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A tad more serious than Thomas Friedman
Charles Maier at OpenDemocracy:
There are conversions … and conversions. Saul was thrown from the saddle, blinded, dressed down by God and had to refashion his whole life. Vision returned only when he was prepared to take a new name and to champion the accessible message of love against the stern exclusivist covenant he had hitherto defended with prosecutorial zeal. Still, no pain no gain. No scary loss of sight, no realisation he had earlier been morally blind. Francis Fukuyama's conversion in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy is a more conditional one. He has had to wipe the desert dust from his Ray-bans; he hasn't had to lose his sight [....]
History itself remains intoxicating; and that, I fear, undermines Fukuyama's vision. We may also aspire to reach a plateau, but a significant number of us live for the transcendent moments of self-dissolution into a larger cause. Calling the impulse romantic, "acting out", or juvenile psychodrama will not remove the longing. No one can say that Fukuyama is wrong. But history goes on for a long time. It still seems a bit early to say he's right.
(Yes, "history" certainly does go back aways. Whether it continues may be another question. In the interest of debate, is there no one still reading Fukayama who also seriously questions whether (neo)liberalism may have a future, and for very long? Speaking of ontological security-blankets, and so on. A symposium via the decline.)
By Matt | December 5, 2006 in History | Permalink
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Matt, thank you for posting this. I was looking at the very same symposium yesterday. I browsed at Fukuyama's response and what jumped out at me was he suggestion that the "values and institutions developed during the western Enlightenment are potentially universal..." (emphasis on potentially) And he also makes clear that the key contribution of the Enlightenment is "liberal democracy." This suggests that he really hasn't modified his position all that much in the last 16 years, except he sounds much less triumphant in tone.
Posted by: Alain | Dec 6, 2006 10:53:24 AM
I don't understand why the symposium papers so overemphasize the Middle East (perhaps Fukuyama does as well, I don't really want to read his essay). It seems to me the crisis of neoliberalism is, quite properly and naturally, actually occurring in the financial/institutional centers of the West, and events in the Middle East are largely a secondary effect.
Posted by: burritoboy | Dec 6, 2006 1:09:26 PM
Dear all: I'm not quite sure how these symposia work; I am pasting here a post from the end of last winter, with working links, I hope. It was written for a more "general" audience, but I find it still relevant. It follows:
Francis Fukuyama's recent change of heart is farce and tragedy at once. Fukuyama, the neocon and neo-neo-Hegelian, proclaimed in The End of History and the Last Man, with an inverted millennarism, that the long progress of historical spirit had found its final form — that U.S.-style liberal capitalism had superseded everything else. He then (somewhat oxymoronically) helped inscribe the strategic and ideological dogma for maintaining the supposedly steady state, in the famed "Project for the New American Century" documents. In the race to war, he served as a marshal.
But now, in the words of Tom Petty, there's been a change. The blinders are off! He is against the war! History may not be over quite yet! This change is recorded in numerous places, not the least of which is the seven-page abstract of new volume America at the Crossroads, featured in the paper of record's weekend fashion spread a few Sundays back (and archived for free here). A couple weeks later, reviewing the book itself, the POR opens by focusing its amazement on the book's apostasy...made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself.
Apostasy must be secured, natch, through the ritual denunciation of the apostate by a true believer — a labor taken up by Chris Hitchens, the neocons' potbellied attack pig, in the pages of Slate. That ought to do it; Fukuyama can now be a hero, or at least a name to proffer, for the progressive liberals who dream only of being allowed to say "I told you so" once in a midterm election.
Alas, Fukuyama's blinders aren't off so much as optimized. He is still searching for a successful strategy for American hegemony; he's just come to realize that a somewhat higher competence level may be required. A world in which this brings comfort to anyone of conscience is tragic to say the least. Meanwhile, his profound aspect-blindness is unchanged. One clear indication is in the piece Fukuyama wrote recently for Slate, in which he diagnoses last year's French riots as part of
....the ongoing struggle with radical Islamism (aka the "war on terrorism").
This is a smallish detail in the essay, but an utterly telling one. Perhaps he failed to read any of the serious journalistic coverage of the riots; perhaps he has no French friends, or, just as likely, his informants share his blindness. We have a name for that: ideology. Dude (as I like to say to destroy my own credibility), that wasn't radical Islam. That wasn't terrorism. That was poor, mostly immigrant kids. That was class conflict.
