The Contented Dog:

Fukuyama’s style in discussing the history of man is captured by the following paragraph extracted from his book:

“An American politician could harbor ambitions to be a Caesar or a Napoleon, but the system would allow him or her to be no more than a Jimmy Carter or a Ronald Reagan - hemmed in by powerful institutional constraints and political forces on all sides, and forced to realize their ambitions by being the people’s “servant” rather than their master.”

He describes his concept of the “last man” with this paragraph:

“Nietzsche’s last man was, in essence, the victorious slave. He agreed fully with Hegel that Christianity was a slave ideology, and that democracy represented a secular form of Christianity.

In the ultimate society, he uses the analogy of a dog to describe his last man’s outlook,

“A dog is content to sleep in the sun all day provided he is fed, because he is not dissatisfied by what he is. He does not worry that other dogs are doing better than him, or that his career as a dog has stagnated, or that dogs are being oppressed in distant parts of the world. If man reaches a society in which he has succeeded in abolishing injustice, his life will come to resemble that of the dog.”

As is clear from the above, the book is well written and full of thoughtful insights.

Fascinating, thought–provoking, but out of date:

In this fascinating and highly thought-provoking book, American philosopher Francis Fukuyama argues that the war at the beginning of human history was a battle for prestige or recognition. And, history has unfolded as a search to find a balance between the drives for victory of one over another to gain that recognition. In the eighteenth century, history effectively began to end as people embraced the liberal democratic/capitalist system that granted mutual recognition.

Now, history is not over for those outside this system, and nations can return to history if they move away from the liberal democratic/capitalist system. Along the way, the author unfolds his argument for the drive for recognition as the engine of human history, explains how we got to where we are, and what the future may eventually bring for the human race. The author makes his argument in a clear, compelling manner that puts great force behind his argument.

I do, though, have several complains against this book. First of all, I have the 1992 edition, and some of what I have to say may not apply to later editions. But, as the West now stands in a crisis situation in world history, it is easy to see that some of what has happened in the last 15 years was not anticipated by Mr. Fukuyama.

Chapter 7 of this book is entitled, No Barbarians At The Gates. Well, in point of fact, the West faces two sets of Barbarians at the gates. The first set of barbarians are in fact within the gates, and is the newly militant Liberalism with its drive to extinguish freedom (think of Dr. Heidi Cullen’s desire to remove American Meteorological Society accreditation to any meteorologist who expresses skepticism towards man-made global warming) in its drive for radical equality. This is in fact the “excess of isothymia” that the author mentioned was possible in chapter 29, but he did not expect it to be coupled with an external threat.

Second of all, on page 45, Dr. Fukuyama states that Islam poses “a grave threat to liberal practices,” but then immediately moves away from the threat of Islam, as if wishing it out of existence. In point of fact, with the West’s inability and even downright refusal to maintain its borders, the “post-historic” world has been invaded by people from the “historic” world, and militant Islam is now working with some success to undermine the liberal democratic system from within the very heart of the “post-historic” world.

Therefore, while I do think that this book is quite correct in its view of the drive for recognition and the victory of the liberal democratic/capitalistic system, I do think that it does not do a good job of anticipating what would (and did!) come next. The “post-historic” world has proved itself unable (at least so far) to protect itself against the “historic” world, and it is uncertain that it will be philosophically able to protect itself without a turn to towards the “megalothymia” that the good doctor so fears.

So, overall, I would highly recommend this book as a fascinating philosophical look at the modern world, but I would not say that it goes so far as to explain where we are now and where we are truly heading. I give this book a somewhat guarded recommendation.

To ignore the post-modern does not lead to history:

