review

Fred Halliday

An Encounter with Fukuyama

In conversation after a television discussion of his The End of History

and the Last Man,1 an occasion somewhat deviated by the interventions of a bibulous Labour dignitary, Francis Fukuyama revealed that
his maternal grandfather had studied in Germany under Werner
Sombart. The grandfather had subsequently purchased Sombarts
library and taken it back to Japan. One day, Fukuyama said, I shall
inherit a first edition of Marxs Das Kapital. Fukuyama is far from
being a Marxist, but his work raises many questions of interest and
challenge to historical materialism and is lacking in the standard
reflexes of academic anti-communism: his treatment of Marx, as of
others such as Hobbes, Hegel and Nietzsche, while at times idiosyncratic, encourages reconsideration.
There are, however, some theoretical schools that Fukuyama, for all
his range of engagement-----from Plato to the NLR-----chooses to ignore
or treat in a slight manner. The difficulties that ecology and feminism
pose for his argument-----the former by intimating catastrophe, and
man-made catastrophe at that, the latter by suggesting a quite other
history with which liberal democracy does not engage-----are glancingly referred to, but not in any substantial way confronted. It does
not look as if the RAND Corporation library has as yet managed to get
in many books on feminist political theory. An even greater absence is
Freud (significantly the one index listing is a misprint): yet Fukuyamas whole argument rests upon a theory of the human mind, and
of the contradictory impact of the desire for recognition, thymos. It
might be thought that in the late twentieth century no theory of
human psychology, and of the unconscious and irrational forces
within it, could be developed without at least a contestatory engagement with Freud. What we have in The End of History is not, however,
dismissal of Freud, or behaviourist epiphenomenalism, but a bland
refusal to engage with the major theory of the irrational, in favour of
a brave, but forced, assertion that history and psychology can be
explained by reference to the thymotic element in man.
In some respects, the real object of Fukuyamas critique is not Marx,
1

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Hamish Hamilton, London
1992, 17.99 hbk; The Free Press, New York 1992, $24.95 hbk.
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or Freud, but rather Weber, since it is his thesis that the universal
ideals predominant in the world today are not specific to particular
cultures (the Protestant) but can prevail, in terms of social and political organization, on a world scale. As Fukuyama himself intimated in
discussion, what would most challenge his thesis is not the prevalence
of wars and inequality in the world, the standard empiricist fare of his
critics, but the success of an illiberal, Confucian, capitalism in the Far
East. The Sombart connection is also a suggestive one, leading one
friend to observe that the subtitle of Fukuyamas book might well be
Why is There No Socialism in America? And regrettably, for the moment
at least, not much sign of it elsewhere, one could add.
Fukuyamas theses, first enunciated in his article The End of History? in the summer of 1989, and expanded in his book, have been
the centre of a notable international debate, marked by extremes of
excoriation and appropriation. He has been accused of capitalist, if
not USocentric, triumphalism, of neglecting the major contradictions
prevalent in the world today, of downplaying the challenge to his
version of liberal democracy from radical Islam, of complacency
about US society itself, and so forth. Others have seen in his work a
robust, if philosophically eccentric and in its Hegelian provenance
unwelcome, assertion of Western advanced capitalist victory in the
Cold War and of the resolution of the major ideological conflicts of
the past two hundred years.
Fukuyama himself appears puzzled by the reception of his theses, if
not ungratified by the reputation it has generated. On his tour of
Europe to promote the books simultaneous publication in France,
Germany and Britain he was struck by the, apparently predictable,
responses: French rejection on the grounds that he is still another
totalizing grand thinker; German amusement that anyone should be
surprised at these ideas which, in the assertive Lnder of the land
where Hegel first pronounced, are self-evident. In Britain there is a
range of response, from the empiricist scepticism of the Right (I cant
see what he is going on about. History is just one damn thing after
another) and a Left divided between those who see him as just a
capitalist ideologue, blind to the potential of revolutionary socialism,
and those who seek to recruit him for a revisionist progressivism. It
is strange to find that, in Europe, many of the people who defend me
are Marxists, he observes. In Japan-----a country with which, despite
family background, he has little sense of common identity-----recognition for a successful member of the diaspora is outweighed by suspicion of his universalism, which looks all too much like an apologia for
US hegemony.
Progress and the Limits of Liberal Democracy
Prior to his 1989 article, Fukuyama wrote studies of Third World
states of socialist orientation, such as Ethiopia, Mozambique and
South Yemen, for the RAND Corporation, in which there was much of
interest. The same applies to his book. Like an opera, it has its
longueurs, repetitions and borrowings, but four of its theses are
important and worth engaging with.
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First is his assertion of the importance of progress in contemporary

