Word: fukuyama
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...Fukuyama's dark musings about the future are rooted in his view of the past, especially the past 40 years. Like many others, he exaggerated the threat of communism. Now he is exaggerating the significance of its disappearance, and he is worried that without a clear-cut, epic struggle between good and evil, we will go soft and flabby...
...Francis Fukuyama wrote a recondite essay on political philosophy for a small neoconservative quarterly, the National Interest. It caused a sensation, largely because of its title: "The End of History...
Well, like that other terminator, Fukuyama is back, this time with a book. The End of History and the Last Man, to be published in the U.S. this week and in 12 languages around the world next month, has earned advance raves from various worthies of the right, including George Gilder, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol and George Will. The book is certain to be widely discussed, as the original article was, although probably not so widely read. Its 418 pages are dense with difficult words and concepts, many of them borrowed from Plato, Hegel and Nietzsche. (For a definition...
...Fukuyama's point is that even in China, where communism remains the official line, it has lost its "dynamism and appeal" as an idea marching through "History." He is so much under the influence of 19th century German philosophers that he sometimes capitalizes Important Nouns. That quirk is telling: Fukuyama takes the intellectual underpinnings and pretensions of political movements more seriously than almost any politician does. The perfect example is his treatment of communism. That doctrine long ago proved to be a recipe for the accumulation and consolidation of raw power by a conspiratorial elite, not a monument...
Part of the fallacy then, which Fukuyama perpetuates, was an obsessive focus on ideology. Of course ideas can be wonderful, or terrible, and potent; you don't have to be a Hegelian to know that. But Fukuyama invests abstractions -- comprehensive categories and grand postulations -- with more weight than messy reality will support. For instance, in a chart intended to show how the number of "liberal democracies" on earth has grown, he includes Singapore, where there are laws against chewing gum and failing to flush public toilets; Sri Lanka, where murderous ethnic and religious violence continues nonstop; and Colombia, where narcoterrorists...