I have recently finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s excellent book, Identity The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, published back in 2018, trying to explain why the world isn’t behaving the way Francis and I think it ought, and not doing a bad job of it at all. I’ve written round and about Dr. Fukuyama a number of times, both carping and praising, and that’s what I’m going to do this time around as well.
Fukuyama more or less “asked for it” with his famous/infamous post-Cold War tome, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), proclaiming a neo-Hegelian “End of History”, since we now find ourselves with far more history than we want, suffering through one form of global chaos after another, making us long for the relative “stability” of the good old Cold War days, when all we did was threaten each other with nuclear holocausts, and no one got hurt!
Well, I sometimes feel that way myself, but still I think the good doctor was far more on point than many of his critics. Despite the truly global revolt of rural against urban, “old economy” versus new, and traditional values versus new, I simply don’t see any way to organize modern society without free markets as the sole method possible to obtain sustained economic growth, and free elections to legitimize governmental authority, undergirded by thoroughly secular values, even though today the Communists in China, and the Republicans in the U.S., seem determined to disagree with me.
Dr. Fukuyama is surely a very erudite man and surely has read several thousand books, but at times he has a curious habit, so it would seem, of thinking “since I read it in a book, it must be true.” This is pre-eminently true of what appears to be the most important book in Dr. Fukuyama’s life, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the “Phenomenology of Spirit”, by Alexandre Kojève, which he discusses extensively both in Identity and his earlier works. Prodded by his praise, I tracked down something by Kojève—I can’t remember how, and there doesn’t seem to be anything available for free on the Internet—and quickly dismissed the poor man as another example of French “niaiserie”, to paraphrase Nietzsche, rather in the manner of Henri Bergson, despite the fact that Kojève was Russian rather than French, and despite the fact that Alexandre and Henri had (probably) little if anything to do with one another, and despite the fact that I had never read anything more than a few short passages of Bergson.
What I had read, however—and this is why I was willing to dismiss people about whom I knew almost nothing—was “the original”, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit1—which, it seems, Dr. Fukuyama had not, and, furthermore, Hegel’s arguments, which I disagreed with, were quite recognizable to me as filtered through both Kojève and Fukuyama. And I still disagreed with them.
Over at the New Yorker, Louis Menand provided extensive and entertaining background on Fukuyama and Kojève back in 2018 when Identity came out. As Menand tells it, Alexandre Kojève, born in Moscow from a wealthy family in 1902, was an extraordinary prodigy—“by the time he was eighteen, he was fluent in Russian, German, French, and English, and read Latin,” later adding Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan to his repertoire in order to study Buddhism. Kojève eventually escaped from post-WWI Russia and moved to Germany, studying with philosopher Karl Jaspers, whom I would describe very vaguely—based on my limited and not very sympathetic reading of his works—as a “gentle” Nietzschean.
Kojève later moved to Paris and ended up giving the lectures that later formed the book that so shaped Dr. Fukuyama’s intellectual perspective. Kojève eventually became friendly with über neocon godfather Leo Strauss, corresponding with him extensively after WWII, when Strauss ended up at the University of Chicago. I’ve read one book by Strauss that I liked a lot—the one on Hobbes2—while disliking almost everything else. Strauss had a number of similarities with Hegel—a near deification of the Greeks, an immense contempt for, and lack of understanding of, empirical science, coupled with an immense contempt for, and loathing of, the “common man”—something pretty much standard in German thought after those softies Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder—but for some reason never wrote about him or claimed him as an influence, as far as I know. One of Strauss’s most famous acolytes, Allan Bloom, whom I also didn’t like, met Kojève in Paris in 1953 and became fascinated with his teachings, studying with him until his death in 1968, becoming what, in an earlier post, I sneeringly called a “third-rate Hegelian epigone” in the process.3 Bloom, teaching at Cornell at this time, arranged for the publication of an English translation of Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in 1969. In 1970, Fukuyama entered Cornell. And so the circle was completed.
