Word: hegelizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...best-known propagator of the theory that history has an "end," meaning its fulfillment in an ideal political system, was Karl Marx. He believed the contradictions of all previous societies would be resolved by the emergence of a Communist utopia. Marx borrowed his concept from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued that history would culminate, as Fukuyama puts it, at a moment "in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious...
...Hegel, history "ended," in this sense, with Napoleon's triumph over the Prussian forces at Jena in 1806. That battle, to Hegel, marked the vindication by arms of the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution. True, Napoleon was eventually defeated and authoritarian monarchy restored. But Fukuyama approvingly cites the argument of a little-known French-Russian philosopher, Alexandre Kojeve, that Hegel was essentially correct. The reason: it was at Jena that the "vanguard" of humanity implemented the French Revolution's goals...
Fukuyama, who considers Hegel an unjustly neglected thinker, argues that those ideals, as embodied in liberal democracy, have outlasted two principal 20th century competitors for the hearts and minds of Western men. "Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II," Fukuyama writes. As for Marxism-Leninism, he notes that "while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang or Cambridge," no large state that espouses it as an ideology even pretends to be in the vanguard of history. Witness, as evidence, the glasnost-inspired admissions of economic failure and bureaucratic bungling that...
Irving Kristol, founding publisher of the National Interest, says Fukuyama's article serves to "welcome G.W.F. Hegel to Washington." To Harries, the . piece "de-parochializes the debate over Gorbachev's policy and removes it from a cold war context." But Fukuyama also has plenty of critics. In general, conservatives, like historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, argue that he is excessively optimistic in predicting that Marxism's demise as an ideology means that the era of superpower conflict is over. Liberals like Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic charge that he is too complacent in proclaiming the triumph of democracies that have done...