[lit-ideas] Rorty and "The End of History"

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2010 20:40:32 -0800
            Rorty writes on page 229 of Truth and Progress, "We should
concede Francis Fukuyama's point (in his celebrated essay, The End of
History) that if you still long for total revolution, for the Radically
Other on a world-historical scale, the events of 1989 show that you are out
of luck.  Fukuyama suggested, and I agree, that no more romantic prospect
stretches before the Left than an attempt to create bourgeois democratic
welfare states and to equalize life chances among the citizens of those
states by redistributing the surplus produced by market economies.

            "Fukuyama, however, sees nothing but boredom ahead for us
intellectuals once we have admitted that bourgeois democratic welfare states
are the best polities we can imagine.  He thinks that the end of romantic
politics will have the same dampening effect on our collective imaginary as
the admission that contemporary Athenian institutions were the best he could
imagine would have had on Plato.  As a follower of Strauss and Kojeve,
Fukuyama regrets this dampening.  In the intellectual tradition to which he
belongs, political philosophy is first philosophy.  Utopian politics, the
sort of politics whose paradigm is Plato's Republic, is the root of
philosophical thought.

            "On a Straussian view, the hope of creating a society whose hero
is Socrates, rather than Achilles or Themistocles, lies behind what
Heidegger calls 'Western metaphysics.'  So to damp down political romance is
to impoverish our intellectual life, and perhaps make it impossible.
Straussians tend to agree with Heideggerians that the end of metaphysics
means the beginning of a nihilistic wasteland . . . ."

            "So far I have been suggesting that what Fukuyama, like
Nietzsche and Kojeve before him, is worried about is not the end of history,
but the end of philosophy, and thus the romance, of history.  What bothers
him is our diminished ability to use History as an object around which we
intellectuals can wrap our fantasies."

            COMMENT:   Rorty is wrong, in my opinion, to suggest that
Fukuyama was worried about the end of philosophy rather than the end of
history.  Fukuyama invoked the idea of Nietzsche's boring "last man" not to
suggest that there won't be anything for philosophers to talk about, but to
suggest that there won't be anything of substance for nations to fight
about.  There is some truth to the idea that Liberal Democratic nations
won't have anything to fight over inasmuch as they are all the same, but if
a Nietzsche Ubermensche were to arise, he wouldn't need a "political"
reason.  He would come equipped with his own inspiring "fury."  He could
and, Fukuyama thinks, might very well start up history again (by warring
against other nations) for no other reason than an exalted view of himself
and his own destiny.  But that wasn't something Fukuyama longed for; quite
the contrary.  It was the one potential danger, the only one he could think
of, that might render Hegel wrong after all.  Nietzsche's bland "last man"
wasn't something Fukuyama regretted, but he thought a future Ubermensche
might regret him.

            Rorty may be reading more of Kojeve into Fukuyama's book than
Fukuyama put there.  Fukuyama had every opportunity to state that he was
more concerned about the end of philosophy than history in his subsequent
writings, but we don't find that in his America at the Crossroads,
Democracy, Power, and the NeoConservative Legacy.  Fukuyama wrote that in
2006 as a rejection of the use to which his earlier (1992) End of History
was put by the Neocons.  He intended his End of History to establish that
Hegel was correct when he taught that Capitalism (aka Liberal Democracy)
would be the "end of history."  Up until 1989 Marx's view that Communism
would be "the end of history" and that Hegel was wrong held sway.  But after
the failure of the Marxist experiment, it was time, Fukuyama thought, that
we give Hegel his due.  The "end of history" was indeed Capitalism (aka
Liberal Democracy) and would not be Communism.  However, Fukuyama intended
his End of History and the Last Man to be a theoretical work and not a
handbook for political action.  He did not believe in the active exportation
of Liberal Democracy, especially not by military means.  Whether or not
Fukuyama's ideas inspired the Bush administration to hope that Iraq could be
converted into a Liberal Democracy, some Neocons were speaking out as though
there was a connection and Fukuyama could not abide that. 

Lawrence
[lit-ideas] Rorty and "The End of History"

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