history. Fukuyama is not saying that progress is without costs, nor is
he sure that it is destined to continue, but he does assert that humanity as a whole has made progress of a significant kind over recent centuries and that it has the capacity, ecological and nuclear disaster
aside, to continue. In this way he rejects both the pessimism of the
Right-----that history is circular, unintelligible, or plain decadent-----and
that of the Left, based on various forms of historical romanticism or,
in the case of Wallerstein, on a combative assertion of overall human
decline since 1400.2 This cautiously optimistic note is significant, not
only because there is something out there which most people would
recognize as progress (like imperialism and patriarchy, it leaves
much to be desired as a concept, but faute de mieux we need to go on
using it) but also because in order to argue about progress, and
whether or not one accepts that it has occurred, one needs universal
analytic and moral criteria. In the contemporary intellectual climate,
of nationalist and religious particularism, and post-modernist confusion of all kinds, this firm eighteenth-century assertion of the possibility of universal criteria, whatever their historic, social and geographical origins, is to be welcomed. In that sense those who deny
there has been progress, Wallerstein included, are still welcome allies
against those who say we cannot know, since their judgement too presupposes principles.
Secondly, Fukuyama has something important to say about the Cold
War. His account of why and how Communism collapsed is contestable, but his judgement of the end-----that one side won and the other
side lost-----needs asserting. This may seem rather obvious, and no
doubt it is to those who have been on the losing side and who are
scrambling to get as much of capitalism as they can. But it has to be
said that it is not obvious in much left and liberal discourse in the
West. Prior to 1989, the dominant view here was that the Cold War
was not about an ideological or intersystemic conflict at all-----this was
the myth of the Pentagon, the KGB and odd people such as myself and
Mike Davis who tried to say so-----but about a pas de deux of two
hegemonic systems each of which pretended to rival the other while in
fact using the pretence of conflict to hold down their own people, make
money out of useless military production, and so on. This analysis
ranged from the perfectly justifiable claims that some people, such as
arms manufacturers, benefited from the Cold War and the attendant
arms race, that many of the ideological slogans about free worlds and
socialist democracy were false, and that the Cold War enabled other
forms of intra-bloc hegemony to be preserved, to the quite different and
unwarranted conclusion that the intersystemic conflict was itself an
illusion. Even after 1989 there is a solipsistic argument to the effect that
while the former Soviet system collapsed and failed, so in some ways did
the West-----witness the social and economic crisis in the USA. As if anyone could fight and win a war without some losses, or that the end of
one titanic conflict, be it World War II or the Cold War, would not
2

Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, London 1983, p. 98: 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.
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lead to further conflicts in the future. The reality, as Fukuyama underlines, is that the advanced capitalist West did win the Cold War.
The third issue on which Fukuyama is interesting is that of liberal
democracy itself. Of course, his invocation of this concept is selective
and ahistorical. That most classical liberals did not believe in universal suffrage, or the equality of nations, and did believe in an interventionist state is not properly recognized. The main thrust of his
argument is, moreover, inclined towards the complacent: that a
solution has been found, in liberal democracy, and that it will, more
or less, last for ever. But there is another reading of Fukuyama possible, not least in this age of the dethroned author: namely, that while
liberal democracy will for a time prevail as the dominant solution to
politics in the contemporary world, it is itself inherently unstable and
liable to self-destruction. This-----eminently Hegelian and pre-Marxist
-----argument rests upon the destabilizing effects of the thymotic, both
with regard to relations within states and to those between them. His
reasons as to why this model may not mark the end of history are to be
questioned, but are less important than this cogent assertion of the
inherent limits and contested future of the political form now claimed
to be the solution to humanitys problems. And even those Marxists
who still hold to the inevitability of a revolutionary socialist outcome,
as capitalism digs its own grave, need to be reminded that there is an
alternative path which liberal democracy could take, namely a
regression to various forms of barbarism, national and international,
by way of some mixture prevailing of capitalist-authoritarian,
nuclear, ecological, racist and recidivist trends.
The fourth aspect of Fukuyamas argument to be welcomed concerns
his analysis of the trend towards universalization in the contemporary
world. Here again his thesis might appear to be self-evident were it
not for the fact that substantial theoretical resistance to it can be
detected from several, variant, quarters. One source of this resistance
has already been noted with regard to the argument on the Cold War,
on the part of those who denied that both Soviet Communism and
Western Communism sought to prevail over the other. Underlying
this view is a belief that persists even in a post-Cold War situation,
namely that capitalism in some way needs an enemy. With Communism gone, it is suggested, some other bogey, such as ethnic minorities, or Islam, has to be evoked. In some cases, this is used to explain
the genesis of the Gulf War. In fact, as Marx and Engels pointed out
in section two of the Manifesto, capitalism does not need an enemy at
all, but seeks to make the world like itself, on pain of extinction----more or less what happened to the Bolshevik Revolution. Rarely articulated, this needed enemy argument underpins much of the critical
literature on cold war, in its reluctance to see why and how capitalism
has developed a universalizing dynamic, not just at the level of markets and productive relations, but also in internal political forms and
cultural patterns. Resistance to this idea is also found in a theoretical
school that Fukuyama criticizes, but not enough: namely, the realism
of state-centric International Relations theory, according to which
what solely matters are relations between states, and the internal
character of them is to be disregarded as reductionist. In Chapter 23,
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on The Unreality of Realism, Fukuyama criticizes realism as being

