we can see how it fits
into the interpretation of Alexandre Kojève, since it is Kojève and not Hegel that we are concerned
with here.
The Phenomenology is an introduction to Hegel's system of philosophy, written in 1807.The section

we are looking at traces the dialectic of the subject to the stage of self-consciousness, wherein the
subject attempts to demonstrate to itself that it is free102. It does this by trying to demonstrate that
the object which confronts it is not really separate from it, that it is rather fundamentally a part of
itself. There is a fundamental contradiction at work here: in being conscious of yourself in the
object, there has to be an object for you to be conscious of yourself in, and therefore there has to
be some kind of otherness; and yet, this otherness is supposed to be reducible to the self. Its first
attempt at resolving this contradiction is described by Hegel in the dialectic of Desire. In this stage
of 'desire', the subject tries to overcome its feeling of dependence by literally destroying the
external object, 'consuming' it (as the subject fulfils its animal desires103). But this 'proof' fails,
because such 'animal' desires will always return, and so the act has to be repeated ad infinitum. It
also fails for the more fundamental reason that the subject has not proved its identity with the
object: the result in consuming the object was actually a return to an empty self-identity as an
individual ego. At the stage of Desire, the subject is perpetually caught between the otherness of
the object and its own empty self-identity: the point is to avoid both a subject-object dualism (non-
identity) and a reduction of the object to the subject, the one to the other (simple identity). “In other
words, there is either identity or non-identity but not the required identity of identity and non-
identity”104. So the question is, what can the subject do to overcome this fundamental impasse?
How can it reconcile the object as something other with the idea of an object as part of oneself?
The solution is to find an object that will demonstrate that it is not anything different from the
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subject, without the subject needing to destroy it. The only object that can itself take on this
positive demonstrative role must itself be a subject – that is, there must be another subject: “Since
the subject cannot negate the otherness of its object, there can be unity in otherness only if the
object negates its otherness to the subject. What can negate its otherness to the subject must be
another subject, another self-conscious being”105 So, to attain knowledge of itself as all reality – to
establishment absolute independence – the subject must (somewhat paradoxically) seek its own
identity in otherness, in an other: Hegel writes that “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction
only in another self-consciousness”106.
Hegel then moves from the standpoint of the philosopher and adopts the participant-position of
consciousness itself, in order to reconstruct the process by which this realization comes about. The
subject realises that to prove its independence, it must gain the recognition of others. But, at this
preliminary stage, the subject does realise that the recognition it requires must come from another
equal, rational, independent self-consciousness – that what is required is mutual recognition107.
Instead, at this stage, the subject attempts to overpower the other, to force it to obey its
commands. The two subjects are then forced into a life and death struggle, whereby each subject
attempts to prove its independence; it seeks to demonstrate its rational status by proving it has the
power over mere biological life and animal desire. It must risk death.
This life-or-death struggle ends in the relationship of master and slave. The dominant subject
realises that he cannot get the recognition he needs if the other ego is killed, so he has to grant the
defeated subject his life. This is an important step outside the immediate circle of consciousness:
the master has to respect the separateness of the slave, even if he does not grant the slave the
rational or free status that he ascribes to himself. But it becomes obvious that this master/slave
relationship is inherently unstable, since the recognition that the master looks for – recognition of
himself as autonomous and independent – cannot come from a subject that the master does not
respect, the slave; the recognition must be freely given, not coerced. It is this dialectic, this volatile
instability between master and slave, that Kojève extrapolates as the dynamic of History in his own
interpretation of the Phenomenology.
Kojève's reading of Hegel does considerable violence to Hegel's philosophy. We can say
conclusively that the struggle for recognition between master and slave has nothing to do with
Hegel's own philosophy of history108. Indeed, it shouldn't be difficult to realise that Hegel's own
account of master and slave as a larger metaphysical agenda which is completely removed from
anything Fukuyama himself deals with, and so falls beyond the scope of this essay. But let us take
what we now know of Hegel to trace the basic themes of Kojève's own argument, since it is this
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that provides the framework for Fukuyama's own second 'motor'.
Kojève adds a specifically existential spin on the fight for life-or-death (showing the influence of
Heidegger on his thought109). The master is the one who successfully chooses 'nothingness' over
'given-being'. The slave was the one who feared his own 'nothingness', and choose self-
preservation and existence (Nature or 'given-being') over the possibility of death. The master then
puts the slave to work in his service. But in doing so the master achieves only fleeting pleasure, not
true satisfaction. The master never attains this satisfaction: “To get oneself recognized by a Slave
is not to get oneself recognized by a man”; hence “the Master never attains his end, the end for
which he has risked his very life”110. However, the slave – who submits to and 'works' in the service
of the master – can ultimately find satisfaction in his work: by transforming the natural world
through work, he negates given-being, and the slave initiates the historical process of 'overcoming'
the world: “The man who works transforms given-being”, so “where there is work there is
necessarily change, progress, historical evolution”111.
History is then the story of a double overcoming, the slave's overcoming of the nature of given-
being through work on the external world (in Marxian vein, the slave achieves the complete
technological mastery over nature that brings an end to scarcity) and the slave's overcoming of the
fear that led him to slavery in the first place, his fear of the master and of death. “Man realizes
himself 'at the expense of Being'. History is the story of human action negating the given, and
creating a new reality that satisfies the all-consuming desire for recognition”112 The Slave first
attains the 'abstract idea' of liberty, and attempts to realise this through struggle. History
progresses through various 'slave ideologies', whereby the slave seeks to reconcile the idea of
liberty with the reality of slavery – first, Stoicism; then Christianity. History ends when the slave
dominates nature, chooses his own work, and abolishes all mastery, becoming the citizen of a
state of universal recognition.
The slave ideologies correspond to various stages of societal and economic development. Kojève
begins with the Pagan world, which Kojève associates with mastery. As war threatened the stability
of the Roman Empire, the responsibilities of defence were contracted out to mercenaries. The
Pagan masters, no longer having to fight their adversaries or face the threat of death, descended
into a kind of pseudo-slavery. This created the ideal conditions for the spread and adoption of the
first truly universal slave ideology, an ideology absolutely essential for the creation of a world in
which the equal freedom of all is universally recognised – this slave ideology is Christianity. But
before the ideal of Christianity can be recognised in the world, the theological dogma of Christianity
must be overcome: for Kojève, history is the progression toward the secular realization of the
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Christian ideal. The ideal is actualized in history when God is replaced by the state as the concrete
embodiment of the universal principle that each particular individual is of absolute value113. History
will end “necessarily” when “man is perfectly satisfied by the fact of being a recognized citizen of a
universal and homogeneous State, or, if one prefers, of a society without classes encompassing
the whole of humanity”114.
For Kojève, Hegelianism is true because it stands at the end of time and so 'knows' the whole of
reality – so, therefore, Hegelianism can only be true if reality itself has attained to the status of
wisdom115. Kojève reminds us that Hegel, as he was finishing the Phenomenology, had remarked
that he had seen the 'soul of the world' on horseback beneath his windows. This letter, Kojève
insists, is a “revelation”: Napoleon, “the conqueror at Jena, is called 'world-soul'... he incarnates not
the history of the French people, but that of the whole of humanity”116. This completed reality is the
Napoleonic Empire – as an empire, it is universal, and is homogeneous. It is universal because I
am recognised by all (by all other men), and it is homogeneous because I am recognised as an
individual in my particularity (“it is truly I who am recognized, and not my family, my social class,
my nation”117). Kojève says that if history did not end with Hegel and Napoleon at Jena in 1806, it is
at least the case that there has been nothing truly new since Napoleon-Hegel. The question was
now whether the mantle of History would be past to the Left-Hegelians, or to the Right-Hegelians.
118
But the composition of Kojève's Universal and Homogeneous State (UHS) is not really Hegelian;
the arguments for it are certainly not to be found among Hegel's own writing (such as his
Philosophy of Right)119. Indeed, Kojève's UHS diverges from Hegel's own state on a number of
points.120
So, what of Kojève's own politics? During the Second World War, Kojève took to the view that
Stalin was the new Napoleon, the World-Spirit on horseback. Kojève, who believed in the Socialist
Empire121, seems to have had faith that the Stalinist USSR could create one universal and
homogeneous system from the East, which would bring history to a close (Kojève, alarmingly,
seems not to have been put off by the accumulating evidence of Stalinist murder and tyranny122.)
But after the War was over, Kojève began to change his thinking. He was to entertain an alternate
prospectus. Kojève turned back to look to Europe once more. The only barrier to the universal and
homogeneous state was the nation-state, which the goal of universality necessarily precluded. The
condition of Kojève's conversion to the West was its supersession of this form. So, “by the time the
European Economic Community, in which he [Kojève] was to play an active role, was formed, the
issue was settled: it was the West, not the East, which held the future of the world”123. The ease
with which Kojève switches sides here – even claiming that capitalism and communism to both be,
in fact, the same stage of history; Kojève being indifferent to the outcome of the Cold War124 –
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shows just how abstract and formalistic Kojève's philosophy of history is.125
For now, we have to integrate our retracing of Kojève's philosophy back into Fukuyama's own
account. Fukuyama himself claims that “the Mechanism created by modern natural science” –
which is everything we have traced so far – remains “a partial and ultimately unsatisfying account
of the historical process”. Fukuyama is convinced that free government exercises a positive pull of
its own. It is to understand this resonance that “we need to return to Hegel”126
Fukuyama begins Part III of EHLM with an account of the 'first man' as he would live and behave in
the state-of-nature, a typical scenario for the liberal political tradition. Fukuyama wretches Hegel's
master and slave struggle entirely from the context of its place in the argument of the
Phenomenology, turning it into an anthropomorphic narrative of the human being as he exists in
nature – and in this, Fukuyama is precisely following Kojève's lead.127 Whereas in the Anglo-Saxon
liberal tradition, the emphasis is on the struggle for self-preservation, Fukuyama turns to Hegel as
a resource in trying to comprehend the 'spirited' struggle for honour, respect, and prestige that
often takes place in this situation. In both Hobbes – who notes how the fear of violent death, as
men will fight over 'trifles', provokes to the creation of the strong liberal state – and in Locke – who
advocates education as a means to subordinate one's desire for recognition to the desire to
preserve one's own life (and to the desire to endow life with material comfort) – the 'first man'
chooses slavery over mastery, as Fukuyama puts it. Fukuyama turns instead to Hegel for an
understanding of first man's “longing for self-transcendence” – a longing to blame not simply for
violence but also for the “noble passions of patriotism, courage, generosity, and public-
spiritedness.”128
The central reason for his doing so is to try and find a way of filling-out the missing third dimension
of History – the question now is not of the universality and directionality of History per se, but of the
moral side of history: how can history be said to be a progress, not simply process? Fukuyama
says that by “identifying the master's struggle for recognition as somehow at the core of what is
human, Hegel seeks to honor and preserve a certain moral dimension to human life that is entirely
missing in the society conceived of by Hobbes and Locke”. The struggle for recognition is to be
used to answer the question posed: “It is this moral dimension, and the struggle to have it
recognized, that is the motor driving the dialectical process of history129
