Fukuyama's book is absolutely fascinating. Many thanks to Lawrence for getting me to read
it.
Fukuyama does something that I never thought would ever happen: he bases US global policy
on... Hegel. The necons are Hegelians. A major reason why his book has been so
misunderstood: there's many very long chapters that discuss Hegel. Hardly anyone in the USA
can understand that. The language philosophers don't know this stuff.
Fukuyama's idea is based on an analysis of the formation of the self in Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit. To me, that's easy reading, because, by coincidence, that was the
subject of my graduate thesis at the Universitaet Heidelberg.
Fukuyama is an 19th century thinker. His ideas are taken entirely from 1806; he writes in
reaction to the Enlightenment. He uses Hegel to understand the world. He discusses Nietzsche
and Marx. But he stops somewhere around the 1870s. There is only a single mention of
Heidegger. Absolutely zero about Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Brunner ,etc. Fukuyama seems to be
totally ignorant of them.
These are some of the reasons why his book is so misunderstood.
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