[lit-ideas] Fukyama on Neoconservatism
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: polidea@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:01:21 -0800 (PST)
I have numerous affiliations with the different
strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a
student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote
the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind";
worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf
issues; and worked also on two occasions for
Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book
"The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a
neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the
view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in
all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal
democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an
accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that
liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the
argument. "The End of History" is in the end an
argument about modernization. What is initially
universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but
rather the desire to live in a modern ? that is,
technologically advanced and prosperous ? society,
which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for
political participation. Liberal democracy is one of
the byproducts of this modernization process,
something that becomes a universal aspiration only in
the course of historical time.
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind
of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term
process of social evolution, but one that terminates
in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the
formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the
neoconservative position articulated by people like
Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they
believed that history can be pushed along with the
right application of power and will. Leninism was a
tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned
as farce when practiced by the United States.
Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body
of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer
support.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?pagewanted=all
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