Next, Fukuyama is concerned with integrating the specifics of Hegelian recognition – already
wrested away from any meaningful context – with “recognition”, a concept that Fukuyama believes
has been central to all Western political philosophy. Fukuyama lists the various manifestations of
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this idea: “Plato spoke of thymos, or 'spiritedness', Machiavelli of man's desire for glory, Hobbes of
his pride or vainglory, Rousseau of his amour-propre, Alexander Hamilton of the love of fame and
James Madison of ambition, Hegel of recognition, and Nietzsche of man as the 'beast with red
cheeks'.”130All these terms supposedly refer to “that part of man which feels the need to place
value on things – himself in the first instance, but on the people, actions, or things around him as
well”.131 The first extended analysis of the desire for recognition in the Western philosophical
tradition is to be found in Plato's Republic: according to Socrates, the chief characteristic of the
class of guardians charged to defend the just city is thymos, meaning basically 'spiritedness'132
Fukuyama then attempts to integrate his burgeoning philosophy of history with Socrates's tripartite
division of the soul, as detailed in Book IV of Republic.133 The human soul has a (1) desiring part, a
(2) rationalizing or calculating part, and finally (3) thymos, the spirited part. Thymos is the part of
the soul that invests objects with value, and so, the desire for recognition is the political activation
of thymos, whereby a human directed by the spirited part of the soul demands that others share in
the same valuation of himself as he does. “Plato's thymos is therefore nothing other than the
psychological seat of Hegel's desire for recognition”134. In chapters 16 and 17 of EHLM, Fukuyama
explores the concept of thymos further, seeing how it can be used to explain certain human
actions, both good and evil – thymos being a deeply paradoxical phenomenon. Fukuyama
captures this paradox by showing how thymos can manifest itself in two contradictory ways – as
either the desire to be recognised as superior to others, which he labels megalothymia or the
desire to be recognised as equal to others, being labelled isothymia. It is these two together that
“constitute the two manifestations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition
to modernity can be understood”135
The basic dynamic of history, from the perspective of the struggle for recognition, can be
summarised as follows: megalothymia, the desire to be recognised as superior, is to blame for the
bloody battles, wars, and struggles to overpower and conquer other societies, that constitutes all
the 'history' of pre-modernity. The social embodiment of megalothymia was in the traditional
aristocratic warrior class. Being uninterested in work, economic rationality, or fulfilling material
desires, the aristocratic warrior amused himself in war; he was concerned merely with behaviour
that accorded him with honour, pride and dignity. But then – closely following Kojève – Fukuyama
traces the overturning of the master/slave relationship in the slave's growing awareness of the idea
of his freedom through his work. In his use of tools and rudimentary technology to meet the needs
of his master, the slave invents science. This invention is the beginning of the process of
modernisation – as we will remember, science is how Fukuyama opens his reconstruction of the
Mechanism in Part II. Science represents the rational part of the soul, the development of which
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unleashes the desiring part of the soul. In terms of thymos, Fukuyama combines Kojève's account
of the takeover of the pagan world by Christianity with the gradual replacement of the dangerous
warrior megalothymia with the benign isothymia, which is a more rational (since universal and
homogeneous) form of recognition. The emergence of liberal democracy is explained through (1)
the increasing economization and consumerism of life, through the blossoming of the desiring part
of the soul, allied with reason – this meaning liberal economics; and (2) the replacement of the
destabilizing megalothymia with isothymia, which requires a sweeping egalitarianism in political life
– thus, political liberalism. This is the second 'motor' of History.
Fukuyama's ending of history in liberal democracy mirrors Kojève's universal and homogeneous
state. The 'contradictions' that drive history forward, the slave's continuing demand for more equal
recognition, are finally solved in liberalism. Liberalism provides “recognition on a universal basis” in
which “the dignity of each person as a free and autonomous human being is recognized by all”.136
“What is at stake for us when we choose to live in a liberal democracy is not merely the fact that it
allows us the freedom to make money and satisfy the desiring parts of our souls. The more
important and ultimately more satisfying thing it provides us is recognition of our dignity”. The
liberal democratic state “values us at our sense of self-worth”, and so “both the desiring and
thymotic parts of our souls find satisfaction”137
In what way can we say that modern liberal democracy recognises all human beings universally?
“It does this by granting and protecting their rights”.138 “Popular self-government abolishes the
distinction between masters and slaves; everyone is entitled to at least some share in the role of
master. Mastery now takes the form of the promulgation of democratically determined laws, that is,
sets of universal rules by which man self-consciously masters himself”.139 For Fukuyama, this
Hegelian liberalism comes a lot closer to accurately reflecting what the people of the world actually
feel when they say they want to live in a democracy – they march in the streets, banners raised,
not for an institutional compromise between competing economic sections of a disparate society,
but for a state that values the fundamental dignity and freedom of each human being.
“The Argument”
This finishes our reconstruction of the main body of Fukuyama's philosophy of history, which has
encompassed Parts I to III of EHLM, much of State Building, and one crucial chapter of After the
Neocons. We have identified two 'motors' of history. The first motor, dubbed the Mechanism,
looked first to science – the maturation of which, in technology, meant both the consolidation of the
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nation-state (as a response to the threat of war) and an exponentially increased capacity for
economic development. This economic development was to be the mainspring for a vast social
upheaval, which would homogenize the basic socio-political arrangements of the countries of the
world, leading to a global free market; and then this would, in turn, create a structural propensity for
the eventual materialization of liberal democratic politics. The second motor is the struggle for
recognition, comprising what Fukuyama believes is his 'return to Hegel'. It seeks to turn the conflict
between master and slave into the moral dynamic of history, explicating history as progress: the
slave finally triumphs in his historical quest for equal and universal recognition, as the secularized
Christian ideal becomes the formal ethic legitimizing the modern state.
Let us now return to the question (which was raised earlier, in the final paragraph of the
'Reconstruction of the Mechanism' section) of how these two motors relate to each other. Are the
two designed to be equal partners, or is there one primordial motor and one supplement? It is clear
Fukuyama himself never anticipated such problems of cohesion or consistency arising when he
was writing EHLM.
How can we answer this? Part III of EHLM is also where Fukuyama introduces Plato's three
divisions of the soul – desire, reason, and thymos. We will now find that we can use these
concepts to redraw both motors of history; which will allow us to show how Fukuyama's confusion
between the two motors plays itself out, as we subsume both motors into this common language.
The problem of the greater coherence of Fukuyama's philosophy of history, viewed through this
perspective of the clumsy integration of Plato's theory of the soul with the rest of the account, is
precisely what is tackled – in typically adept fashion – by Marxist historian Perry Anderson, in his
essay 'The Ends of History.'
Anderson claims that with Fukuyama's attempted use of Plato to explicate his argument, the
“original logic of the historical dialectic disintegrates”, as the generality of human development
“becomes the field of interplay of three component forces – drives that are persistent and distinct.”
140
Anderson then examines the argument of EHLM using these concepts. The starting-point is
science, which “alone has given clear-cut directionality to human affairs”. This means reason
comes first. With the invention of modern scientific method during the Renaissance, reason
unfetters material desire through economic development, and awakens spirit in the need for
recognition in democracy. This sequence “seems unambiguous enough”, but it is “no sooner
advanced than disavowed”. Fukuyama immediately qualifies the place of science in the dynamic:
while modern scientific method “may be regarded as a possible 'regulator' of directional historical
change”, it should “in no way be regarded as the cause of change.”141 Science itself needs to be
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explained.
What has always essentially 'driven' science is desire, Anderson observes. This would yield an
economic interpretation of history, not so remote from Marx's own. But there is still a missing
component. If desire explains the stimulus or 'motivation' for the development of reason in science
and technological innovation, it does not show how this happens: what explains desire's sudden,
abrupt ability to galvanize reason at this quite specific historical juncture, the coming of the
Renaissance?
But before this problem can be properly formulated, Fukuyama shifts his emphasis again, now to
“the desire that lay behind the desire of Economic Man.” In what seems like a complete reversal (a
reversal which we touched upon as we ended the section on the reconstruction of the Mechanism),
Fukuyama now looks for “the primary motor of human history” in “a totally non-economic drive, the
struggle for recognition.”142 As Anderson dryly puts it, it is now Hegel who is “given the palm”. The
origin of development “lies in a battle for prestige that creates the bondage which prompts work
that transforms nature”. “After apparent oscillations, the first mover comes to rest, not in desire or
reason, but in thymos”143 Yet it becomes clear that, for the historian Anderson, this new emphasis
makes much less sense than the previous delineations. The historical dynamic of thymos “is not
cashed into any empirical account of pre-modern origins.” A “real macro-history” is “only sketched
from the Industrial Revolution onwards.”144
Anderson shows that some sense can be made of the disorder at the heart of Fukuyama's
philosophy if one assigns importance to that aspect of the history which holds the greater empirical
weight (that aspect which Fukuyama devotes the most time and effort to demonstrating). This can
be pinpointed as the final part of the Mechanism, wherein Fukuyama explains how economic
development makes the emergence of liberal democracy more likely. Anderson looks in particular
at the phase of transition from industrialization to political liberalization, writing that “it is quite clear
from Fukuyama's own account” that “although economic development to high technological levels
is not a sufficient condition of political democracy, it is a necessary one”; whereas “the reverse
does not hold: there can long be remarkably successful industrialization – in the 'market-oriented
authoritarianism' of the ROK or Taiwan, the fastest growth of all – without electoral liberalization.” In
this asymmetry, “the priority of thymos is overthrown.”
The previous affirmation that thymotic passions are what propels history is put aside. The stress
now falls simply on the defensive claim that the advent of democracy cannot be reduced to the
operating of the Mechanism, to the coming of consumerism, or to the age of mass education.
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“Silently, the original directionality reasserts itself”, Anderson observes – thymos becomes “in effect
a residue”, the “extra fillip needed to take a society across the threshold from prosperity to
parliaments”145 While there are occasions in EHLM (especially in Part III, but also with later themes
in the book) where thymos apparently takes precedence, beneath the surface much of the legwork
is being done by desire allied with reason. “In its general tendency, Fukuyama's narrative veers
between a rhetorical priority of spirit and a factual priority of desire.”
Yet while we can accept Perry Anderson's suggested reading of Fukuyama, it remains the case
that the overall historical narrative never achieves proper resolution. “The directionality of
technique and the strivings of honour remain competing principles of explanation, whose claims of
precedence are not to be reconciled. In the design of the account, a true concatenation is missing.”
146
Anderson ends by remarking on the contrast between Fukuyama's usage of these concepts and
the use made of them by Hegel and Plato. While reason is the most central category for Hegel's
own philosophy of history, it becomes “curiously marginal” in Fukuyama's: “there is a sense in
which reason is displaced to the side of the construction, as little more than the enabler of desire –
as against a spiritedness beyond reason.” And the contrast with Plato is equally noticeable, since
while Fukuyama appears to ally reason with desire, Plato made reason an ally of thymos. The
result of this, Anderson notes, is to “tilt the outcome of the enquiry towards the stark dichotomy
between a rational hedonism and an elemental agonism with which Fukuyama's reflections
conclude.”
The setting up of this 'stark dichotomy' is the solidification of the two distinct motors of history. Let
us now briefly restate them. In terms of the Mechanism, the first two parts of the soul are key.