What the rioters had in common was, in ascending order of commonality, a) varying tones of darker-colored-than-Sarkozy skin, b) a history of being actively and passively brutalized by governmental agents, most notably cops with batons, tasers, and guns, and c) disenfranchisement.
To not see this is to see nothing. One wonders if Mr. Fukuyama is able to present the current unrest by poor and disenfranchised French youth as similarly linked to "radical Islamism," or if, in what may be an even greater achievement in magical thinking, he finds this wave to be unrelated and only coincidentally similar. Unable to see, much less speak, the obvious, these are his choices — and ours. Which is to say that, as an intelligent and informed person with the apparent capacity to open and change his mind, Fukuyama is the America we would like to believe in. But with his hysterical inability to mention social relations, social class, and the transnational, transreligious confrontation between the wealthy and the disenfranchised, Fukuyama is the America we know, in which any story can be told as long as it doesn't mention those niceties. In that regard, Fukuyama clings to to the murderous blindness of the New American Century as dogmatically any of his colleagues, while playing at debate — a farce indeed.
Posted by: jane | Dec 6, 2006 2:41:33 PM
is there no one still reading Fukayama
Is threre anyone still reading Fukuyama?
Posted by: richard | Dec 8, 2006 3:09:46 PM
Hm, apparently so richard.
Though it seems nobody here wishes to dignify much less defend him, or rather his most uncanny discovery of The Enlightenment's just and fitting telos; oh well.
I agree, and that's an interesting point, burritoboy. A bit of displacement at work on the intellectual's part, perhaps?
And thanks, jane (was it really over a year ago, the French riots)? And while decades of discrimination may have played a part, I'd agree with you on taking a more Walter Benn Michaels line (those events were certainly not reducible to race, far less to some contrived and final show-down between two irreconcilable "cultures" at "war"...
There is a very peculiar habit of mind-I think Derrida describes it well somewhere-peculiar in the properly-seen sense, that is, (while truly nothing, you understand, could be more common and predictable)-whereby the most radical sort of forced intervention and mounting cruelty are justified/rationalized/displaced by virtue of some near-mystical clinging, as if to some-thing absolutely present and forever fixed.
...in a way, Heidegger's idea that the present does not exist seems to anticipate all the (ontological) critique necessary for dispensing with such sophistries (whether it be new age yuppie "be here now-ism," Bernard Lewis-style "clash of civilizations" or Francis Fukuyama-style "Hegelianism").
Anyway, thank you for the comments.
Posted by: Matt | Dec 11, 2006 11:27:34 PM
Speaking of Friedman, excellent piece here:
http://www.nypress.com/16/20/news&columns/cage.cfm
Posted by: daniel | Dec 15, 2006 1:29:28 AM
Matt: as you say, "decades of discrimination may have played a part." Indeed, a huge part: you'll note that it can be seen as either cause or effect (or both) for all three of the mentioned categories shared by the banlieue insurgents. I'm pretty sure no one's trying to efface discrimination, except insofar as that term makes it difficult to name material facts (in which sense it's Fukuyama who is the most discriminating here).
Posted by: jane | Dec 16, 2006 5:50:12 PM
Frankly, I find Fukyama's "weak determinism," faux Marxism, and neo-con Hegelianism to be disingenuous at best, and at worst, a rather pathetic misappropriation of Enlightenment and socialist thought for conservative, imperial purposes. He writes extremely well, has thoroughly read and absorbed the classics, studied a wide range of histories, and would have us believe him to be an impeccably rational man who has achieved great insight through a wholly objective, Olympian sort of reasoning. But when our paths crossed 35 years ago, Frank was a seemingly counter-culturual, Cornell undergrad who dug the Rolling Stones and wore moderately long hair, but supported U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and was a protege of leading Cold War academic lights on campus. Not much has changed. With sincere apologies to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and any other "bourgeois" icon who has made legitimate contributions to the idea and practice of democracy, Fukuyama's philosophical rationalizations of empire and the violence that accompanies it remind me just a little of the opening lines of a speech given by a perhaps apocryphal Old Left organizer to an audience of New York writers in the early 1930s. "Capitalism," he allegedly remarked, "is a massive, stinking dung heap. And the role of the intellectual is to manufacture and spread a little perfume over that dung heap so we can walk around in it without choking from stench." Crude, over-siimplified, and probably resentful of the listeners' relative privilege, but something worth considering before digesting 'The End of History' on its own terms.
burghartdt
Posted by: burghardt | Dec 22, 2006 2:52:29 PM
'tis well said, burghardt.
Posted by: Matt | Jan 3, 2007 11:13:59 AM
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