Kicking the Ladder
Why Francis Fukuyama is not even wrong.
I once asked the late Lorenzo Albacete, a Puerto Rican priest and New York writer, what he thought about Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” idea. He smiled. “According to Fukuyama … it turns out that the culmination of the human spirit looks like the suburbs of New Jersey.” Today, I live in the suburbs of New Jersey, and they are indeed wonderful, if not quite the fulfillment of all my desires. But I fear the prophecy in what Albacete said next: “I never believed it. I knew that sooner or later, something would blow up.”
The question, “Has history returned?” has been on many writers’ minds since Russia invaded Ukraine. But the idea of history ending (and then returning) has enjoyed wide circulation since Fukuyama first discussed it in 1989. Today, it’s an idea whose time has passed. Its kernel of truth has been accepted even by Fukuyama’s opponents. The idea is like a ladder: once we’ve used it to climb to a higher point of view, we can leave it behind.
Damir mentions the “End of History” thesis in last week’s Monday Note, which was about Lea Ypi, a political thinker who wrote a beautiful memoir about growing up in post-Communist Albania. Its title alludes to Fukuyama: Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. Something that Ypi recently said about the post-Communist, end-of-history world struck me as being darkly prophetic, of a piece with Albacete’s quip. Damir writes that, for Ypi
… [w]hat is most striking about large parts of Central and Eastern Europe (and probably even Russia) is that people have lost faith. Communism took away their religion and then collapsed on itself, she said. An experiment with liberal democracy and capitalism has in a lot of places also yielded deep disappointments and disillusionment. And faith in the transformative project of the European Union is also fading fast. There’s probably nowhere else in the world with a larger concentration of people who legitimately don’t believe in anything, [Ypi] concluded.
Ypi’s comments inspire Damir to ask two questions. First, a personal one: “Can life be fulfilling if you don’t believe in some bigger narrative of redemption?” Second, a political one: “How do you organize and govern a bunch of people who believe in nothing?”
I’m not sure whether Damir thinks that the two questions are related or, better, that you can’t answer the political one without also addressing the personal one. Can you have prosperity and order without a bigger narrative that gives meaning to our lives? One of the main assumptions behind the “End of History” idea is that the two questions can and should be addressed separately. The question of meaning is a private one, to be solved by the individual. The political question is a matter of implementing the right institutions, which should be neutral, fair, and small-l liberal.
But Ypi’s account suggests that both questions overlap, because they’re both political. The instability of Central and Eastern Europe, the revival of nationalisms, the seduction of tyrants, the temptation of violence, all have occurred in a context where great belief systems — Christianity, Communism, liberal technocracy, etc. — have disappeared or failed. These systems provided both personal meaning and political order. In these places, liberalism was not the final system. It did not usher the “End of History.” It is only the latest system to lose credibility.
Damir is right: It’s a pressing question how to govern under these post-religious, post-Communist, post-liberal conditions. But the first step towards a solution is to ditch Fukuyama’s thesis.
As Fukuyama put it, the “End of History” refers to the claim that humanity has finally developed a political system that satisfies it completely, and could bring about global peace.
Fukuyama argues that history is largely driven by human nature, and that human nature has two essential parts. The first part is “desire,” by which he means something like “acquisitiveness.” Desire is expansive: It includes the impulse to pursue both basic goods (food, shelter), but also non-essential consumer goods. Free market capitalism, industrialization, and technology have, according to Fukuyama, made it possible to satisfy this desire to a great degree. In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, he calls this “the triumph of the VCR,” alluding to the then-high demand in eastern Europe for videocassette players.
The other part of human nature Fukuyama calls “spiritedness,” an idea from ancient Greece called thymos. This is the aspect of the human being that wants to feel accomplished and proud, which motivates creativity and ambition, and which demands recognition from its peers. It cannot be satisfied by material prosperity, but only through a mutually beneficial order that grants universal recognition to all. Humanity has achieved this, so the argument goes, with liberal democracy. In a liberal democracy, we are all equal under the law, a form of universal recognition. Liberalism sublimates thymos by allowing individuals to pursue great projects of technological or national significance. It makes the human spirit “safe and domesticated.”
The “End of History” means that eventually, everyone in the world will realize that tech-driven capitalism and liberal democracy are the only way to satisfy human society. Eventually, Fukuyama writes, “enough wagons would pull into town such that any reasonable person looking at the situation will be forced to agree that there had been only one journey and one destination.”
The problem with this theory is that it can’t be falsified. The commentary bears this out. Every few months, with increasing regularity, someone publishes an article somewhere arguing that “the end of the end of history” has finally arrived or, the opposite, that Fukuyama’s thesis still holds up and that history is still, truly over. Sometimes the argument begs the question: The end of the end of history is coming precisely because people are forgetting how good liberal democracy is; history is returning, but Fukuyama is still right.
The two main internal pressures on liberal democracy, Fukuyama wrote, are isothymia and megalothymia. The former is the desire for ever-greater equality – it’s what motivates people to demand equal representation in every part of life, something which leads to clashes of groups within democracies. (This is why, years later, Fukuyama became a critic of identity politics.) The latter is the desire for greatness — it’s what motivates people to acquire wealth, to hustle, to seek fame, to become Donald Trump (a name Fukuyama mentions, prophetically, in his 1992 book). On the geopolitical level, these two pressures cause wars. Small countries demand equality with large countries. Small nations are driven by isothymia to demand justice and independence. Once-great nations are driven by megalothymia to resurrect their dead empires.
But this scheme only goes so far in explaining the inner drive of those figures who want to transcend liberalism. Fukuyama believes that political motivation is completely accounted for by desire and thymos. He mentions no other sources for human achievement. It follows then, that if you’re satisfied, it’s because you’re living in a liberal state. If you’re not satisfied, it’s because your state is not liberal enough. But the scope of human desire might be greater than what’s accounted for in Fukuyama’s theory. It’s interesting that Fukuyama uses the Greek word for spiritedness, thymos, throughout his 1992 book, but he never uses the Greek word for desire, which is eros. For the ancient Greeks, eros was more than mere acquisitiveness. It is the impulse to seek truth, create beauty, craft legislation, even seek God.
Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, “The End of History?” and The End of History and the Last Man succeed as historical narratives and even, as works of art. Their genius lies in the way they capture the ideas, drama, and spirit of the end of the Cold War and the wave of liberalization in the 1990s. But the truth of what followed this wave was better expressed in 1999 by the American poet, Zack de la Rocha:
For it’s the end of history It’s caged and frozen still There is no other pill to take So swallow the one that made you ill.
There’s something in the human spirit which compels it to want more, and to seek to transcend the current dispensation, even at the risk of doing something perverse. I’m not convinced Fukuyama’s account of human nature can explain it.
Fukuyama himself admitted that a lingering dissatisfaction would always be with us. “The end of history,” he wrote in 1989, “will be a sad time.” But maybe the way to happiness lies in looking at our historical moment in a new way, beyond the desire-and-spiritedness framework that everyone tacitly accepts. Liberalism provides a modicum of freedom, but millions of people now wonder what freedom is for, what meaning it should serve, and whether society can be structured in a way that better reflects this meaning, whatever it might be. Even in the Jersey suburbs.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs in the 1990s. While an undergrad at George Washington University in the 2000s, I remember a fellow student in a political science class saying, “Fukuyama was right, until 9/11.”
Saying the end of history would be a sad or dull time almost seems like daring history to start again.
I'm thinking more along the lines of "the end of civilization" with the coming of Trump and the resurgence of Fascism.