Science, in technology, is the material actualisation of reason (this part of the soul is also, self-
evidently, present in the rationalization of society – in the organization of labour, business
administration, government bureaucracy, etc.) It is scientific and technological advancement,
through economic development, that 'unleashes' desire (the innate human desire to fulfill material
needs and wants). Finally thymos, were it to be retrospectively added to our reconstruction of
Mechanism, would feature as the 'added ingredient' in Fukuyama's attempt to explain the final link
between economic development and democracy. And thymos is also latent in the discussion of the
last chapter of Part II, forming the background to the sentiment that there can be no democracy
without democrats. In contrast, for the struggle for recognition, it is thymos that powers history. The
other two parts of the soul, reason and desire, only really make their presence felt as modernity
draws to a close, at the end of history. At a certain point of the unravelling of thymos, where
isothymia replaces megalothymia as the primary form of recognition permeating the political order,
reason and desire begin to supersede thymos as the dominant aspects of the soul. It is the
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domestication of thymos in isothymia that allows all three parts of the soul to synchronize, more-or-
less, in liberal democracy: without the radical imbalance toward thymos, the drive which propels
human society forward dissipates, and history slowly grinds to a halt.
Perry Anderson's analysis remains by far the best on its subject. However, having been written
back in 1992, the analysis has become, in a sense, outdated. What we now need is an analysis of
how Fukuyama goes on, long after the publication of EHLM, to deal with this indeterminacy at the
centre of his enterprise.
In the section 'The Development of Fukuyama's views', we have already attempted to interpret the
main policy recommendations of State Building and After the Neocons as a continuation of the
Mechanism in EHLM. The governing principle of this continuation, we in effect argued, was to take
the various elements of the first motor of history – which, as we have just seen, includes the
interplay of desire and reason, an account of technological development grounded in science, and
a more social-scientific tendency framing the first motor as a type of modernisation theory – and to
silently reduce the whole account down to the latter. (Although it can certainly be argued that the
modernisation theme is a prominent (perhaps the most prominent) aspect of the Mechanism
anyway, and in many ways this is true – indeed, from the perspective we initially took in our
reconstruction, the whole account could have made sense on its own, without mention of the
struggle for recognition or of Plato's tripartite division of the soul.) But Fukuyama's understanding
of history – laid out in Parts I and II, before Part III – was always more than this. If we recall from
the introduction to EHLM, Fukuyama was never attempting just another run-of-the-mill social-
scientific theory of the current political order and the developments that led to it. It was to be a
“Universal History of mankind” (we will return to this in the Conclusion). Yet now Fukuyama
apparently says he was never concerned with the culmination of history in the realm of human
freedom, nor with the growth of democracy per se, but rather with the 'structural conditions' for
such developments, should they happen to take place. The 'political turn' that we identified, which
revises the account of historical development – now emphasizing the need for a strong, centralized
state, as a condition for both sustained economic growth and for maintaining democracy –
produces exactly this kind of effect. Neither desire nor reason has the kind of background role in
history that it had done in EHLM. And, as we had also previously noticed, the teleology that was
present in the original philosophy is weakened: the idea that there is a universalist mechanism
governing all of human history, where the achievement of certain socio-economic and political
goals can be conceived as sufficient conditions for further development, fades.
This is the smaller preliminary stage for the larger movement that takes place in Fukuyama's
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thought. We can observe that the Mechanism, now consolidated as a theory of political
modernisation, has today effectively pushed the struggle for recognition out of sight. Fukuyama's
philosophy of history has become simply mechanism-as-modernisation-theory, and the impression
Fukuyama often gives is that this was how it was all along! The indeterminacy and indecision
within Fukuyama's argument, never acknowledged by Fukuyama himself, is now forcibly resolved
by repressing the second motor – this being, remember, the motor with the moral tinge, the motor
where the story of human progress was more prominent. Fukuyama renounces the moral dynamic
that he believed he had inherited from Hegel. If Fukuyama really had written EHLM the way the
book is nowadays portrayed, it would have been a weaker and less compelling effort than it
actually was. Whatever the intention, the result would seem to be a theory that had less moral
claims against it to answer for.
After EHLM, Fukuyama avoids Hegel, Kojève, and the idea of recognition. They never again play a
serious part in his work. But the problems these concepts sought to address remain pertinent,
indeed vital, for Fukuyama. It is just that the concepts completely change. Instead of thymos and
(struggle for) recognition, we are left with the rather downgraded concepts of trust and social
capital.
Fukuyama begins his 1996 book Trust by returning to 'the human situation' at the end of history. He
does this not to continue the discussion – Fukuyama is not interested in reopening the debate –
but to remind his readers of the conclusion. The essential lesson of EHLM for policy analysts
should have been that, with the convergence of world institutions around the model of democratic
capitalism, further improvements in society “cannot be achieved through ambitious social
engineering”. Acknowledging this fact is, for Fukuyama, an absolute prerequisite for any budding
reformer of Western society who wishes to be taken seriously. As we stand today at the end of
history, “having abandoned the promise of social engineering”, we see that “virtually all serious
observers understand that liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and
dynamic civil society for their vitality.”147 And it is perfectly true that the one follows from the other: if
we have the optimal political institutional arrangements in the West, it must be the case that all its
remaining problems (at least those that can be solved) are social or cultural rather than political,
having to do with the health of communities and civil society, etc.
Fukuyama here invents the concept of 'trust', which is to be a sort of quantitative measure for
comparing the health of various highly disparate cultures and traditions. Fukuyama insists that trust
– “the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior,
based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community”148 – is vital for
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the accumulation in turn of social capital, which is “a capability that arises from the prevalence of
trust in a society or in certain parts of it” that is “usually created and transmitted through cultural
mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit.” The central argument of Trust is that there is
a relationship between what Fukuyama terms 'high-trust' societies that have plentiful social capital
– he names Germany, Japan, and the United States – and the ability to create and sustain large,
private business organisations149.
In Fukuyama's 1999 book The Great Disruption, he again discusses the topic of social capital –
which he defines here simply as “an instantiated set of informal values or norms shared among
members of a group that permits them to cooperate with one another”150 – and the same
arguments are repeated. Social capital is vital for the proper and efficient working of the economy,
as an informal reservoir of honest and reliable information and authority. It is also critical for the
creation of a healthy civil society – “the groups and associations that fall between the family and
the state.” These 'informal' groups and associations are crucial for both 'formal' economic
organisations and businesses, as analysed in Trust, and 'formal' political and legal administration,
as analysed in State Building151, to function at their best.
What does this mean for the philosophy of history? It is strongly implicit in both accounts that these
informal groups of embodied values – “virtues like truth telling, meeting obligations, and reciprocity”
152
– are not to be explained through their own dynamic or motor of history. There is no struggle for
recognition.153 To re-inscribe this back into the forgotten terms of Plato's substance, we might say
that social capital/trust – as the 'irrational' cultural support for the healthy working of the economy
and the polity – takes the place thymos had had within the Mechanism of EHLM. This replacement
takes two forms: it usually means that social-capital/trust is conceived is the 'residue' or 'extra fillip'
that helps to glue things together after the dialectic of Desire and Reason has fully exhausted itself
in the liberal democratic order. But, on occasion, Fukuyama strangely replicates the relationship
between social capital/trust and socio-economic development through what is clearly the Marxist
base-superstructure metaphor.154 Either way, the second motor of history has clearly evaporated,
even while the impurities left behind are what continue to occupy Fukuyama's interest.
Fukuyama himself, in the preface to Trust, best describes his own career transition. He looks again
at Kojève, who he says believed Hegel was essentially correct in declaring the end of history, and
so had “decided as well that philosophers like himself had no further useful work to do”. And so
Kojève relegated the study of philosophy to weekends, and became a full-time bureaucrat. “In the
light of this progression”, Fukuyama writes, “it seemed only natural that I also should follow my own
The End of History and the Last Man with a book about economics.”155. This is a fair self-
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assessment in the immediate sense that Fukuyama still holds to the idea that history has ended,
and so feels able to move on from his more philosophical interests to more earthy issues like
economics and theories of administration. Or it might symbolise the abandonment of the struggle
for recognition, the second motor of history, so that Fukuyama can take leave of EHLM and study
the remaining surplus issues through his public-policy work – the need for thymos or 'recognition'
for the successful functioning of large-scale businesses (Trust), government administration, legal
enforcement, and public sector provision (State Building, After the Neocons), and for the general
health and well-being of society (The Great Disruption).
Fukuyama, Neoconservatism and US foreign policy
We have completed the primary purpose of the dissertation, which was to reconstruct Fukuyama's
philosophy of history, analyse its details and developments, and make explicit its inconsistencies.
We have just argued in the last section that the inconsistency in Fukuyama's argument has been
resolved in favour of one 'motor' over another. The point of this current segment is to sketch one
possible contributing reason of why this switch in Fukuyama's philosophy of history has occurred.
At the outset we will concede that it cannot account for the whole movement; to even attempt to do
so would be unjustifiably reductionist. The mundane, unglamorous truth of the matter is probably
just that Fukuyama was embarrassed at the attention the end of history thesis received, and felt
that the Hegelian and Kojèvean themes were detracting too much from his serious work as a policy
intellectual. It would miss the point, anyway: the philosophy of world history is about a lot more
than contemporary debates in international relations, and about a lot more than America. Still, the
issues are entangled. It is impossible to talk about liberal democracy and capitalism without
mentioning America, and impossible to talk about America without mentioning its foreign policy
Fukuyama has written copiously on issues of foreign affairs, so we cannot claim to deal with the
huge scope and volume of his views here. Rather, we will concentrate our attention on Fukuyama's
After the Neocons, specifically the admirable pocket history of neoconservatism that comprises
chapter 2. The occasion for tracing the genealogy of this fascinating group of thinkers, of course,
was the 2003 war in Iraq – since the neoconservatives were largely recognised as the intellectual
force behind the push for the war, even sometimes being accused of hijacking the White House
itself.156 What interests us here is that we learn both of Fukuyama's previous self-identification as a
neoconservative (“having long regarded myself as a neoconservative....”,157) and his abandonment
of that very label today (“I have concluded that neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a
body of thought, has evolved into something that I can no longer support”158). This relatively
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sudden change of heart occurs after 9/11, and emboldens with the subsequent decision to invade
Iraq. What is remarkable about this, however, is that Fukuyama had unambiguously been for
regime change since the mid-1990s: “I started out fairly hawkish on Iraq”, recounts Fukuyama,
“and in 1998 signed a letter sponsored by the Project for the New American Century urging the
Clinton Administration to take a harder line against Baghdad after Saddam Hussein blocked the
United Nations weapons inspectors” (the PNAC being a prominent think-tank with notable
neoconservatives members: Fukuyama had previously signed the group's founding 'statement of
