Yesterday, I talked up the Nation’s Tom Meaney and his subjects/victims Pankaj Mishra and Francis Fukuyama and today I’d like to return to the fray. In his review of Fukuyama’s most recent book, The Origins of Order, Meaney, recapitulates, in a not too friendly manner, Fukuyama’s intellectual progress from his famous/infamous “The End of History?” essay (1989) through his relatively brief neo-con phase* to his current synthesis and finds that the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the Hegelian tree:
Despite the new Fukuyama’s willingness to entertain a variety of explanations for historical change—he deftly interchanges religious, economic and political variables—the old Fukuyama persists in seeing human nature, in the form of the Hegelian quest for recognition, driving all the while toward the liberal democratic state. Never in the course of an argument that spans ages and oceans does Fukuyama consider that the vagaries of world history may tell another, less glamorous story: the achievements of liberal democracy are by their nature unstable, having come about through centuries of backdoor compromises that barely survived the twentieth century, and that it is the false comforts provided by his providential history that impair our ability to confront liberal democracy’s unresolved problems in good faith. In Crossroads Fukuyama inflated the significance of neoconservatism by suggesting that it alone was responsible for the Iraq debacle, when in reality the invasion of Iraq had enablers across the political spectrum; now, in The Origins,, a similar tunnel vision leads Fukuyama to attribute the rise of the liberal state to a few original chess moves deep in the fog of history. But to tell the civilizations of the world that they have, unbeknownst to themselves, stumbled up against some of the features of the liberal state is a strange form of flattery. The most valuable political lesson they may hold for us is that they did not.
OK, that’s a long quote. But after telling us, ultimately, that the “liberal state” isn’t all that, he turns around, a couple of months later, while reviewing Mishra’s Ruins of Empire, and uncorks the following:
But more than a touch of the romantic also colors Mishra’s arguments. Must he invoke the hopes of Mao’s revolution to castigate today’s Chinese elite? Are the pre-globalization days of India in the 1970s in any way worth returning to? And what does Mishra want us to glean from the lives of three interesting but ineffectual intellectuals who lived more than a century ago? That Asia too had its share of sages who were just as troubled by the march of modernity as the Slavophiles and German Romantics? There are times when talk of gauzy historical “alternatives” to the nation-state and liberal capitalism and modernity becomes a cover for complacency. Garavini’s and Prashad’s books show that many of the finishing touches of our world order are only thirty or forty years old. They hardly obeyed any ineluctable logic. The notion that intellectuals today should perhaps start cobbling together new world-embracing ideologies, rather than try to reclaim democratic political decisions from the spurious overseers of economics in our institutions, seems to be another one of Mishra’s exercises in nostalgia. The choice is never between an ideal future and a bad one, but between a better future and a worse one.
Got that? “There are times when talk of gauzy historical ‘alternatives’ to the nation-state and liberal capitalism and modernity becomes a cover for complacency.” Stop talking about “gauzy alternatives” and accept things as they are. Just make them a little bit better! Does Meaney really see any alternative to the “liberal state”? Is he tired of democracy? Is that right to vote thing just a drag, since all too often folks won’t vote the way people like Mr. Meaney think they ought to? In fact, representative government has never delivered the way it was supposed to. Neither representative government nor the rule of law solved the problem of slavery, but rather blood and iron, and the same can be said of the “Irish Question” and any number of other questions one can name. Yet for all its manifest limitations and failures, nothing confers legitimacy on government like popular elections.
China, of course, is the outstanding holdout, but with the ever-growing list of disasters—ultra high-speed train wrecks, bridge collapses, disastrous fires—the myth of an all-wise party elite grows thinner and thinner. Once a significant portion of a society attain middle-class standards of wealth and education, some sort of representative democracy becomes inevitable. It’s just that middle-class societies never existed prior to around 1700 that the idea seems so new. And to have a middle class—a powerful middle class—one needs (you guessed it) capitalism.
*Fukuyama used to hang his hat at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, located only a couple of blocks from the American Enterprise Institute, DC neo-con nerve center No. 1. When Frank decided that Iraq wasn’t such a great idea after all, he moved his act to Stanford. Who can blame him?