Hegel was preeminently the philosopher of history—he wrote one book with the title The History of Philosophy and another with the title The Philosophy of History. He saw all of human history as the history of “necessary” progress—driven by the need of “reason” to reveal itself fully in human society. As Fukuyama explains Hegel’s doctrine in Identity:
The philosopher Hegel accepted this link between moral choice and human dignity [as described in the philosophy of Rousseau and Kant]; human beings are morally free agents who are not simply rational machines seeking to maximize satisfaction of their desires. But unlike Rousseau or Kant, Hegel put recognition of that moral agency at the center of his account of the human condition. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, he argued that human history was driven by a struggle for recognition. The demand comes initially from a warrior who is willing to risk his life in a bloody battle, not for territory or wealth, but simply for recognition itself. But this recognition ultimately fails to be satisfying because it is the recognition of a slave, that is, of someone without dignity. This problem can be solved only when the slave acquires dignity through labor, through the ability to transform the world into a place suitable for human life. The only rational form of recognition is ultimately the mutual recognition of master and slave of their shared human dignity.
At this point, of course, the master and slave are no longer master and slave but equal. And this is what the post-Napoleonic European society in which Hegel lived had, in Hegel’s opinion, achieved, and had necessarily achieved, because society could not stop “progressing” until it achieved the complete fulfillment of reason. And this is what Dr. Fukuyama believes as well.
According to Hegel, the process from master to slave to political equality—from ancient Egypt to contemporary Europe—went through almost endless permutations, all of them “necessary”, as the “spirit”—of “Reason”—realized itself through history, culminating, as everyone who has written about Hegel has observed, in the Philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, or rather his “wisdom”, for, as Hegel quite conscientiously pointed out, philosophy, the “love of wisdom”, is all very well, but what we really want is wisdom itself, which he often called—in German, of course—“science”, though what he meant by “science” is pretty much the opposite of what we empiricists mean.4
What Hegel was doing in his intellectual/cultural history of Europe was, in large part, “justifying” the past against the attacks of the Enlightenment, who saw the history of Europe from roughly 450 AD to 1300 AD as the “Dark Ages”, the triumph of barbarism and Christianity. Like the Enlightenment, Hegel believed in “progress”, though his concept was very different from that of such figures as Voltaire, and one of the main goals of his philosophy was to assert the dignity and spiritual value of the past, to incorporate it as necessary for achieving a full understanding the human spirit, rather than as something to be discarded as the product of ignorance and bigotry.
Seen today, Hegel’s history of the human spirit suffers from some very severe cultural blinders. For Hegel, “history” was very largely what he read in “the classics”. If “the Greeks” said it, it was so. (Sound familiar?) And, for some reason—Hegel never bothered to ask himself why—“reason” only chose to manifest itself in “Western” history. The “Orient” remained stuck in “Oriental despotism” (as Herodotus and the other Greeks called it), because, well, because they were Orientals. Only in the West did the “master-slave” relationship prove “unstable” (my word), fated to be replaced by more fully rational forms of social organization, as the human spirit moved through a long series of increasingly rational, though still “one-sided” (Hegel’s term) states, until, finally, we reach “modern times” and the “end of history.”
I’m sure that Dr. Fukuyama would agree with me that Hegel’s unconscious assumption of inherent western superiority is false. He might even agree with me that Hegel’s argument that the struggle for “recognition” (what we might call social acceptance) is “solved only when the slave acquires dignity through labor, through the ability to transform the world into a place suitable for human life,” reflects not “rational” (and therefore inherently universal) values but rather the values of bourgeois Europe, the first society in history to talk about the “dignity” of labor. All previous civilizations had reflected the values of an aristocratic ruling class who defined themselves very largely by the fact that they did not labor. These civilizations endured for thousands of years, their rulers quite content with the recognition they received from their peers, as well as the homage given by their “inferiors”.5 The notion that anyone not born a “gentleman” might have “dignity” equal to a gentleman because he labored to “transform the world into a place suitable for human life” had scarcely existed, even on the fringes of society, for more than a century and a half.