principles' in 1997159). Fukuyama then claims that after participating in a study (unnamed) on US
strategy toward the war on terrorism, he had at that point “decided the war didn't make sense.”160
The opening salvo in Fukuyama's distancing from his previous allegiances came with his essay
'The Neo-Conservative Moment”, directed as a critique of Charles Krauthammer. 161 The essay was,
however, only published in the summer of 2004.
Fukuyama begins his critique of the Bush administration using the following device: he manages to
reduce neoconservatism – famously not a complete set or doctrine of beliefs, but rather a sort of
'persuasion' shared by various individuals, otherwise intellectual loners162 – to a 'key' of 4 meta-
principles. During the Cold War something of a concord solidified over what these principles
meant, which “yielded by and large sensible policies both home and abroad”. But during the 1990s,
Fukuyama insists, these principles – wrongly interpreted (though it is far from clear where the cut-
off point lay for Fukuyama) – were used to justify an American foreign policy that “overemphasized
the use of force and led logically to the Iraq war”. At this stage in history, Fukuyama sighs,
neoconservatism has become “irreversibly identified with the policies of the administration of
George W. Bush in its first term, and any effort to reclaim the label at this point is likely to be futile.”
163
The four meta-principles of neoconservatism which Fukuyama discerns are: (1) a concern with
democracy, human rights, and more generally the internal politics of states; (2) a belief that US
power can be used for moral purposes; (3) a scepticism about the ability of international law and
institutions to solve serious security problems; (4) and finally, a view that ambitious social
engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends.164 The
mistake of the Bush administration, in Fukuyama's assessment, was to turn these principles into a
kind of closed mindset impenetrable to rational reconsideration in the light of new empirical
evidence. This led to “biased judgment” in three main areas. The administration, firstly,
overestimated or mischaracterised the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism (by
this, Fukuyama appears to mean, Bush wrongly vastly over-hyped the Iraq/WMD issue); next,
Bush erroneously morphed a healthy scepticism about international law and institutions such as
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the UN (meta-principle 3) into a stubborn conviction that the US needed to 'go it alone' and choose
a unilateralist approach, which had the effect of deeply angering the rest of the international
community. Finally, the Bush administration tragically failed to anticipate the requirements for
pacifying and reconstructing, and was “wildly over-optimistic in its assessment of the ease with
which large-scale social engineering could be accomplished.”165 As Fukuyama convincingly point
outs, this last 'biased judgment' is not so much an erratic interpretation as a direct, flagrant
contradiction of neoconservatism's fourth meta-principle – the opposition to vastly ambitious social
engineering projects166 (this opposition being a closely-held belief for Fukuyama, something we
had already encountered at the beginning of Trust).
Now that neoconservatism has been forever tainted by the failures of the Bush administration,
Fukuyama undertakes what can only be described as a rescue operation. Far from abandoning the
four neoconservative principles, the task of Fukuyama's newly proposed “Realistic Wilsonianism”167
is to re-stitch neoconservatism with more traditional realist threads. Fukuyama himself explains
that Realist Wilsonianism takes from neoconservatism the premises that the US and the
international community at large “need to concern themselves with what goes on inside other
countries, not just their external behavior, as realists would have it”, that “power – specifically
American power – is often necessary to bring about moral purposes”, and even accept the
“forgotten” neoconservative principle that “ambitious social engineering is very difficult and ought
always to be approached with care and humility.”168 Realistic Wilsonianism differs from
neoconservatism in that it “takes international institutions seriously”169 (But we can see how shallow
a concession this really is when Fukuyama takes a look at the state of international organisations
in chapter 6.)170
One possible way of reading the development of Fukuyama's views here is through the turmoil of
allegiances that has been brought on with the end of the Cold War. One of Fukuyama's bugbears
is what he thinks is the blindness of the new generation {'third age'171) of neoconservatives to the
problems of assimilating US national interests and the interests, if we can put it like this, of 'the
system' – of Western liberal democracy and capitalism per se.
Neoconservatives, who historically never had a set of shared beliefs in foreign policy,172 began to
coalesce around a new collective vision, that vision espoused by a number of young writers in the
1990s – Fukuyama mentions William Kristol and Robert Kagan. For most people, it seems fair to
say, the full history of neoconservatism as a movement, tracing origins back to the 1930s, is now
associated in its entirety with the views typically expressed in the op-ed pages of Kristol's The
Weekly Standard. In journals like this, and in books such as Kristol and Kagan's Present
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Dangers173, these neoconservatives took the grounding belief in 'American exceptionalism' to push
for a post Cold War policy of 'benevolent hegemony'. That is, since it was held that the US was the
'exceptional' nation, that it could be trusted to exercise its foreign policy within certain moral
parameters, this thereby meant that if the US was to capitalise on its post-Cold War position to
push forward its military supremacy (rather than return to normalcy – to remould the world in its
name, creating a benign, peaceful, and democratic order – this would not be empire, at least as
traditionally understood, would not be feared by other countries, and could be said to have its own
source of legitimacy. The US would have established itself in a position of 'benevolent hegemony'
But even for Fukuyama, who is far from disagreeing with these presuppositions – who would agree
that US interests were largely coterminous with the interests of the liberal-democractic/capitalism
system during the Cold War, with this system loosely representing human progress – the sheer
chutzpah of this new formulation was simply too much. He is moved to point out that benevolent
hegemony “rests on a belief in American exceptionalism that most non-Americans simply find not
credible. The idea that the United States behaves disinterestedly on the world stage is not widely
believed because it is for the most part not true and, indeed, could not be true if American leaders
fulfil their responsibilities to the American people.”174
How does any of this relate back to our central concern, Fukuyama's philosophy of history? We
should see that it has the effect of refocusing attention on the question of how, through what
means, history is to be advanced. We have a philosophy of history, strong in Marxian-esque
themes throughout, but which is completely absent of any liberal democratic equivalent to Marxian
class struggle and proletarian revolution. And therefore we can ask, what is the historical agent in
Fukuyama's philosophy of history?175 It is far from implausible that the US military could play this
role. Fukuyama is desperate to make it abundantly clear that he will have nothing to do with
'Leninist' interpretations of his history thesis176. (Yet would the alternative to Leninism not be, to
continue the metaphor, a kind of Second Internationalism, where the belief in the end of history
might be unshakable, but the time of the end itself is forever postponed?177)
In terms of the main argument of this essay – that Fukuyama chooses the Mechanism over the
struggle for recognition, which fades from view – the next stage is now deceptively simple: the
terms of such an 'agency', some have noted, can be found in Kojève, who emphasizes the use of
violent struggle and terror in the progression of history.178 And so, because Fukuyama wants now to
draw an (untenable) distinction between using economic and political 'soft power' to induce regime
change, and the use of 'hard power' – the blunt tool of military intervention – to enforce it directly;
and therefore wants to insist that his philosophy of history in EHLM could only possibly entail the
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former as a foreign policy option, and not the latter; Fukuyama disfigures his original construction,
eliminating Kojève and the second motor of history. If the Kojèvean vision of the struggle for
recognition “now appears to be something of an encumbrance for Fukuyama”, this might perhaps
be because “it was a theory of mortal conflict. Hegel and Kojève were, each in his own time (Jena,
Stalingrad), philosophers of war. They legacy is too agonistic for the purposes of drawing a line
between the newfound caution of the statecraft Fukuyama now recommends and the democratic
hypomania of former friends at the Standard. The platitudes of modernization theory are safer.”179
Fukuyama's subsequent disavowals, “recapitulating an agonistic philosophy of history as a pacific
theory of modernisation, eviscerate a distinctive thesis by stripping it of its 'primary motor'” 180
There is certain amount of truth in these arguments, but they have an inherent limit. It is doubtful
how far the link between Kojève and military intervention can be taken; in fact, it seems to go no
further than noticing that both emphasize 'war' or 'struggle' in some way. However, the argument
can work within the terms it was framed: as a contributing factor to Fukuyama's changing attitudes
toward the two developmental logics at work in his philosophy of history
Finally, to bring some closure to this section, we might perhaps comment on the fact that – despite
the title of the book, After the Neocons181 – taking Fukuyama at his word when he says he is no
longer a neoconservative, that he disavowed his neoconservative leanings “years ago”,182 is not a
straightforward exercise. Realistic Wilsonianism, while “tempering the best of neoconservative
convictions with a more informed sense of the intractability of other cultures and limits of American
power,” would still retain the “need for pre-emptive war as a last resort and the promotion of
democracy across the globe as a permanent goal.”183 Fukuyama believes Bush's means were
ineffective and counterproductive, but holds steadfast to his ends. And, while Fukuyama wants to
distance himself from the Kristol/Kagan belief that the US should push forever forward with its
'benevolent hegemony', it can be argued that his retreat to and defence of the platitudes of foreign
policy consensus still implies a deep agreement with the current US global military dominance
today, which is deep cause for concern, whether this consensus can be deemed 'neoconservative'
or whether it cannot. Indeed, we could even say that, as America pushes ahead with its “strategy of
openness” – as A.J. Bacevich has theorised184 – the US military has been playing the role of
historical agent for the propagation of market institutions and pliable democratic governments for
the past twenty years anyway, perfectly indifferent to whether Fukuyama quietly acquiescences or
speaks out.
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Conflicting Themes
Acknowledging the fact that the essay does not encompass the whole of Fukuyama's EHLM
(concentrating on the first half of EHLM – which outlines the mechanisms for a philosophy of
history themselves – thereby ignoring the second half, Parts IV and Part V), and has restricted
itself to one broad line of criticism or interpretation, I will now take three paragraphs to bring up
these other areas for the reader. ,
So, firstly, we have not looked at what Fukuyama has to say on the topic of the last man (and the
way in which the prospect of the last man would completely transform the character of the end of
history). The basic idea is this: from the division of thymos – into megalothymia and isothymia – it
is isothymia that is embodied as the key governing principle in liberal democratic institutions. Then,
over time, isothymia becomes further ingrained into the life and spirit of each community. But
Fukuyama, witnessing this, worries whether we have misunderstood the nature of the end-state we
have reached. Liberal democracy is sustained through an equilibrium of the types of thymos with
the other sides of the soul, reason and desire. Even while a peaceful human order of equality
requires isothymia to be the determining principle, it still requires sufficient 'outlets' for
megalothymia, both to fortify the structure (principally through competition in business, but also in
things like sport, etc.) and to be 'earth' its disruptive effects. If this is not achieved, there is always
the chance that the liberal democratic end-state could be destabilised. Not finished, Fukuyama
then wonders whether even these 'neutered' forms of megalothymia will truly be sufficient for the
highly ambitious and power-hungry. Perhaps there is a part of human nature that will always rebel
against happiness and comfort, that will always prefer struggle and great achievement (who will
save the Übermensch?) With this – as many critics have noticed – he seems strangely to revoke
his whole argument.185 This has spawned a reading of Fukuyama – brilliantly exemplified by
Joseph McCarney186 – to the effect that EHLM is really a kind of replaying of the debate between
Kojève and philosopher Leo Strauss187, and so the book is as much a critique of liberalism and
modernity as a defence of it. Strauss had argued that Kojève's end-state would be less like Marx's
realm of freedom than the period of Nietzsche's last man, and Kojève seems to have come to
agree with Strauss, even while he kept to his philosophy of history.188 This is the source of
Fukuyama's own strange pessimism about the end of history, as it appears in Part V.