inapposite to a post-Cold War situation where interdependence is
growing; but here he fails to see the import of his argument as a
whole, which is that realism was never an adequate explanation of
international relations, in that there was always a universalizing element in the system as far as both internal and international norms are
concerned, ever since capitalism began to develop transnationally in
the sixteenth century.3
The Desire for Recognition
The problems with the Fukuyama argument are many, but suggest,
for their part, what a programme of future theoretical and historical
work may be. Absent from the 1989 article, there is here a powerful
psychological component to the historical thesis based on the Greek
term thymos, which Fukuyama renders as the desire for recognition.
For Fukuyama, humans demand recognition of their worth and
revolt, or they fight when they do not get it. This is why they are content not just with economic well-being, which a prosperous dictatorship could provide, but need democracy and a measure of equality as
well. He is on to something here: no one can deny that this is a factor
in the political activity of humans, at the interpersonal, national and
international levels. Yet, as rendered in his book, this invocation of
thymos is forced. First (even granting that there is a thymotic instinct
as he describes it), like other instincts-----smiling, eating, touching, and
so forth-----it only takes on a meaning in a social context. Moreover,
what constitutes acceptable dignity or recognition varies from
historical period to period, and from one society to another: what is
tolerable in one place and time is not in another, leaving aside
variations across gender. Thymos is a social construct: there can be
no meaningful invocation of thymos if it does not take account of
the socialization of people into groups and collectivities, and, regrettably, of what one may only term the anti-thymotic-----for which, see
Dostoevsky.
The apparent authority of the concept of thymos is derived from Fukuyamas reading of Platos Republic, via Allan Bloom, but this part of
the operation is thin indeed, reminding the Marxist of nothing so
much as the attempt to squeeze a general theory of socialist politics
out of some decontextualized lines of Marx or Lenin, or Mao. In
classical Greek the word s (thymos) means rage, or lust (for food
or drink) and is a quality associated with animals and spirited
horses.4 In Plato himself, it has a more specific meaning akin to selfrespect-----the part that loves honour and winning. But even Platos
usage does not square with that of Bloom/Fukuyama, as other
commentators indicate;5 and he is misreading Plato to imply that the
3