Does Dr. Fukuyama really believe in “western superiority”, that reason realized itself in society, so that “the real became the rational, and the rational became the real,” that the human spirit attained full realization only in the west because only the west was capable of this achievement? I strongly doubt it. In the first volume of his two-volume “history of everything”—The Origins of Political Order—he discusses numerous non-western cultures, not too surprisingly awarding the palm of “first civilized state” to the Qin Dynasty in ancient China, circa 202 BC, for coming up with the first “real” bureaucracy. None of these states “progressed” to contemporary bourgeoise standards of “enlightenment.” As I have argued, most extensively here, though you have to dig for it, recapitulating the arguments of such authors as Walter Scheidel (Escape from Rome) and Ian Morris (Why the West Rules—for Now), that the “emergence of the west”, the “rise of the west”, the “European Miracle”, was essentially a random event, one that could easily have not have happened, if it were not for an extraordinary confluence of unrelated factors—the development of “Arabic” (actually Indian) numerals, which allowed a staggering increase in both the ease of numerical calculation and the power of mathematics, that golden oldie the printing press, the political disunion within Europe which eventually allowed the emergence of freedom of intellectual thought as an ideal rather than a crime, and, of course, the discovery of the “New World”, both ripe for exploitation and an extraordinary stimulus to the development of sea power, to complement the improvements in the “art of war” on land, helped along not a little by the “Chinese Miracle”, gunpowder—another ultimate benefit of Europe’s political disarray.6 “Reason”, one might say, held a distinctly subordinate role in the emergence of the modern bourgeoise state that both Dr. Fukuyama and I hold dear.7
For me, the acceptance of the necessary validity of the bourgeois state lies, not in the absolute power of “Reason”, whose power I find to be distressingly limited, but rather three things: first, the notion of intellectual freedom as an end in itself; second, the unique ability of free markets, when combined with the power of modern science, to provide economic growth sufficient to allow all of humanity to lead “human” lives—lives not defined by the simple struggle to stay alive—and third, the inability of any form of government to validate itself except through the vehicle of free elections.
The recent sacking of the U.S. Capitol was a vivid demonstration of the power of global discontents—along with the intellectual vacuity of the American “right”, which for five long years has sought to “use” Donald Trump for its own purposes, and now finds itself liberally smeared with his excrement for its pains. But liberalism has “failed” before, when it failed to prevent World War I, when it failed to prevent or solve the Great Depression, and when it failed to prevent World War II. When the British Labour Party won a great mandate in 1945, surely every “intellectual” in the party would not have dreamed that they could ever lose another election. The cloth caps versus the top hats! It was no contest! And yet socialism failed and liberalism—and Thatcherite-Reaganite liberalism, to boot—came back, and came back in triumph. God grant that we will not have to endure such travail again to establish the primacy of free minds and free markets.
Afterwords
A microcosm, one might say, of Dr. Fukuyama’s addiction to monocausal explanations of what are in fact complex phenomena is his take on our British—and particularly English—cousins’ suddenly absurd enthusiasm for “splendid isolation”, an enthusiasm that is, one can say, more than a century out of date. Why are the English now so hellbent on “Brexit”? Well, Dr. Fukuyama explains it all for you, relying on British historian Alan Smith,8 who tells us that, hundreds of years ago, in the sixteenth century, “the feeling of national identity and uniqueness continued to grow, reaching an apogee in the reign of Elizabeth when it was given classic expression in one of the most influential works in the whole of English literature,” John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, a book that, according to Smith, that encouraged the English to think of themselves as “superior to the enslaved Papists of the Continent”, a belief that was confirmed, Dr. Fukuyama tells us, by the English victory over the Papist Spanish Armada in 1588.