Next, there are elements of Fukuyama's thought which suggests that while, yes, he does believe in
the end of history, he is not convinced precisely where that lies. He has claimed, in retort to the
idea that EHLM was simply a defence of the American order, that his vision of the end-state would
in fact be closer to the European model than the American189. There are also threads in the
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argument of EHLM that suggest the possibility that the end-state might not even be one of these
two options but rather a third, Asian authoritarian-paternalistic capitalism. 190 What are we to make
of these?191 Firstly, it is difficult to know quite how Asian authoritarian-paternalistic capitalism would
fit into the dynamics of Fukuyama's argument. While using the Mechanism, we might see how this
model could prove the more efficient, and might contain an avenue for a kind of group thymos, but
it would seem to dampen the emphasis on individual recognition in EHLM. We might be more
inclined to argue that the differences between them – especially between Europe and America –
are far less than important than their similarities.192
Finally, another form of the argument that Fukuyama's philosophy is designed to defend the
American order has been suggested. This comes not from the 'inconvenience' of the second motor
of history, but from the apologetic – or, we might better say, anaesthetizing – effect the idea of an
'end to history' has on any efforts to change the existing order. Frank Füerdi writes: “By means of a
prefix, 'post-' terms revoke history. By declaring the Western world to be 'post-historical.' If history
has already happened, then change is now excluded... By protecting an immutable present into the
indefinite future such a revocation of history exposes its fundamentally apologetic intent.”193
Fukuyama's distinction between 'post-historical' and 'historical' peoples also seems like it could
easily be used to justify US intervention in the developing world – the language of B-52
humanitarianism (as Hobsbawm has termed it.)
We will now conclude the essay – summarising and consolidating the argument, offering some
self-criticisms or delimitations, and ending with an overall assessment of Fukuyama's philosophy of
history.
Summaries, Reservations, Conclusions
The primary intention of this essay has been to introduce, describe and then analyse Francis
Fukuyama's philosophy of history or project for a 'Universal History', as laid out by Fukuyama in
Parts I, II and III of his book The End of History and the Last Man. We then tried to sketch a
lineage of the argument from EHLM right through to Fukuyama's subsequently published efforts.
In the first section of the essay we tried to accomplish three things. Firstly, we set the historical
context for Fukuyama's claims – the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, which
was to represent more generally the collapse of systematic alternatives to liberal democracy (and
capitalism). Secondly, we set out what can be described as the empirical demonstration for the
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ending of history in liberal democracy, which took the form of the table of 61 democracies that
Fukuyama presents. We mentioned some criticisms of Fukuyama's categorizations, but found
them sufficient for the purposes of Fukuyama's presentation. Thirdly, we presented the project of a
'Universal History', what it means, and alluded to the thought of Kant and Hegel. This set the scene
for the rest of the exposition.
In the second section we reconstructed the principal sections of Part II into what was called 'the
Mechanism'. This was initially, for the purposes of the argument, taken as a stand-alone attempt at
explaining the movement and directionality of history alone. We looked at how military competition
forced the consolidation of nation-states, how the advance of science and technology allowed the
capacity for greater economic development, causing vast social upheaval; and why industrial
development was to lead to the modern free market. Next, we introduced three possible
mechanisms for explaining the transition from this larger economic process to the establishing of
liberal democracy, and suggested they were adequate for what they were, even while there was a
'hole' in the argument (as we discussed). Within the terms of the reconstruction at least, there was
no need for turning to the struggle for recognition, and so this switching motionn set up the two
'motors' as rivals for the same space.
For the third section we temporarily postponed the exposition of EHLM for a reading of
Fukuyama's books State Building and After the Neocons, where we attempted to substantiate the
claim that these presented, within them, arguments for a continuation of the Mechanism. We
interpreted the continuation through the their accentuating of the theme of modernization theory,
and through a 'political turn', which downplayed the economic determinism of the previous
account.
In the fourth section, we returned to EHLM to reconstruct the struggle for recognition. This was not
done immediately, however, as we first sought to situate Fukuyama's use of the idea within the
master/slave dialectic of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and then the philosophy of Alexandre
Kojève. We saw that apart from a few Hegelian motifs, the struggle for recognition had very little if
anything to do with Hegel, but more to do with Fukuyama's idiosyncratic use of Plato's divisions of
the soul and the concept of thymos.
The fifth section sought to make explicit the terms of the interpretation that was gradually
crystallizing through the essay: after using Perry Anderson's analysis to show that there was
indeed an extensive confusion or indecision at the centre of Fukuyama's attempt to construct a
mechanism for explaining the movement of history (vindicating what had been lightly suggested at
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the end of section two), we then argue that this indeterminacy has been forcibly resolved in favour
of the Mechanism, or the Mechanism-as-modernisation-theory. The interest in the struggle for
recognition morphs into a concern with concepts such as 'trust' and 'social-capital', relics of
Platonic thymos.
This was the argument of the essay's central proposition completed. The next section – on
neoconservatism and US foreign policy – was designed to suggest that a possible contributing
factor in this switching of Fukuyama's philosophy was his unwillingness to be associated with the
'agonistic' implications of Kojève and the struggle for recognition, as he was trying to clear himself
of intellectual responsibility for the disaster in Iraq. To be clear on the status of this argument: it is
not designed to be a sufficient explanation for the shifting emphasis on the motors of EHLM. It is
only supposed to be one contributing factor – albeit the most interesting and attractive one – to the
shift, the others being more mundane: Fukuyama was embarrassed by the attention, his
intellectual interests simply evolved, etc. And secondly, the argument is likewise not designed to
understand the entire project of the philosophy of history, and the prospect of facing an end to
history, by reducing it all down to a defence of the American foreign policy/military consensus.
Insofar as the current world order of liberal democracy and capitalism is an American order, there
is of course a link, but otherwise it is important not to assimilate the two.
This is now the place to offer a few possible reservations on the argument as it stands. Many of
these reservations might be grouped together under one more general self-criticism – the tendency
to over-interpret to make an argument fit. In what sense is it fair to treat all of Fukuyama's written
work as a complete whole, and thereby interpret each new topic or policy position as the
development of one coherent underlying philosophy? The essay may be guilty of trying too hard
and generalising too much in an attempt to fit Fukuyama's books together as one long narrative
stretching out from EHLM. To a certain extent this seems fair, as it is obvious Fukuyama has not
been trying to develop the end of history thesis, but just to say something insightful and useful on a
wide range of disparate topics. Nevertheless, there must likewise be a strong case for trying to
string together these arguments, and make sense of later work by relating it back to the early
thesis, and visa versa. I hope this case has been made during the essay. Otherwise, I ask the
reader to forgive this
A subset of this general problematic tendency would be trying to exaggerate the differences
between the accounts Fukuyama gives over time, in order to make for a more compelling
argument. Possible instances could include: over-interpreting Fukuyama's 'political turn', seeing it
as more pronounced than it really is, while Fukuyama still holds to an economic determinism; and
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playing down the extent to which the struggle for recognition, and thymos, was already something
in EHLM – especially in Part IV – akin to the concept of 'trust'.194 To be sure, such criticisms would
not altogether miss the mark. But again, I think a case can be made for each segment of the
essay's developing argument. Perhaps it should only come with the proviso that such an argument,
so broad in scope, need not be wholly exhaustive, but rather be convincing in a way that sheds
some light on the topic, or offers a strong perspective that can prove a worthwhile contribution to
the debate
Finally, there is the issue of where Fukuyama's project for a 'Universal History' stands today. There
are elements of the essay's argument – arguing that there is the weakening of teleology, and the
treating of the EHLM thesis just as humdrum social-science – which might even suggest it wasn't
just the struggle for recognition getting sidelined, but that Fukuyama was gradually abandoning the
philosophy of history, and thus the idea of an end of history, altogether. A few aspects of such a
shift do exist. But no, overall, the idea of history still remains. Fukuyama's thinking is still structured
in these broad terms: he would surely stick to the delineations of the idea – from Part I of EHLM,
the victory of liberal democracy and the defeat of all alternatives, etc. – as firmly now as he did
then.
And so now, finally, we should conclude. Let us remember that Fukuyama's first essay on the
subject of the end of history was published in 1989, and the book in 1992, now making the thesis
some two decades old. Should we still pay attention to it? As a product of the end of the cold war,
its immediate message – the death of communism – no longer has any political resonance. Yet this
could now be the source of its significance. The end of history thesis cannot, in 2010, be castigated
as American or Western triumphalism: in the current political climate, it is more a kind of common
sense, a second nature – no one is interested. Today, even to return to the end of history thesis, to
risk re-celebrating the moment that liberal-capitalism finally vanquished all rivals, might in its own
small way be a kind of refusal, as we remember what the progressive movement of history used to
be.
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1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man (EHLM), p.xii
2 EHLM, p.xiii
3 EHLM, p.xiv
4 EHLM, p.3
5 EHLM, p.11
6 By this crisis Fukuyama does not mean a crisis of rationalism per se, a critique that would equate the rationalism of
the impersonal totalitarian state bureaucracy with the increasing systematic dominance of purposive or market
reason (arguably elements of this are raised later on in the book, with Fukuyama's Nietzschean streak), but a rather
less ambitious observation that the horrors of the 20th century could be seen as discrediting rationalism, leaving
liberal democracy “without the intellectual resources by which to defend itself”.
7 Henry Kissinger is often comes up in Fukuyama's writings as the principal representative of realism. On the issue of
whether the USSR was to be a 'permanent feature' of the world, Fukuyama attributes to Kissinger the view that “it
was utopian to try and reform the fundamental political and social structures of hostile powers like the USSR.
Political maturity meant acceptance of the world as it was and not the way we wanted it to be...” (EHLM, p.8). He is
paraded as “the single most articulate advocate of realism in the past generation” (EHLM, p.246); Fukuyama quotes
Kissinger's book A World Restored in support of his view that realists seek to systematic exclude moralism from
foreign policy. Kissinger is also discussed in After the Neocons.
8 EHLM, p.12
9 EHLM, p.37
10 Fukuyama follows Jeane Kirkpatrick's well-known distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian states
[ “Dictatorships and Double Standards”, Commentary 68 (November 1979)] devoting a small chapter to each: in the
first, Fukuyama looks at regimes whose military rulers have voluntarily decided to surrender power to civilian
institutions (two of the examples he gives are the collapse of the military regimes in Greece and Argentina, in 1974
and 1983 respectively, which were not forcibly ousted from power but “gave way to civilian authority instead
through inner divisions with their ranks, reflecting a loss of belief in their right to rule” [EHLM, p.19]) which goes
to demonstrate the collapse of the very legitimacy of authoritarianism itself, because of the growing belief that only
democratically elected government can be legitimate. This was coupled with the widely acknowledged economic
inefficiency and social incompetence of such regimes – the military, of course, not known for its expertise in solving
endemic social problems – and this lack of ability had much the same de-legitimizing effect. In the next chapter,
Fukuyama looks at the collapse of the totalitarian state, and the much wider discrediting of the totalitarian idea that
lay behind it. The USSR, Fukuyama believes, is now considered a failure by the standards of liberal democracy and
capitalism, and communism has now become forever associated with backwardness.
11 EHLM, p.xii
12 EHLM, p.42
13 See EHLM, pp.49-50
14 EHLM, p.43
