[lit-ideas] Re: Pfaff on Fukuyama's Utopia
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:46:07 +0900
The turkey is a data-driven thinker.
Everyday of his life, the sun has risen, the farmer has fed him.
Then comes Thanksgiving.
John
On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Mike Geary
<jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> 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=4 provides
>> 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. ****
>>
>> ** **
>>
>
>
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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