Thoughts on the End of History (pt. 1)

Hi everybody. Thank you for your patience as I pounded out the most recent history episode. The response has been uniformly excellent, so thank you. But I am definitely glad to be done with that era, at least for quite a while, and am very much looking forward to tackling new topics.

The period immediately after finishing a history podcast is always a bit of a dead zone for me. The last two months or so were entirely devoted to a subject about which I’ve now said everything I have to say, and downshifting from the long, feverish days of obsessive work into a mode where I’ll be reading the material on the next subject can cause me to tumble into the doldrums if I’m not careful. For the next… I don’t know, two months? For the next two months or so I’ll be reading, reading, reading. I took one day off after releasing Whose America?, pt. 2, but since then I’ve had my nose in a book for 6-8 hours each day, laying the groundwork for a very big and ambitious topic I’ll be covering in Whose America?, pt. 3. I can be hard to nail the proper rhythm for working on these things. I’ve got a stack of at least 20 books, with more added on the regular, that I’ve got to get through before I’ll feel comfortable creating the next history episode. But if I spend all my time reading about a topic I won’t be ready to write about for a couple months, I end up neglecting the Substack, Unraveling, etc. On the other hand, if I devote too much time to those other projects, then it’s hard to generate the level of immersion necessary to actually make the history episode good. And so, as I start to work through the material, I will work through it here, and my hope is that the next history episode will be something of a collaborative effort, with me trying out ideas and narratives on you guys and working your feedback into the show.

I’m still in reset mode as I reorient toward an entirely new historical period, so until I start putting together my thoughts on the new topic, I’ll talk about some other things that have been on my mind. Today I want to talk about Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man, a widely-panned, but highly-influential and much-misunderstood book published as the Soviet Union was drawing its last breaths.

---

Fukuyama’s book expanded on an essay he’d written for the neoconservative journal, National Interest, in July 1989, just months before the Berlin Wall came down. His timing was impeccable. The essay was called “The End of History?” and made the case that Western-style liberal democracy was the final destination of all human political development. It was the kind of triumphalism that liberal intellectuals mock even as they adopt it as their own outlook. The “?” at the end of the title (regrettably left off the title of the book he published a couple years later) did not save him from derisive criticism. “This guy is trying to say that history is over! That nothing else will ever happen again! The West has won, and that is that, forever, ha!” Many more people mock the book than have actually read it, though, and it shows.

Philosophy nerds will immediately recognize that “the end of history” and the “last man” refer to the ideas of the G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche, respectively. Fukuyama’s thesis cannot really be understood without knowing how completely it depended on the two German philosophers, especially Hegel. Fukuyama was not an academic philosopher, though, he was a policy wonk. He worked as a foreign policy analyst for the RAND Corporation before moving on to President Reagan’s State Department, where he rose to be deputy director of the department’s Policy Planning Staff. His understanding of Hegel was shaped by a Russian emigre philosopher named Alexandre Kojeve, who is less well-known today than he ought to be (at least in the US), and about whom a bit should be said.

Kojeve had fled the Bolshevik Revolution to Germany, and then on to France, yet he remained an avid supporter of the Soviet Union and called himself a “strict Stalinist” when asked about his politics. I’ve read his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which, though meant as a guide for the perplexed, was no easier to get through than Hegel’s own notoriously convoluted work, and I won’t claim to fully understand either of them. Hegel called his eschatology the historical dialectic, which, in the broadest possible strokes, says that history is headed in a particular direction to a knowable destination through predictable processes, though the road to that end is neither smooth nor coherent to the people living through any given stage of it. Hegel borrowed the term “dialectic” from the Greeks, to whom it meant a style of logical argumentation whereby a statement (thesis) is countered by a conflicting idea (antithesis), and the apparent contradiction between the two positions gives way to a solution that transcends and includes both of the original ideas (synthesis). The new thesis, in turn, encounters its own antithesis, which is resolved by a new synthesis, and the process continues this way according to the overpowering imperative of rationality. Hegel maintained that what he called the Spirit evolved according to this same process. What is Spirit? Well… I’m starting to doubt the wisdom of what I’ve gotten myself into here. I just wanted to talk about Fukuyama’s book… what have I done?