15 EHLM, Ibid. Fukuyama, in a footnote (EHLM p.347n5), adds to this list the “qualifications to eighteenth-century
definitions of democracy” made by Joseph Schumpeter: we can say with him that democracy is “free competitions
among would-be leaders for the vote of the electorate” [in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, Harper
Brothers: 1950) p.284]. Schumpeter is an important thinker for Fukuyama, who returns to Schumpeter's work in his
essay “Capitalism and Democracy: The Missing Link”, Journal of Democracy (Vol. 3, No.3, July 1992).
Schumpeter also receives numerous other references in EHLM: he is cited in support of the idea that a “market-
oriented authoritarian state should do better economically than a democratic one” (EHLM, p.123), as arguing that
“democratic capitalist societies were markedly un-warlike and anti-imperialistic because they provided other outlets
for the energies that formerly fanned wars” (EHLM, p.260) and he appears numerous times in the footnotes.
16 EHLM, p.43
17 EHLM, p.48
18 For example John Gray castigates the table for the “Monty Pythonish character” of the characterisation. Paul
Johnson calls the table of democracies “a minefield of misunderstandings, both historical and contemporary”.
19 EHLM, p.44
20 e.g. Ralph Milliband, see Literature Review
21 EHLM, p.50
22 e.g. “It is altogether possible to imagine states like Peru or the Philippines relapsing into some kind of dictatorship
under the weight of the crushing problems they face” (EHLM, p.45)
23 EHLM, p.45
24 Ibid.
25 'Reflections on The End of History, Five Years Later', in After History
26 Gregory Elliott, Ends in Sight (2008), p.52. Elliott criticises the 'mystical kernel of Hegelo-Marxism' in Fukuyama's
philosophy of history, preferring to register “Althusserian accents”
27 EHLM, p.58
28 Fukuyama himself says exactly this: History is not “a blind concatenation of events” but a “meaningful whole in
which human idea concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out”
(EHLM, p.51)
29 EHLM, p.46
30 EHLM, p.51
31 Ibid.
32 This argument has been criticised as a naïve, pre-Kuhnian understanding of science by Fred Halliday. But Fukuyama
anticipates such criticism in his footnotes (p.352n2). He writes that Kuhn's scepticism is “not relevant to our present
argument” because “a scientific paradigm does not have to be 'true' in any ultimate epistemological sense for it to
have consistent and far-reaching historical consequences. It merely has to be successful at predicting natural
phenomena, and in permitting man to manipulate them”.
33 EHLM, p.72
34 EHLM, p.73
35 Ibid.
36 EHLM, p.76. Fukuyama gives a few historical examples of such “defensive modernizations”: the consolidation of
power by the great monarchies of Louis XIII of France and Philip II of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries; the far
reaching reforms of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II in reaction to the growing power of the neighbouring Egyptian
military; the reforms of vom Stein, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau in Prussia in response to their crushing defeat at the
hands of Napoleon; and, finally, Fukuyama interprets Gorbachev's perestroika as a last minute attempt to modernize
in the face of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
37 Fukuyama takes this as a “demonstration of the truth of Kant's observation that historical change comes about as a
result of man's 'asocial sociability': it is conflict rather than cooperation that first induces men to live in societies and
then develop the potential of those societies more fully.” (EHLM, p.76).
38 This might suggest a reliance on a kind of structural realism (and Kenneth Waltz is quoted and referenced frequently
in EHLM.) But Fukuyama spends most of his time – in chapters 23 and 24 of EHLM, but also in After the Neocons
– attacking realism. Indeed, Fukuyama's insistence that international relations theorists need to take notice of what
goes on 'inside' states is plainly in contradiction to a structural realist position.
39 EHLM, p.76
40 Ibid.
41 EHLM, p.77
42 Which is because “it is only in cities that one finds an adequate supply of skilled labor required to run modern
industries, and because cities have the infrastructure and services to support large, highly specialized enterprises”
(EHLM, p.77)
43 EHLM, p.91
44 EHLM, p.93
45 The argument is almost reminiscent of Karl Popper's, in favour of the open society. But Fukuyama is otherwise
fairly scathing about Popper's legacy. He cites The Open Society and Its Enemies as a “superficial misreading of
Hegel in the empirical or positivist tradition” (EHLM, p.349n14)
46 EHLM, p.94.
47 Fukuyama admits that “the strong work ethic of many societies is not the result of the modernization process” but
says that certain socio-economic arrangements can subjugate any existing work ethic, making it extremely difficult
if not impossible to re-create. Fukuyama devotes all of chapter 24 of EHLM to this subject (he cites Kojève to the
effect that Hegel believed that Work was the true essence of Man.) Fukuyama attempts to explain the successes of
some countries economics against the failures of others by looking at the 'work ethic'. He universalises Max Weber's
particularist thesis in The Protestant Ethic, saying that truly productive work is undertaken to satisfy thymos and not
simply desire: “The most successful capitalist societies have risen to the top because they happen to have a
fundamentally irrational and 'pre-modern' work ethic”, which would suggest that “even at the end of history, some
form of irrational thymos is still necessary in order to keep our rational, liberal economic world going...” (EHLM,
p.229)
48 EHLM, p.100
49 Fukuyama goes on to elaborate this central thesis of dependency theory: “The advanced economies controlled the
world system of trade and, through their multinational corporations, forced Third World countries into what was
called 'unbalanced development' – that is, the export of raw materials and other commodities with low processing
content. The developed North had locked up the world market for sophisticated manufactured goods like
automobiles and airplanes, leaving the Third World to be, in effect, global 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'.”
(EHLM p.100). He expands on these points, and introduces some of the key literature (EHLM p.357n2,
p.358n8,n10). Fukuyama is also interested in Immanuel Wallerstein, and in critiques which “expose his reading of
the historical record”). Wallerstein has famously claimed that “It is simply not true that capitalism as a historical
system has represented progress over the various previous historical systems that it destroyed or transformed”
(Historical Capitalism, Verso: 1983)
50 EHLM, p.100
51 For instance, Latin America – in its newly granted independence – inherited the feudalism and merchantilism of 17th
and 18th century Spain (and Portugal), making it politically slow to adapt to changing economic conditions
(capitalism never works because it is never really tried). This long standing disposition was combined in the 20 th
century with egalitarian income distributing policies, inspired by the socialist movements, and trade policies such as
import substitution, (restricting – Fukuyama claims – the potential for economies of scale) informed partly by the
assumptions of the dependency theorists. The result being that, today, “many Latin American economies are
dominated by bloated and inefficient state sectors that either attempt to manage economic activity directly or burden
it with a tremendous regulatory overhead” (EHLM, p.104). The vast bureaucratic hurdles often forces economic
activity underground
52 EHLM, p.108
53 Fukuyama continues: “The enormously productive and dynamic economic world created by advancing technology
and the rational organization of labor has a tremendous homogenizing power. It is capable of linking different
societies around the world to one another physically through the creation of global markets, and of creating parallel
economic aspirations and practices together in a host of diverse societies” EHLM p.108. This theme of
homogenization is taken up by Fred Halliday in his “International Society as Homogeneity: Burke, Marx,
Fukuyama”, where he discusses Fukuyama's views.
54 EHLM, p.109
55 EHLM, p.112
56 Fukuyama quotes Talcott Parsons, “Evolutionary Universals in Society”, American Sociological Review (vol.29 no.3
June 1964).
57 EHLM, p.113
58 These social actors would likely include a newly fledgling working class (“increasingly differentiated according to
industrial and craft specialities”), managerial personnel, government bureaucrats, even “waves of immigrants from
abroad, legal and illegal, who seek to take advantage of the open labor markets in developed countries” (EHLM,
p.113)
59 Ibid.
60 EHLM, p.114
61 EHLM, p.113
62 EHLM, p.115
63 EHLM, p.116
64 EHLM, p.117
65 EHLM, p.123
66 EHLM, p.125
67 Ibid.
68 EHLM, p.134
69 EHLM, p.135
70 Ibid.
71 For instance, Callinicos writes that – while Karl Marx “conceptualizes social contradictions as strains generated
within a unitary process”, Fukuyama “treats his two mechanisms of historical change as in effect heterogeneous to
one another, and offers no account of their relationship” (p.40)
72 Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons (AN), p.54
73 Fukuyama refers to Fontenelle, to Machiavelli (“the father of the modern notion of social progress”), to Voltaire,
Turgot, and Condorcet. The main thinkers for Fukuyama are of course Kant, Hegel, Marx and Kojève.
74 EHLM, p.68
75 Fukuyama quotes Capital itself, where Marx observes that “the country that is more developed industrially only
shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”. This line is for Fukuyama the beginning premise of
modernization theory. (Fukuyama attributes this line to “the preface to the English edition of Das Kapital”, but of
course the author of this preface was Engels. It is the source and not the author that is misattributed: the quote
actually comes from Marx's preface to the first 1867 German edition)
76 EHLM, p.68
77 For what Fukuyama considers the most important variations of these modernization theories, see the relatively
detailed survey in EHLM p.351n34. He also goes into more detail on how he believes European sociology mutated
into American modernization theory in After the Neocons, pp.125-6. For a further historical overview, Fukuyama
refers us to Nil Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (John Hopkins
University Press: 2003) (p.209n15)
78 EHLM, p.69
79 AN, p.57
80 AN, p.116
81 Francis Fukuyama, State Building (SB), p.4
82 Fukuyama's account could have been lifted straight from Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Indeed, Fukuyama
indirectly acknowledges the debt, observing that “Friedrich A. Hayek, who was pilloried at midcentury for
suggesting that there was a connection between totalitarianism and the modern welfare state” saw his ideas “taken
much more seriously by the time of his death in 1992” (p.5)
83 SB, p.6
84 SB, p.7
85 SB, p.24
86 SB, p.25. Fukuyama quotes a comment made by the “dean of orthodox free market economists”, Milton Friedman.
He noted in 2001 that a decade earlier he would have had three words for countries making the transition from
socialism: “privatize, privatize, privatize”. “But I was wrong”, he continued. “It turns out that the rule of law is
probably more basic than privatization”
87 Fukuyama says that while “there is today a huge academic- and practitioner-based literature on democratic
transitions, and an even larger literature on institutions and economic development”, the prominent neoconservatives
“stood largely outside this debate” – a judgement that in hindsight seems rather excessively generous. (AN, p.117)
88 He cites Huntington's 1968 “landmark work” Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press: 1968).
Fukuyama sums up the central message of the book as being that “political decay was as likely as political
development” for the developing world, since “excessively fast socio-economic modernization could outrun
political development and produce disorder and violence” (AN, p.126)
89 AN, p.126
90 AN, p.125
91 AN, p.140
92 Ibid. But it is not clear how seriously we are supposed to take the possibility that modernizing authoritarians might
be preferable. Fukuyama echoes his ideas on the weakness of dictatorships and authoritarian states as he elaborated
them in EHLM: on the next pages of After the Neocons, he argues that “good governance is ultimately not possible
without democracy and public participation” and so “without democratic legitimacy, authoritarian rulers will not
survive inevitable setbacks and crises” (AN, p.141)
93 AN, p.128
94 Ibid. See Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and
Material Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge: 2000)
95 AN, p.129. See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Blackwell: 1990)
96 AN, p.130
97 AN, p.130. Fukuyama also gives examples of such work by political scientists (AN, p.210n23)
98Francis Fukuyama, “Francis Fukuyama: The End of History Revisited” (Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, Jun.
28Th 2007) http://fora.tv/2007/06/28/Francis_Fukuyama_End_Of_History_Revisited
99Francis Fukuyama, “The history at the end of history”, The Guardian (April 2007) [online article for Comment is
Free] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/03/thehistoryattheendofhist
100 Afterword to the Second Paperback Edition of The End of History and the Last Man (2006)
101Francis Fukuyama, interview with Matthew Philips for Newsweek, (Sept 20, 2008)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5053194139940095896
102 Or, in Frederick Beiser's words, the subject is aiming to “prove its absolute independence” through its “power over
the world” (Frederick Beiser, Hegel, p.185)
103See Hegel, p.182. Beiser writes that “The ego's first experience is that it cannot attain absolute independence on the
level of animal desire”; “desire destroys its object by consuming it, by forcing it to conform to its life-processes
(digestion, excretion)”. See also Robert Stern, p.73.
104Hegel, p.183
105Beiser, Hegel, p.183
106Phenomenology of Spirit, p.110 / ¶175
