Francis Fukuyama, who is probably my most favorite living neo-Hegelian, has sadly gone off the rails more than a little with this ecstatic, triumphalist treatise, Why Ukraine Will Win, which sounds to me a lot like the late Charlie Krauthammer on steroids and scotch circa 2004, rejoicing over the new American empire, on which, he…
Tag: Francis Fukuyama
The Billiard Ball Causality of Francis Fukuyama, Together With Other Considerations
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….
Getting to Denmark: Turn left at the light, and read your Bible!
Francis Fukuyama, who did a pretty good job writing the history of the world from 10,000 BC to 1789 in his book The Origins of Political Order, and a not so great job writing its history from 1789 to the present in Political Order and Political Decay1, frequently talks about “getting to Denmark”—enjoying the benefits…
Meaney, Fukuyama, and Mishra, Round 2
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?”…
Thomas Meaney: Five thousand feet above the five thousand foot folks
A grad student who knows everything? That seems to be the case with Thomas Meaney over at the Nation, who pours both illumination and condescension on mega-thinkers like Francis Fukuyama and Pankaj Mishra. I first caught up with Tom in his four-barreled review of After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge From the Global South 1957–1986 (Giuliano Garavini), The Poorer Nations:…
Francis Fukuyama, finding what he’s been looking for, again
Well-known Hegelian Francis Fukuyama takes a look into the soul of Egyptian liberals and, predictably, doesn’t like what he sees. Two of the leading candidates for Egypt’s presidency, Fukuyama says, are “suspected of having ties to the military,” another has been endorsed by “the ultra-conservative Salafis,” and the fourth is the candidate of the Muslim…
Egyptology II; Plus, Eunuchs!
I’m back to piling on Francis Fukuyama (see below), who totally disses not only “Western Civilization” but the Ancient Middle East as well in order to glorify the role of China in his recent book The Origins of Political Order. For Fukuyama, channeling Max Weber, “civilization” really means “an impersonal bureaucracy possessing a monopoly on…