For the most famous statement of this, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, New York 1979.
4
Interestingly, in this original meaning it approximates to the Arabic word thawra,
contemporary Arabic for revolution, but in origin a word denoting the spiritedness
of bulls and other animals.
5
For different accounts of thymos in Plato, see R.C. Cross and A.D. Woozley, Platos
Republic, a Philosophical Commentary, London 1986, pp. 120---21; Julia Annas, An Introduction to Platos Republic, Oxford 1981, pp. 126---8.
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soul has parts at all, since all Plato meant by parts of the soul was
that people are complex.
Thymos is identified with the irrational, since it is the seat of anger and
rage, akin to spirit or heart. The key story that Fukuyama invokes,
from Plato, to illustrate the concept itself, points in another direction:
it concerns Leontius, the son of Aglaion, who, while walking near the
walls of Athens, sees some bodies lying under the wall, at first turns
away his eyes, and then out of curiosity looks. He is then ashamed and
angry with himself, suffering an attack of thymos. This is a story anyone can understand, but it hardly illustrates the Fukuyama concept of
thymos, which is both relational, involving what others think of one,
and about recognition, not anger. All of which suggests that whatever
the validity of the insights on the role of recognition in politics, the
derivation of it amidst a flurry of textual backup is inconclusive.
Much has been made of how Fukuyamas confident extrapolations are
supposedly wrong-----wars will continue, Islam is a threat, 1.4 billion
people still live under Communist Party rule as opposed to 1.7 billion
before 1989, and so forth. These observations do not really challenge
his central theme, since neither Dengist modernizations, nor Islamic
fundamentalism, are challenges on a global stage: the Islamic threat
is little more than a malign combination of clerical bombast and
Western paranoia. The real challenge to the West (a hypostatization
we could well do without) is from Japan, not Iran or Algeria: where,
one might ask, is the technological or investment challenge from these
latter states? Where Fukuyama is, on empirical grounds, more shaky
is in two other respects: first, in his belief that capitalism can bring
the whole of the world up to current developed levels; second, in the
degree to which he believes liberal democracy is now spreading. The
former, a restatement in RAND Corporation terms of the view cogently
expressed by Bill Warren, is right to criticize the myths of dependency
theory, but ignores the facts which stare at one every year from Table
1 of the World Bank Report, namely that while few countries, outside
Africa, are getting poorer, the gap between rich and poor states is
widening. Moreover, as Arrighi has so well pointed out, the membership of the club of rich states has remained constant for over a
century-----no one has left, although the members have changed places
in the ranking order, and only one state has joined, namely Japan. The
belief in liberal democracy understates the degree to which capitalist
democracy is precarious: it needs to last for a generation at least
before it can be assumed it will endure. One only has to think about
the Weimar Republic, or about such states as Sri Lanka, Liberia,
Argentina, Lebanon in the 1960s to see how dictatorship can be reestablished. In this, historically more cautious, perspective, there are
only about two dozen established liberal democracies in the world
today, out of what are now over 180 independent states.
On Historical Agency
This historically superficial view of democracy is linked to an idealist
and most misleading account of how democracy came about. The dates
Fukuyama gives for the establishment of liberal democracy-----1790 for
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the USA, 1848 for Britain, and so on-----are those of constitutional

myth. The reality, which Therborn has instructively shown, is that full
democracy, in the sense of one-person, one-vote, and only one vote
per person, was achieved in these two states only in the 1960s and-----a
point greatly understated-----as a result not of the evolution of the
system in some idealist manner, but of political action, of struggle.6
Here we come to the central theoretical problem of Fukuyamas work,
which is not about whether history has come to an end, but about
what constitutes history and, more specifically, historical agency.
Behind all theories of the end of history there lies a theory of agency.
That most people have some working answer to this question is evident if we just list some of the candidates for motor-of-history that
have come forward in recent centuries: God, gods, the stars, Reason,
the working class, the bourgeoisie, the peasantry-----indeed virtually
every class except the one that may have done more than any other to
shape the twentieth century, the petty bourgeoisie-----the intelligentsia,
bureaucracy, conspiracy theories of all shapes and sizes, the economy,
and, as we have recently seen, the market. No doubt more are to
come.
Fukuyamas answer is idealist: economic scientific development combined with the evolution of human freedom constitutes the motor of
history, or, as he calls it, the Mechanism. Here there is a lot to disagree with. His account of the evolution of science is singularly innocent of the Kuhnian and other institutional studies of how power
relations determine scientific progress-----compare the amount of
money being spent on arms as against AIDS research. He seems to
ascribe to it a direction independent of human intent and interest.
More to the point, he ignores what is the main motor of human history, in this and previous centuries: namely, collective political action,
action by groups, be these classes, nations, states. The span of world
history since Hegel and Marx, and not least the collapse of Communism, encourage us to rethink how collective action operates, and to
enlarge the range of possible such actors, while qualifying the priority
and historical role ascribed in socialist theory with too much ease to
the proletariat. Indeed, it is the retheorization of this question that
constitutes the major challenge of Fukuyamas book. Yet, faced with
the evident discrediting of the teleology and the agency underlying
most Marxist theory, it is not necessary to revert simply to the idealist
assertion of a world spirit, now presented as science and thymos,
shaping the course of events, any more than it is to collapse into postmodernist vacuity and frivolity.
The problem with Fukuyamas theory, and his account of history, is
fundamentally the same as that of Hegel himself. There is, of course, a
classical solution to this problem: to do to Fukuyama what Feuerbach
did to Hegel, namely turn him on his head. It is a measure of Fukuyamas breadth of reading, and to his tolerance of his critics, that
when this was suggested to him he did not seem too perturbed.
6

Gran Therborn, The Rule of Capitalism and the Rise of Democracy,

May---June 1977, pp. 3---41.

NLR

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