A mythic history book that has fed reams upon reams of debate, but seventeen years later it sure has aged. First let’s be clear. It is not a philosophy book since it essentially repeats and confronts what others have written and it stops with Kojeve who is at least kind of old. Not one of the post modern philosophers or historians are quoted or alluded to. This leads me to my second remark. How can we dare discuss modern history and ignore the post modern school which is, true, essentially European, what’s more French? Of course, the disadvantage with these historians is that most of them are still alive and kicking and they do not like people making them say things what they do not think. In other words they can rebut. Which means the book is not a history book in any way entering the scientific and academic debates of the last fifty years. Then, this being said, we can examine the content of the book. The main idea is that history is following some trajectory that leads it to some kind of a destination, understood as an end, a final point. History contains a pattern and it is not pure whimsical caprice. Right. Easy to see. Now to believe democracy is spreading in the world. We can even agree with that. But it is not democracy that is the pattern or the trajectory. It is the march of humanity towards full freedom. It had to free itself from purely animal life and nature that made the human species quite fragile and weak at first. It had to develop its surviving strategies by using what biology had given to it: a brain, the possibility to speak vowels and consonants and articulate them, the possibility to stand up, the possibility to grasp objects in a more effective way due to its thumb opposed to the fingers, etc. And the first task was to take care of their young who were premature and had to be looked after for several years before they could be really autonomous, and yet too small to live autonomously for several more years (sexually autonomous at the age of eleven of twelve, maybe earlier in those distant millennia). This determined the first division of labor, those who could look after the young, and particularly feed them, and the others. And language was invented and along with it the power to conceptualize, etc. And that’s exactly what Kant forgot, what Marx neglected, what Kojeve ignored and what Fukuyama overlooks. Then he lives on a mythic first man that never existed, he thinks along the line of the primeval battle without any specification: in what state was humanity before the battle? If this battle established the masters and the slaves, they must have been free before. And they would have accepted to be enslaved all over the world? Of course not. Slavery was marginal and even inexistent in many civilizations, or it had very elaborate justifications like the caste system in the Hinduistic tradition, and that is not primeval. It is not because slavery was the norm in ancient Egypt, in Persia, in Israel (except for Jews or Israelis), in Greece and in Rome that it was true all over the world. It was marginal in the Celtic and Germanic tribes. Then this myth of the first man borrowed from Hegel is redoubled with the other myth of the last man borrowed from Nietzsche. And there Fukuyama derails. The future of the liberal democratic world is peaceful, without any classes, without any conflicts, without any struggle, with full satisfaction of human needs, etc. In other words a life without work, without ambition, without any effort to do better today than yesterday. Just sit back and enjoy. In other words the Elois of H.G. Wells but without the Morlocks. In other words a liberal world that he constantly identifies to capitalism but with no competition any more. He just forgets that competition is the basic principle of the market economy. In other words he is irrelevant due to this contradiction. But there is still worse. He speaks a lot of the inequality of human beings, but in vague terms. Human equality is only “born - and not created - equal in rights”, but that is the French Revolution, but he seems to believe it is the same thing as the Declaration of Independence that says “created equal”, period. Then when he speaks of the liberal revolution that the spirit of 1776 represents for him, he seems to forget that this Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the states statutes refused these rights to women, men under a certain age which was very advanced at the time, to Indians who do not pay taxes, to Blacks and other slaves who are not free, and to all the whites who do not earn property and/or do not pay taxes. And each extension of the beneficiaries of the Bill of Rights will be a battle, even a bloody battle at times, like the Civil Ward and its 600,000 casualties, and the Indian wars that will not lead to any extension. By neglecting all that he does not see that the motor of history, as he says, is the contradictions in our various human societies and that a contradiction is always solved to be replaced by another and contradictions will be eternal. And Fukuyama does not see the world is changing so fast that we cannot say what it will be in fifty years, and he ignores the fact that we are not in the post-industrial economy anymore but we have entered the knowledge economy phase: what are the contradictions of this world, the competitions of this economy? Fukuyama repeats Kojeve and Hegel and Nietzsche but does not answer these questions.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

Finally - Hegel can now be understood!:

I normally dont get down with political philosophy books, but this one really explores some serious ideas while putting them in the context of history. Fukuyama bases almost all of his ideology off of Hegel and Kojeve, a modern Hegel scholar from Czech Republic. I love history yet have found Hegel incomprehensible and too dense to even consider buying one of his tomes - for people who are interested in history or the idea of dialectics, read this book. Fukuyama explains Hegel while placing him in the context of liberal democratic government - Fukuyama follows Kojeve’s assertion that this is the end of history because there are no serious competitors to liberal democracy. The fall of communism and the subsequent unveiling of information on the corruption and violence that those regimes inflicted on their own people has led to a more or less universal acceptance of democracy as the preferred form of government. Fukuyama and Kojeve believe that democracy best satisfies man’s “desire for recognition” - which leads to man’s stupid ideas - mainly war, envy, etc. These aggressive tendencies of man are what cause history and the end of history has been brought about by the acceptance of the governmental form (liberal democracy) which best allows all men the opportunity for recognition. Seriously, this is an insightful, true book full of great intellectual ideas.

A brief summary to a modern philosophical gem::

Fukuyama spends most of the book exploring the seminal underpinnings of Universal History as it relates to early Christianity and ultimately the great German Idealist, Hegel: Fukuyama expresses his assiduous thesis with mostly Hegel as his overarching linchpin and with Alexander Kojeve serving as an elegant, clear sighted interpreter.

As an evolutionary catalyst threading throughout human history, Fukuyama examines the details of the ever-insistent human trait of “Thymos,” a driving human impulse for recognition: “the primary motor driving history.” Fukuyama carefully threads the social implications and political impact of “Thymos” throughout history and its tenuous development through various less than savory political forms (Authoritarianism, Communism, Fascism) until it arrives at its most counter-balanced form under the current rising epoch of Liberal Democracy.

For Fukuyama, the natural culmination of human political and social society ends triumphantly with Liberal Democracy. It is with Liberal Democracy that mankind’s needs and wants are most thoroughly satisfied: The balanced state of “Isothymia.” It is with Liberal Democracy that the passionate drive for recognition of “Thymos” (and it’s most severe condition: “megalothymia.”) is most innocuous.

However, as the culmination of human history, modern Liberal Democracy is not without its incipient flaws (the constant tug of war between Liberty versus Equality) or its potential for crippling problems arising from an unchecked “megalothymia:” Equations that Fukuyama explores with iconoclastic precision with the ever powerful and frightening Friedrich Nietzsche as his intellectual blunt instrument.

With Nietzsche as his ruthless gadfly, Fukuyama arrives at the danger of the Last Man: “We risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals…Men would face the constant danger of degenerating from citizens to mere bourgeois.” The problem of the Last Man highlights and outlines current social disintegration in our very own society. (Some brief examples: The poor voter participation, the apathy of our citizens to engage in worthy causes, our lack of community spirit, etc.) If the sickness of the Last Man is left to fester, if it is not addressed, modern Liberal Democracies would “grow into a morass of selfish hedonism and community would ultimately dissolve.”

This book is a fantastic piece of work. I had great fun reading this book and I am sure that I will re-read it again.