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For the factual evidence, Fukuyama launches into a distilled and often tedious historical account of the progress of democracy in the world. It is here that the text takes a turn, that was most interesting, and contemporaneously relevant for me.To structure the best political system, one must theorize about the nature of man. Brushing aside the temporary problem of Islamic fascism, the central theoretical problem then is: Is this a temporary state of affairs, and have we finally reached the end of history, with a system that best serves all the needs of a human being.The task is at once to deal with theoretical questions of the nature of history and listing the actual historical events suited to his thesis. Hegel, foreseeing this, sought to keep thymos alive.
In Plato's Republic, Socrates divides the soul into reason, desires/appetites and thymos - the human desire for recognition. The thymos of people is directed in activities like mercantilism, politics, and for the vast majority, in sports, adventure seeking and so on. In this way he got the recognition of his fellow men. There are south east asian and chinese models which are capitalist, but not democratic. The traditional master-slave feudal system was created because amongst the first men, the man with the greatest thymos, staked his life in battle and made the others his slaves.
To the theoretical questions, such as Aristotle's idea that History is cyclical and no universal history is possible, his best answer is Natural science. In the English liberal tradition, men like Locke and Hobbes recognized the destabilizing potential of thymos and sought to kill it. In Hegel's view, a liberal society must redirect and not kill the thymos, and only then will it fulfill all the three components of the human soul, and become the perfect political system. But these were slaves, and thymos calls for recognition from equals and superiors. Fukuyama is not sparing in his disdain of economic and environmental rights, that inform a lot of the european states. But as a study of the theory of history, it falls quite short of the mark.
The greatest opponent to Hegel's theory was Marx, who contended that as long as there is class inequality, there will be class warfare. More seriously though, the theory appears forced to fit the facts at times, and it is evident that it is derived from a more nuanced source - in this case Alexandre Kojeve's works. He takes his cue from Hegel, with his theory of the universal history and the historical dialectic, and his conclusion that the dialectic has finally been resolved in the Western liberal political system. This however, creates the bourgeois, which is a contemptible class with no public spirit. the least amount of work, the dignity of the worker and pursuit of individual leisure, have actually been achieved in the capitalist liberal democracies.
Even in the developed world, the European welfare state models are significantly different the American one. The discussion of democratic transitions around the world are simplistic, and presented to suit the thesis, very often tackled with the same billiard ball mentality that he later reserves for his criticism when discussing the Realpolitik school of policy. At a theoretical level, it is certainly not clear that the human desire for recognition is fulfilled in contemporaray liberal societies, as dramatized in Haneke's Seventh Continent. Traditional social structure in Japan and India still has a significantly greater social importance than the individualistic America. Today, however, Marxism stands utterly defeated, and it turns out that many of Marx's objectives, e.g. Science and technology will ensure that knowledge survives, and short of a nuclear obliteration of the planet, enough knowledge of the liberal theory and traditions will be left for men to build over again, even after a lull of a few centuries. Hence, the ceaseless battles between princes. Liberal democracy is a generic term, and Fukuyama's usage of it is primarily sourced from the American system.
Fukuyama has obviously influenced the neocon agenda in US, and for that reason enough, it is probably worth reading this book. Fukuyama's essential thesis is that Liberal Democracy is the political system best suited for human beings. Multiple attempts to find a logical reason that democracy is the best system for a modern industrial society are examined, and none stand up adequately. Taking a cue from Machiavelli, excessive thymos is regulated through a system of checks and balances.There are numerous objections one can raise at every turn of this text.
His thesis is ridiculous. Thus even back in 1992 he should have guessed what was going to happen when Islam met globalization. Hasn't this author committed seppuku by now. I'm surprised the publisher doesn't shamefacedly order all copies pulled from the shelves.I'm not a history professor, but he is.
Finer; 4) Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 5) Political Thought: 5.1. A millennial perspective" (2001) plus "The world economy: Historical Statistics" (2003) by Angus Maddison (a combined edition of these two volumes appeared on December 2007); 2) Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 3) Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. Religion and Political Thought in World History" plus "A World History of Ancient Political Thought" by Antony Black; 6) Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 7) War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat There are already many good reviews so I will only suggest reading the following books (whose scope is amazingly global) instead of, or in addition to, Fukuyama's peculiar work: 1) Economy: 1.1 "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke; 1.2 and 1.3: "The world economy. and 5.2: "The West and Islam.
I've always thought that stupid people should be listened to with the most attention because they involuntarily spell out in words their entire thought process, revealing in this way assumptions and conjectures that more intelligent people with similar ideas would never dare admitting explicitely - even to themselves.Fukuyama in writing "The End of History" has accomplished a great deed in involuntarily gifting humanity of the most detailed and well explained text ever written about the stupidity of historical eschatology. I found particularly painful to read him discuss Hegel and Nietzsche with little to no cognition of the depth of the thoughts of these authors and remaining attached to a ridicolously superficial view of their ideas. Many things have been said about this book - adding one more review would be useless. I'd like to point out, though, two things that have not been discussed so far.Firstly, what made really hard for me to read this book was the fact that Fukuyama seems to have studied Western Philosophy on a "Philosophy for Dummies" guide. This thing alone should put Fukuyama back on a school desk for life and not in an office room with the tag "professor" on the door.Secondly, this book - for how incredibly shallow and misinformed - has one incredible quality.
"So philosophy, as it expires in the arms of truly historical thinking, can no longer glorify its world without denying it, for even in order to express itself it must assume that the total history in which it has vested everything has come to an end, and that the only court capable of ruling on truth or falsehood has been adjourned." - Guy Debourd "The Society of the Spectacle" (1967)
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