107There are two things to note here: Firstly, as Robert R. Williams points out, Kojève is wrong to frame the
master/slave struggle as the model of recognition in Hegel. Williams shows that Hegel sets up a distinction between
an analysis of “the general structure(s) and patterns of intersubjectivity” and “empirical analyses of their potentially
endless contingent variations in determinate actualizations” (Williams, p.48). The master/slave is a 'deficient
realization' of recognition, which does not embody all of its essential features. Contra Kojève, Hegel actually
believes that recognition can be achieved not through the struggle of the slave, but by both egos renouncing
violence. Recognition cannot be forced or coerced, but is only attained through a 'letting-be', a leaving of the other
in his freedom (Williams, pp.56-57). Second, we can see that Fukuyama's use of recognition has none of the
intersubjective character of Hegel's. For Fukuyama, the individual seeks recognition simply so he can be secure and
comfortable within the state, and feels that his fundamental dignity as a human being is respected. An isolated
individual ego or cognito confronts another individual, and both confront the state, etc. Whereas, for Hegel, the
relation to the other is at the same time a self-relation. Hegelian recognition implies that subjectivity is
intersubjectivity.
108McCarney, when discussing Kojève, says that the textual basis for Kojève's interpretation is “slight”, and that there
is “little warrant” for thinking that Hegel himself cast recognition in the role (McCarney 2000, p.92). He goes on to
say that “there are textual grounds, backed by theoretical considerations, for concluding that the struggle for
recognition cannot, for Hegel, be the driving force of history (p.95). Callinicos also delivers an unambiguous
verdict: for Hegel, history is “emphatically not to be characterized as a struggle for recognition. It is rather 'the
progress of the consciousness of freedom'.” (p.27)
109Shadia Drury devotes a whole chapter to this debt, see chapter 5 'The Lure of Heidegger' in Alexandre Kojève: The
Roots of Postmodern Politics. The main point is that Kojève disputes what he himself deems as Hegel's 'monism',
prefering the dualism of Sein (space, static Being, Nature) and nicht-Sein (non-Being, nothingness, negation,
history, Man). Michael Roth argues that Kojève's usage of Heidegger is key to establishing the finitude of History:
Kojève projects Heidegger's “conception of the essential finitude of man onto the historical plane, arguing that
history, since it is the product of human action, should likewise be finite”. “If this were not the case – and here
Kojève accepts Heidegger's critique of the dominant version of Hegelianism – men could flee from the
consciousness of their morality by identifying themselves with part of the story of the infinite progress of History”
(Michael S. Roth, “A Problem of Recognition: Alexandre Kojeve and the End of History”, p.297. Alex Callinicos
summarises that “the shadow of Heideggerian Being-toward-death undoubtedly hangs over Kojève's version of the
historical process” Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History, p.23
110Kojève, quoted in Patrick Riley, “Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre Kojeve”, Political Theory (1981; 9; 5).
Riley also explains that for Kojève, mastery is therefore ultimately “tragic” and “an existential impasse”. Shadia
Drury disputes Kojève's verdict on the sorry state of mastery (p.21)
111Kojève, quoted in Patrick Riley
112Drury, p.19
113This account of Kojève's history is based on Shadia Drury's interpretation. See chapter 3, 'The Age of Slavery'
114From Kojève's “Hegel, Marx and Christianity”, quoted in Riley, p.9
115 To fully explain this we would need to outline the Hegel interpretation of Koyré, and show the ways in which
Kojève tends to rely on Koyré's assumptions. In 1953 Koyré published a pioneering essay on the concept of time in
Hegel's Jena Logik and Realphilosophie, which had concluded that for all its majesty Hegel's philosophy was a
failure because its system was only possible if history was completed, which was just what its dialectic of time, as
perpetual negation of the present by the future, precluded. This diachotomy necessarily means, for Koyré, that the
project of a philosophy of history is incoherent while time continues. Thus Kojève argues that in order for Man to
know his history, time must stop (the future must be impossible): this is the 'end of history'. See Michael Roth, 'A
Problem of Recognition'
116Kojève, quoted in Patrick Riley, p.9
117Kojève, quoted in Patrick Riley, p.10
118Quoting Kojève: “if there has been from the beginning a 'left' and a 'right' Hegelianism, this is also all there has been
since Hegel” ('Hegel, Marx and Christianity', quoted in Patrick Riley, p.13)
119Indeed, “it might be argued that Kojève ignores Hegel's actual theory of the state, and advances in its place what
Hegel's theory would have been if Mastery, Slavery, recognition, and satisfaction had been the only political notions
which he used (Riley, p.19)
120 i.e. from his treatment of the French Revolution (Hegel's attack on the Terror and its 'abstract universality' in the
Phenomenology, that it abolishes all distinctions) to his view on the nation state (central for Hegel, but needs to be
surpassed for Kojève) and the substance itself of the ideal state (Hegel's state being differentiated in structure,
articulated into corporate divisions etc., with an important role assigned to civil society; whereas, Kojève's state
strongly emphasizes the lack of differences within it). Fukuyama himself observes this: “Kojève's universal and
homogeneous state makes no room for 'mediating' bodies like corporations or Stande [Estates]; the very adjectives
Kojève uses to describe his end state suggest a more Marxist version of a society where there is nothing between
free, equal, and atomized individuals and the state” [EHLM p.388 (footnote)]
121This is the term Kojève in his work Esquisse d'une Phenomenologie du Droit. See Anderson, p.321. Kojève's
Marxism is discussed in Patrick Riley
122Callinicos writes that Kojève's treatment of Stalin is “thoroughly Hegelian”; his treatment of Stalin “recalls Hegel's
conception of 'the great individuals of history' as 'the instruments of the substantial spirit', and implies a view of
history as an objective process which, thanks to 'the cunning of reason' realizes its aims through human actors
unaware that their subjective schemes are fulfilling deeper purposes” (Theories and Narratives, p.28)
123Anderson, p.322.. He adds: “The 'imperial union' advocated in 1945, recast as 'integration' in 1950, became a reality
at Rome in 1957, and Kojève could end his days as counsellor to Giscard and Barre, performing the office of the
philosopher as he had wished it” (p.323)
124While Kojève obviously knew there had been wars and revolutions since 1806, he regarded these as merely the
“alignment of the provinces.” This meant for Kojève, as Fukuyama spells out, “communism did not represent a
higher stage than liberal democracy, it was part of the same stage of history that would eventually universalize the
spread of liberty and equality to all parts of the world. Though the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions seemed like
monumental events at the time, their only lasting effect would be to spread the already established principles of
liberty and equality to formerly backward and oppressed peoples, and to force those countries of the developed
world already living in accordance with such principles to implement them more completely” (EHLM, p.66)
125 Perry Anderson explains this in the following way: there is a philosophical coherence behind Kojève's ability to
slide seamlessly between communism and capitalism as the end of history, and this lies in the formalism of Kojève's
universal and homogeneous state. “It lacks, very pointedly, any specification of property regime or constitutional
structure” (“The Ends of History”, in A Zone of Engagement, p.323). This is because the end-state is “deduced all
too rigorously from the original figure of a bare dialectic of consciousness, shorn of social or institutional
complication. As such, in its abstraction and simplicity, it was always liable to capsizals of reference. Universality
and homogeneity – the all and the same – are categories sufficiently wide to accommodate an ample spectrum of
contents. There was thus no conceptual barrier to stop Kojève from switching the end of his story from socialism to
capitalism, without major adjustment”
126EHLM, p.144
127That Kojève's gave an anthropological reading of Hegel is a commonplace observation. Callinicos, citing Jean
Hyppolite, says “Kojeve offers an anthropological version of the dialectic. That is, like all left Hegelians, he gives a
reading of Hegel which privileges the Phenomenology...” (p.23)
128EHLM, p.161. In the collection After History,Timothy Burns argues against Fukuyama's dichotomy between Hobbes
and Hegel, arguing that Hegel's understanding of man is fundamentally Hobbesian
129Ibid.
130EHLM, p.162
131EHLM, p.163
132 Most of the commentators on Fukuyama's work have complained about his cavalier attitude in using concepts,
principal of those being Hegelian recognition and Plato's thymos, e.g. Halliday, Drury, Anderson,Holmes, Heilbroner
133 For an extremely brief exposition of Plato's views on the soul, see Julia Annas, Plato: a very short introduction
(Oxford: 2003), p.68
134EHLM, p.165.
135EHLM, p.182
136EHLM, p.200
137 Ibid.
138EHLM, p.202
139EHLM, p.203
140“The Ends of History”, p.348
141EHLM, p.80
142EHLM, p.135
143“The Ends of History”, p.349
144 We could have been aware of this in Kojève, whose philosophy of history essentially paints the transition from the
pagan world of the master, to the Christian world of the slave, to the overcoming of the relationship in the secular
realization of this ideal. This abstract philosophical account obviously has no credibility as an actual historical
explanation. It shares many similarities with the early Marx.
145 Ibid.
146 Ibid., p.350
147 Francis Fukuyama, Trust, p.4
148 Trust, p.26
149 For a critical review, see Charles Wolf Jr., “The Limits of Trust”
150 Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, p.16
151 Fukuyama, in the second part of State Building, moves on from his discussion of 'stateness' to take a closer and
more detailed look at the requirements of effective public administration. Here he identifies the problem of what he
calls 'organizational ambiguity'. This is where the goals of an organization are unclear, contradictory, or otherwise
poorly specified – this being especially true in the public sector (since there are trade-offs between various public
goods which are difficult to define. The public sector provides services, and service sector productivity is inherently
hard to measure). Goals often emerge and evolve through complicated interactions between organizational 'players',
and the ambiguity of the goal often results in ambiguities over the place of authority in directing agents in pursuit of
these goals. Concerns emerge over what degree of delegation will be most efficient for each particular setting, and it
becomes increasingly difficult to enforce formal systems of monitoring and accountability within the quickly
expanding administrative bodies of a nation experiencing good economic growth. The point that Fukuyama appears
to be making is that much of the time bureaucratic dysfunction is down, at least in part, to disagreements over
authority and responsibility, since these things cannot be decided and formalized all-the-way-down. Due to the size
and complexity of modern public administration, authority will always necessarily have to be distributed
functionally for it to operate; organizational ambiguity will ultimately ensure that “no particular formal specification
of an organization will ever fully optimize the organization's goals”. This crystallizes in the identified problem of
how to monitor low-specificity activities with high transaction volume. Social capital is in a sense a way of
navigating the problem, by being a source of informal authority, or indeed, trust.
152 The Great Disruption, p.17
153 My claim here is directly contradicted by what Fukuyama says in Trust, p.7, on the way that the struggle for
recognition has been subsumed from the military to the economic sphere. But I don't really think this plays any
operative role in Trust. Still, it is reason to measure the essay's argument at this point.
154 In The Great Disruption, Fukuyama claims that “social norms that work for one historical period are disrupted by
the advance of technology and the economy, and society has to play catch-up in order to renorm itself under changed
conditions” (p.12). When discussing social capital, he continues with this theme: “in economic life, group
coordination is necessary for one form of production, but when technology or markets change, a different type of
coordination with perhaps a different set of group members becomes necessary. The bonds of social reciprocity that
facilitated production in an earlier time period become obstacles to production in a later period ...”.(p.18). The Great
Disruption, in many ways like EHLM, manages to combine a deep conservatism – as it laments the break up of
community and family life with the increasing of divorce, illegitimate births, and crime, since the 'sixties – with a
strange optimism or progressivism that this shake-up of moral norms will allow something new to emerge through
the development from the industrial to the information economy
155 Trust, p.xiii
156 See the chapter by Max Boot, 'Myths about Neoconservatism', in Irwin Stelzer (ed.) The Neocon Reader (Atlantic:
2004)
157 AN, p.xxv
158 AN, p.xxvii
159 See the statement of principles on their website: http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
160 AN, p.xxvi
161 Francis Fukuyama, “The Neoconservative Movement”, The National Interest (Summer 2004). In this piece, even
amongst the criticism of Krauthammer, Fukuyama admits that “there are elements of a different neoconservative
foreign policy that are implicit in what I have said”. Fukuyama also refers to Krauthammer in After the Neocons,
when the latter began to argue that the United States faced a 'unipolar moment'.
