[lit-ideas] Liberal Democracy as an inevitability
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 08:35:15 -0700
I started rereading The End of History. Perhaps I'll quote a few bite-sized
chunks from time to time; so if Andreas has a different view, perhaps since
I won't be discussing all of The End of History at once, he will have the
time to express it. Here is what Fukuyama writes on page xx of TEOH:
"A world made up of liberal democracies, then should have much less
incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one
another's legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence
from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave
imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of
going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their
fundamental values."
This is the chief Neocon thesis. Fukuyama didn't abrogate the idea that
liberal democracies should have much less incentive for war. Neither did he
abrogate the thesis that Liberal Democracy would comprise the end of
history. He did however in America at the Crossroads distance himself from
the idea that we in America should actively engage in spreading Liberal
Democracy. Liberal Democracy is an inevitability, Fukuyama argues just as
Marx once argued that Communism was an inevitability. Marx did advocate a
certain sort of activism, but it was Lenin who brought the first Communist
government into existence, and he did it militarily. Fukuyama sees the
Neocons as having diverged into a Leninist sort of activism, which he
disapproves of.
Lawrence
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