[lit-ideas] Re: Pfaff on Fukuyama's Utopia
- From: Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2011 19:14:45 -0600
Damn, Lawrence, are you OK? I never thought I'd see the day you
criticized Fukuyama. : ).
Have a good Turkey Day.
Mike Geary
PS -- did anyone see the Nova program called "My Life As a Turkey"? -- I'm
almost positive that was the name of it. It was fucking incredible.
Existence is so amazing and surprising and brutal.
Mike
On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 5:10 PM, Lawrence Helm
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=546****
>
> ** **
>
> The above article appears in the November 24th edition of the NYROB. It
> is a review by William Pfaff of Francis Fukuyama’s *The Origins of
> Political Order: from Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.*
>
> * *
>
> Pfaff doesn’t think much of Fukuyama or his book. He refers to both
> Samuel P. Huntington’s *Clash of Civilizations *and Fukuyama’s *The End
> of History and the Last Man *with disapproval* * A biographical article
> at http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=4provides
> some insight into why he does so:
> ****
>
> ** **
>
> “In a long assessment of William Pfaff’s work and influence in The New
> York Review of Books (May 26, 2005 . . . Pankaj Mishra wrote ‘His
> broad-ranging intellectual and emotional sympathies distinguish him from
> most foreign policy commentators who tend to serve what they see, narrowly,
> as their national interest.’ Pfaff is also indifferent to, and often
> brusquely dismissive of, the modish theories that describe how and why
> dominoes fall, history ends, and civilizations clash....****
>
> ** **
>
> “[In his book, The Bullet’s Song], a long essay on utopian violence,
> he reiterates his conviction that the idea of total and redemptive
> transformation of human society through political means is ‘the most
> influential myth of modern political society from 1789 to the present
> days.’ Pfaff is especially wary of its ‘naïve American version,’ which,
> ‘although rarely recognized as such, survives, consisting in the belief
> that generalizing American political principles and economic practices to
> the world at large will bring history (or at least historical progress) to
> its fulfillment.”****
>
> ** **
>
> I have not been “dismissive” of Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s theses, but
> have been inclined to pit them against each other in the evaluation of
> current events and of future possibilities. If Fukuyama were indeed
> proposing a utopian future based on Liberal Democracy then I would agree
> with Pfaff, but I haven’t seen that in anything of Fukuyama’s thus far.
> Could that argument be in the book Pfaff reviews (which I have not yet
> read)? I doubt it. Fukuyama’s thesis is based upon Hegel’s as
> “interpreted” by Alexandre Kojeve. This thesis argues that the “end of
> history” will not be a Marxian one (who turned Hegel upside down) but
> Hegel’s (thus turning Hegel right-side up). Marxism is indeed Utopian but
> in all my reading of Fukuyama I have never seen any suggestion that Liberal
> Democracy, even as the “end of history” comprises a Utopia (unless Pfaff
> views the end of war as constituting a Utopia). Quite the contrary as his
> reference to “the last man” signifies.****
>
> ** **
>
> Pfaff in his review writes “Fukuyama assumes that what Huntington called
> the ‘third wave of democratization’ has already largely taken place, since
> at the time he was writing this book the number of ‘democracies and
> market-oriented economies,’ forty-five at the start of the 1970s (according
> to Freedom House), had increased to some 120 – ‘more than 60 percent of the
> world’s independent states.’ Fukuyama therefore claims that liberal
> democracy is now ‘the default form of government.’ To increase that total
> and ensure the enlargement of a new democratic international order, it will
> be necessary to rescue ‘collapsed or unstable governments,’ the issue he
> says has most interested him as a Washington scholar and think-tank
> analyst. . .”****
>
> ** **
>
> We see Pfaff’s “dismissiveness” when he writes “his interpretation of
> prehistory and history, despite his disclaimer, is close to what the
> British historian Herbert Butterfield in 1931 termed ‘the Whig
> interpretation of history,’ which is to say that the past has been a
> progressive process leading up to us. ‘Us’ is not only England and the
> United States but Denmark, Sweden, and other exemplary democracies.” The
> foundation for Fukuyama’s thesis is in Germany (Hegel) and France (Kojeve)
> not in the ideas Butterfield criticized. ****
>
> ** **
>
> I was surprised later in his review to see this criticism: “He
> acknowledges the influence of the Enlightenment’s conception and promotion
> of the rights of man and human equality, and the challenge of its humanist
> ideas to religion, which widely replaced religious with secular values.
> But he ignores the most important political consequences of this
> introduction of the possibility of an earthly utopia, which largely
> replaced religion’s teaching and that the afterlife was where men and women
> would find salvation.” Pfaff doesn’t sound here as though he read
> Fukuyama’s *The Great Disruption, Human Nature and the Reconstitution of
> Social Order. *If he discusses these matters in *The Great Disruption, *is
> he guilty of ignoring them if he doesn’t repeat himself in *The Origins
> of Political Order? *Perhaps, if their absence comprises a logical
> inconsistency, but I am more incline to think the dismissive William Pfaff
> hasn’t read the former book.****
>
> ** **
>
> Pfaff might be saying that if Fukuyama were more aware of myths about “an
> earthly utopia” he might have avoided creating such a myth of his own (a
> view that a wider reading of Fukuyama would disabuse him of), for further
> down Pfaff writes, “Post-Enlightenment secular theories of history, as
> generally recognized today, had the characteristics of substitute
> religions. Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism, the most important of
> them, were teleological and utopian. Marxism claimed to provide a
> comprehensive explanation of society’s existence and its foreordained
> outcome. It expected to transform the human condition, and, when achieved,
> to explain and justify all that had gone before.” * *****
>
> ** **
>
> Pfaff spends most of the rest of his article arguing that there is no
> evidence that human nature has in any way improved since the beginning of
> recorded history. I agree with him here, but so does Fukuyama. Fukuyama
> treats human nature, at least in *The Great Disruption *as unimprovable.
> He begins that book with a quote from Horace, which translated reads “You
> can throw out Nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes running back and
> will burst through your foolish contempt in triumph. ****
>
> ** **
>
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