162 See Irving Kristol, 'The Neoconservative Persuasion', in The Neocon Reader
163 AN, p.xxvii
164 AN, p.4. These principles are later expanded upon, AN pp.48-49
165 AN, p.6. Iraq is an example of a “heavy-footprint” approach to state building and post-conflict reconstruction (SB,
p.x). Fukuyama does not think that the neoconservative pessimism and scepticism toward social engineering can or
should apply to Afghanistan.
166 Fukuyama in fact cleverly traces the genealogy of neoconservatism using this principle. The anti-Sovietism and
anti-Communism of the early Cold War imbued a natural scepticism of 'idealist' or utopian goals, and a reflexive
awareness of the problem of unintended consequences. This then eventually asserts itself on these thinkers – coming
from the liberal tradition – as they began to analyse US domestic policy. In opposition to Soviet social engineering
abroad and in seeing the limits of Sixties radical 'social engineering' at home, the neoconservatives completed their
move to the Right. The question would then remain of how all this turned around in the neoconservative foreign
policy views of the 1990s.
167 AN, p.9. Fukuyama maps 4 different approaches to American foreign policy:. In addition to the neoconservatives,
there are the (2) realists, whose “respect power and tend to downplay the internal nature of other regimes and human
rights concerns”; (3) liberal internationalists, who “hope to transcend power politics altogether and move to an
international order based on law and institutions; and, there are what Walter Russell Mead labels (4) 'Jacksonian'
American nationalists, who “tend to take a narrow, security-related view of American national interests, distrust
multilaterialism, and in their more extreme manifestations tend toward nativism and isolationism” (AN, p.7)
168 Ibid.
169 AN, p.10
170 For instance, Fukuyama insists that a lack of trust in the United Nations cannot be read as contempt for
international opinion; he criticises the UN as being “structurally limited with regard to both [democratic] legitimacy
and effectiveness” [AN, p.157] and likewise dismisses the Security Council as too cumbersome and bureaucratic to
be taken seriously on major security issues. But of course, while there are “deficiencies in the ability of the United
Nations to authorize [the use of] force”, this “does not mean that the organization cannot play an important role in
post-conflict reconstruction and other nation-building activities” [AN, p.161]. Once we make the decision, you feel
free to join in. When Fukuyama says that the Realistic Wilsonian – unlike the neoconservative – must believe in
international institutions, the reader must not be so naïve as to assume he means ones that actually exist. Instead,
Fukuyama looks to the construction of new international institutions, following the principle of what he calls 'multi-
multilaterialism' Although some existing international institutions are better than others, especially those that have
“fewer legitimacy problems than the United Nations”, whose “members are genuine liberal democracies” which “all
share important core values and institutions”, and where “the United States has a great many friends.” [AN, p.173]
We are of course speaking of NATO, an organisation which – while itself operationally cumbersome, Fukuyama
admits – provided legitimacy for military intervention in the Balkans and later in Kosovo in a way the UN could not.
171 See both the introduction and appendix to Justin Vaisse's new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a
Movement (Belknap Press: 2010)
172 This being the case at the end of the Cold War and the early 1990s, before Kristol/Kagan. The National Interest
editor Owen Harries proclaimed the need for a return to realism; Irving Kristol began arguing in the 1980s that the
United States ought to consider disengaging from Europe; and Jeane Kirkpatrick issued a brief for a return to
American 'normalcy'
173 William Kristol and Robert Kagan, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense
Policy (Encounter: 2000). The book has an expansion of another article they had originally written, “Toward a Neo-
Reaganite Foreign Policy”, Foreign Policy (75, no.4, 1996). Fukuyama quotes from their book, AN p.56
174 AN, p.111. Perry Anderson elsewhere puts it like this: “For the neoconservative core, American power is the engine
of the world's liberty: there neither is, nor can be, any discrepancy between them. For Fukuyama, the coincidence is
not automatic. The two may drift away from each other – and nothing is more likely to force them apart than to
declare that they cannot do so, in the name of a unique American virtue unlikely to persuade anyone else”. (“Inside
Man”, see Literature Review)
175 See Fred Halliday, covered in Literature Review
176 Fukuyama writes: “I did not like the original version of Leninism and was skeptical when the Bush administration
turned Leninist. Democracy in my view is likely to expand universally in the long run. But whether the rapid and
relatively peaceful transition to democracy and free markets made by the Poles, Hungarians, or even the Romanians
can be quickly replicated in other parts of the world, or promoted through the application of power by outsiders at
any given point in history, is open to doubt” (AN, p.55)
177 Ken Jowitt had offered an interpretation of Fukuyama's views here which Fukuyama himself found very congenial.
He writes that, in the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration had “concluded that Fukuyama's historical
timetable was too laissez-faire and not nearly attentive enough to the levers of historical change”. This led to an
“active 'Leninist' foreign policy in place of Fukuyama's passive 'Marxist' social teleology”. But as Fred Halliday
makes clear, such a 'passive' social teleology, without any notion of an agent or moving force, seems inadequate to
task. Anatol Lieven puts it like this: “Fukuyama stresses in his latest book that The End of History described a
democratic capitalist version of an anti-Leninist Marxian approach – stressing slow cultural, social and economic
change, not sudden revolution. He maintains that he is a Gramscian, emphasizing the intellectual and cultural
hegemony of capitalist democracy, not claiming that it would inevitably work well everywhere or solve all
problems”, in 'The Two Fukuyamas'
178 Gregory Elliott: “history might culminate in a rational hedonism, but the road to that end state was drenched with
blood. Hegel had pronounced history had pronounced history a 'slaughter-bench'. Kojeve, in what Vincent
Descombes deems 'a terrorist conception of history' [Modern French Philosophy, p.14], embroidered the conceit”
(Elliott 2008, p.60) It is worth quoting Kojève at length on this (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p.185):
“Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht ('World History is a tribunal that judges the World'). History is what
judges men, their actions and their opinions, and lastly their philosophical opinions as well. To be
sure, History is, if you please, a long 'discussion' between men. But this real historical 'discussion' is
something quite different from a philosophic dialogue or discussion. The 'discussion' is carried out not
with verbal arguments, but with clubs and swords or cannon on the the one hand, and with sickles and
hammers or machines on the other. If one wants to speak of a 'dialectical method' used by History, one
must make clear that one is talking about methods or war and of work”
Callinicos notices in Kojève's Stalinism an acceptance that terrorism and tyranny may be necessary to advance history;
Drury notices how Kojève “places special emphasis on terror as a necessary component of revolution”, that the
liberation of the slave is not possible without a fight (Drury, p.36).
179 Anderson, “Inside Man”, see Literature Review
180 Eliott 2008, p.61
181 After the Neocons being the British title of the book, the US title was America at the Crossroads. But again, as we
have seen, whether Fukuyama really believes the US is at an important crossroads, or whether really he is really
comfortable with it continuing down its current path, is up for debate
182 In the Newsweek interview, Fukuyama's interviewer Matthew Philips asks “You're a long way from your early
neoconservative leanings?”, and Fukuyama replies “I disavowed those years ago”
183 Anderson, “Inside Man”, see Literature Review
184 A.J. Bacevich argues that the 'Big Idea' guiding US strategy is “openness”. The four imperatives of the consensus
constituting the substructure of post-Cold War US foreign policy are summed up by Bacevich: (1) the imperative of
America's mission as the vanguard of history, transforming the global order and, in doing so, perpetuating its own
dominance (the “end toward which history tended under the tutelage of the United States” was “freedom, achieved
through the spread of democratic capitalism and embodied in the American way of life”: “America's unique
responsibility was to assist others toward history's ultimate destination”); (2) the imperative of openness and
integration, given impetus by globalization but guided by the United States; (3) the imperative of American 'global
leadership' expressed by maintaining US preeminence in each of the world's strategically significant regions; and (4)
the imperative of military supremacy, maintained in perpetuity and projected globally. For other insightful views on
US foreign policy, see Gowan (1999, 2001), Chomsky (2003)and Callinicos (2009)
185 e.g. Ryan, Holmes, Mead, Gourevitch
186 McCarney, 'Shaping Ends: Reflections on Fukuyama'. See Literature Review
187 The important terms here are Strauss's two criticisms of Kojève: that (1) without a teleological philosophy of
nature, history cannot be given the order Kojève seeks of it (Kojève having severed Hegel's philosophy of history
from his views on nature); and (2) Strauss argues that it is the quality and not the universality of recognition that
counts. Fukuyama takes up both of Strauss's points in his theory of megalothymia. See Strauss 1963. For the full
Kojève/Strauss debate, see Michael S. Roth, The Ironist’s Cage, chapter 5; and Robert Pippin, Idealism as
Modernism, chapter 9.
188 Since the primary criterion of Kojève's end of history is the fulfilment of satisfaction rather than the realisation of
liberty, he can argue that the end state might see the abolishing of Man as he has all his desires satisfied, returning to
nature; becoming animals again. Michael S. Roth describes how Kojève reinscribes Nietzsche into his end-state
after his debate with Strauss: “The fantasy of the end of history becomes a nightmare as it is incorporated into a
Weberian perspective on the routinization of life. The closure of the end of history is an iron cage in which human
animals can engage in a variety of activities without struggle because their essential desires have been satisfied”
(1993)
189 Fukuyama writes in the 2006 Afterword that “Anyone familiar with Kojève and the intellectual origins of his
version of the end of history would understand that the European Union is a much fuller real-world embodiment of
the concept than the contemporary United States. In line with Kojève, I argued that the European project was in fact
a house built as a home for the last man who would emerge at the end of history.” Fukuyama also said in the
Newsweek interview that “the European Union represents those ideas [of the end of history] actually”
190 Fukuyama says that the “most significant challenge being posed to the liberal universalism of the American and
French revolutions today” is coming from “those societies in Asia which combine liberal economies with a kind of
paternalistic authoritarianism” (EHLM, p.238) but then says (“Recognition based on groups is ultimately
irrational...”) (EHLM, p.242). Fukuyama actually goes on to dispute the cogency of the idea of a generalised 'Asian
model' in Trust
191 Elliott gives 4 possible candidates for the end of history: (1) US liberal democratic capitalism; (2) Asian
authoritarian-paternalistic capitalism; (3) European liberal democratic capitalism; and (4) History has not been
concluded, and will continue until the contradictions within liberalism resolved (2008, p.50)
192 Which Fukuyama himself argues: “Contemporary Europeans tend to prefer more equality at the expense of liberty,
and Americans the reverse, for reasons rooted in their individual histories. These are differences of degree and not
principle” (Afterword, 2006)
193 Füerdi, 'The Enthronement of Low Expectations'. See also Fritzsche and Norris, who see the similarities between
Fukuyama's ending of progressive history and the postmodernists revoking the cogency of the idea of progress
history. Norris also links Fukuyama to the failure of intellectuals to properly resist the US during the Gulf War
194 e.g. in After the Neocons, Fukuyama repeats the argument of chapter 10 of EHLM, rather than emphasising the
need for strong states: “Economic modernization, when successful, tends to drive demands for political participation
by creating a middle class with property to protect, higher levels of education, and greater concern for their
recognition as individuals” (AN, p.54). There is also the idea the capitalist work ethic is a sublimated form of the
desire for recognition (see footnote 48, 65-67 )

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On Francis Fukuyama

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Chris Hughes 50655 – Dissertation (809L3) – MA Social and Political Thought

Francis Fukuyama and

History”3, which becomes the first 'motor' of history.

Reconstructing the Mechanism

According to classical liberal theory, Fukuyama summarizes, “participation in an open system of

The Development of Fukuyama's views

Fukuyama is broadly supportive of the Reaganite/Thatcherite project of state cutbacks. Indeed, he

Hegel, Kojève and the struggle for recognition

The Phenomenology is an introduction to Hegel's system of philosophy, written in 1807.The section

that provides the framework for Fukuyama's own second 'motor'.

Fukuyama, Neoconservatism and US foreign policy

Summaries, Reservations, Conclusions

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