Dilip Simeon's blog

Last Man Standing - Fukuyama pines for that old-time liberalism    “IN WATCHING THE FLOW of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something fundamental has happened in world history.” These were the seminal opening words of Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History?” published in the summer 1989 edition of The National Interest. Fukuyama, then a policy planner at the State Department, offered a simple, unoriginal, yet provocative thesis: humanity was on the precipice of a “post-historical world.” Rather than preparing for war, or for disorder at the mercy of communism’s coming demise, the world should prepare for a permanent end to imperial and ideological conflict. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” Fukuyama wrote, was within sight. Our destiny, the world’s destiny, was liberal democracy: a Pax Liberalismus spurred by American global supremacy. Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama Reviewed by Michael Brenes M...

NB : This informed defence of Fukuyama contains the following arguments:   Late capitalist modernity might be the highest civilisational point we could achieve, because it contained the fewest contradictions...  The anti-capitalist Left, however, was a busted flush. Communism was now a known fraud and failure, and post-Historical people driven by  megalothymia  would have no truck with its egalitarian pretensions, or its nakedly tyrannical realities. Far more threatening to the stability of liberal capitalist societies would be the emergence of demagogic strongmen from the fascistic Right.. Three years after it was written, in the midst of a pandemic, perhaps the author will recognise the fatal flaws in his argument: late capitalist modernity is not a high civilisatonal point: if it is, we are doomed.  And liberalism; communism and  fascism are connected, because the authors' so-called 'fewest contradictions' are always present in all projects to conquer...

“The End of History?” began as something of a recondite joke. Fukuyama was at the time a mid-level figure in the Reagan State Department witnessing the rapid unravelling of the Soviet mystique. “I remember there was a moment when Gorbachev said that the essence of communism was competition, and that’s when I picked up the phone, called my friend and said, ‘If he’s saying that, then it’s the end of history.’” Fukuyama is careful to point out that the coinage was not of his own making, but instead that of a Russian émigré professor named Alexander Kojève whose seminars on Hegel influenced postwar French existentialism. In some ways, Fukuyama says, he has been “trapped” by the ideological cul-de-sac in which his claims regarding the “End of History” have placed him. Though he still stands behind the assertion that liberal democracy is the eventual destination of history, he has qualified his argument and narrowed the scope of his id...

It was the great liberal philosopher Karl Popper who first exposed the weaknesses of historicism as a mode of political justification in his devastating critique of Marxist and fascist determinism. It is ironic that his arguments now apply to the liberalism he sought to defend...  It’s no wonder, given their intellectual arrogance, that so many liberals are surprised when large parts of the world rejects them—or that people spurn their wise counsel when markets collapse and life savings are threatened by the accidents of free-market capitalism.  If liberalism is to survive and flourish, it has to be rescued from Fukuyama’s grasp and from the perils of historical determinism. Most of us in the West are liberals, whether we admit it or not. We want equal rights for all, reject racial differences, cherish the freedom of worship while preserving the freedom to disagree, and seek an economic order that suits the ambitions of the individual. But there’s a growing sense that lib...

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment Reviewed by Wesley Yang If “The End of History?” was “Marxist” in its framework, Fukuyama said, his neocon friends had become “Leninist” in believing the U. S. had the power to hasten the movement of history through military force. He believes they drew the wrong lessons from the Reagan years, specifically the belief that undemocratic societies would simply default toward democracy if we toppled their dictators... Fukuyama’s grandfather was an immigrant from Japan. He came to the United States in 1905, when it was still a nation with mostly open borders, to evade the draft for the Russo-Japanese war. He built a successful hardware store in downtown Los Angeles and became a community leader in Little Tokyo. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was rounded up and sent to an internment camp by the U. S. government for the duration of World War II. Given two weeks to sell off his business, he did so to a white competito...

http://www.e-flux.com/issues/56-june-2014/ In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama published his infamous essay declaring the global triumph of free-market liberal democracy over communism as the end of ideology as such. Not only that, but he also claim ed the world was on the cusp of realizing what Fukuyama's mentor Alexandre Kojève called the "universal homogenous state," which would be the climax of a particular Western idealist tradition stretching back to Hegel. It would be the endpoint of a human consciousness based in accumulative historical progress that also grounded the thinking of Marx himself, who pegged his own philosophy to a conception of time and human advancement as a constant moving towards a projected endpoint. But seriously, regardless of whether this endpoint has been reached, how advanced do you really feel? How many artworks have you seen in recent years that even struck you as being relevant as art? And the insane proliferation of regressive ul...

“The end of” is also the perfect headline for our age. It fits a moment that fetishizes disruption over stability. It grabs an audience enamored of what is next, not what is here. It suits a public debate in which extreme positions are requisite starting points . by Carlos Lozada I hope you had it while you could because, last week, sex ended.  That may sound like a big deal, but it’s not when you consider everything else that has ended already.  Nature and   truth . Money and markets. Men   and   marriage .   Faith  and   reason . They’ve all ended. Power ended in March, but that makes sense because leadership ended last year.   History   ended more than two decades ago, while the   future   ended just two years ago. On the plus side, illness has ended, along with poverty,  racism , war — even  homework . If you thought these things were still around, just pick up  “The End of Sex,”  by Donna Freitas,...