Word: fukuyama
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...windfall of improvements in the world: the collapse of communism; the dismantling of apartheid; the end of the cold war and the nuclear menace, at least in its apocalyptic Big Power form. State violence (in the style of Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu) seemed to be skulking off in disrepute. Francis Fukuyama, a former U.S. State Department policy planner, even proclaimed "the end of history." The West and democratic pluralism seemed to have triumphed: satellites and computers and ; communications and global business dissolved the old monoliths in much of the world. Humankind could take satisfaction in all that progress and even think...
America's Purpose (ICS Press; $19.95) culls 16 essays from the small (circ. 8,000) but influential quarterly National Interest. It was in that journal two years ago that Francis Fukuyama fretted over the "end of history" and thus provided a slogan for cold warriors' dismay at the waning of the all-defining struggle and the surrender of the essential enemy. Since then, the right has split into isolationist and internationalist camps. In the pages of this slim volume the two sides square off for intellectual combat of a high order...
...metaphysics of the possibilities can flare and darken. The Holocaust and other catastrophes of the 20th century invite the term post-apocalyptic. But a world veering toward the 21st century sometimes has an edgy intuition that it is "pre-apocalyptic." Last summer Francis Fukuyama, a State Department planner, resolved the matter peacefully. He published an article proclaiming the "end of history," a result of the worldwide triumph of Western liberal democracy. Hence this is the posthistoric age, a fourth dimension in which the human pageant terminates in a fuzz of meaningless well-being. Intellectuals sometimes nurture a spectacular narcissism about...
Never mind, Fukuyama seems to say: "For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in . . . the common ideological heritage of mankind." This passage, almost a throwaway line amid the references to Hegel and the main strands of Fukuyama's argument, stands out nonetheless. It will be particularly embarrassing when "post-history" produces its first ugly spectacular, whether it is a nuclear war between two backward and strange- thinking countries that never cared much for Karl Marx or Adam Smith, or an ecological disaster that is beyond...
...melancholy respect, there is nothing new in Fukuyama's pernicious nonsense. In the bad old days of Stalin and Brezhnev, too many Americans were preoccupied with the threat of Communism to attend adequately to Third World problems (overpopulation, underdevelopment, sectarian strife), as well as First World blights such as drugs and homelessness. Now, in the heady era of Gorbachev, some Western strategists may have redefined the challenge as coping with the decline of Communism, but their world view remains afflicted by a peculiar combination of arrogance and shortsightedness...