Foxe’s book, originally published in 1563 under the title Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church, expanded and extracted and republished over and over again, was one of the seminal works of the English Reformation, written in “latter times”—that is, the times immediately preceding the Second Coming of Christ, picturing the Catholic Church as the anti-Christ. It had an enormous impact on evangelical Christianity in both Great Britain and the U.S. However, English feelings of superiority over “the continent” has had fresher roots than Foxe’s passionate polemic and the demise of the Spanish Armada—in particular the long series of British triumphs in its wars with France under first Louis XIV, Louis XV, and finally Napoleon, which established the British Empire as the most powerful in the history of the world, blessedly free from the convulsions that shook the rest of “civilization” throughout the course of the 19th century, until everything was all cast away, unnecessarily, in defense of the useless French, first in World War I and then all over again in World War II. Roy Jenkins, Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Labour Government led by Harold Wilson in the 1960s, was president of the European Union when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and got to know her views on the other members. “They’re all rotten,”she told him. She hated them all for not standing up to Hitler and leaving the British to fight Germany alone. Naturally, she did respect Germany, for its economic power and because they hated Soviets almost as much as she did.
A great many British believe today that their empire could and should have continued, if only Britain had not joined with France to oppose Germany in World War I. This was the entire point of Niall Ferguson’s much discussed (and thoroughly inaccurate) history of World War I, The Pity of War. Max Hastings, who, unlike both Dr. Fukuyama and myself, is British, attributes the English superiority complex to World War II, which, the English feel, they won all by themselves. (I say “English” rather than “British” (most of the time), because the Scots, though they fought WWII as well, don’t want to leave the EU. I guess I’m being unfair to the Welsh. Sorry!)
1. I read The Phenomenology way back in the mid-1970s, in a paperback reprint of a translation dating back to 1905.
2. Strauss generally had a hearty dislike for anyone who, like Hobbes, rejected Plato and Aristotle, but, I think, admired Hobbes for his generally “skeptical” view of human nature, respecting him as a fellow homme de monde, something that Strauss tried very hard to be—though, in my own skeptical opinion, he fell well short of the mark most of the time.
3. When I read bits and pieces of The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom’s 1987 best-selling attack on post-sixties American academia, I wondered how a gay Jew from Indiana could turn himself into, well, a “third-rate Hegelian epigone”. And now I know.
4. Dante calls Aristotle “il Maestro di color que sanno”—the Master of those who know. According to Vergil, Dante’s guide, “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas”—happy is he who is able to know the causes of things.
5. “He never forgot my position”, was the highest praise rendered by the duc de Saint Simon, when speaking of someone of less than ducal rank. For past civilizations, and as recently as World War I, the elaborate gradations of rank were the essence of civilization, not obstacles to its fulfillment.
6. According to some historians, gunpowder was necessary for the development of unified states because it allowed kings to blow up their nobles’ castles and thus bring them into submission.
7. It doesn’t seem to me that Hegel concerned himself at all with “free markets”. I suspect that, like many German intellectuals, he looked down on “trade” as the very opposite of “Spirit” rather than its necessary complement.
8. Alan G. R. Smith, The Emergence of a Nation-State: The Commonwealth of England, 1529–1660.
9. Ferguson blamed the British prime minister of the time, Herbert Henry Asquith. Jenkins, who took Asquith as his hero, blamed Lord Grey, Asquith’s foreign minister. I think Asquith, Grey, Winston Churchill, and Lloyd George, the leaders of the Liberal Party at the time, all believed, and all believed correctly, that Britain had to maintain France as a great power to prevent Germany from establishing dominance on the continent, which would allow them to squeeze British trade as much as they pleased. Unfortunately, after the war, none of the four had the nerve to argue that the war had to be fought. The cost was so great that no one could stand to believe that it had to be paid. For more of my autodidact ramblings on this matter, go here.
