11.25.09
Hegel, Fukuyama, and the ‘end of history’
Fukuyama’s essay/book on the ‘end of history’ is starting to fade away now, having done its right wing work all too well, and having confused the left, who should have been able to deal with this ideologue.
But Fukuyama is deceptive here, because what he had to say was more to the point than anyone on the left realized.
It raises the question of what Hegel really meant. Hegel never discoursed on the ‘end of history’. He did produce a teleological metaphysics of spirit in which the emergence of freedom was part of a spiritual design.
This language was confusing to secularists, and finally rejected, missing the point he was making, which is twisted into something else in Fukuyama.
Fukuyama makes a subtle set of changes in Hegel, first to adapt the argument to ‘historical materialists’, so to speak, by getting rid of the spiritual apparatus for a secularized reductionism, and second by injecting the question of capitalism into the question of the end of history (that pun on the teleology of history, and the endpoint of history, clever pun indeed).
The permanance of capitalism at the end of history is something Hegel never claimed. What he did claim was that, as he toasted the French Revolution every year, the gains of modern freedom were an aspect of the teleology of Universal History. This kind of thinking just couldn’t survive the onset of positivism. But history has born Hegel out, in some fashion. This was therefore a strange sort of plug for the dawn of liberal civilization, even as he acutely critiqued liberalism even as it was being born. The issue is much clearer in Kant, who produced the great philosophy of liberal freedom.
The point for the left here is, not that Leninist ruffians can or should destroy liberalism and concoct a totalitarian socialism, but that a successor to liberal capitalism ought, at the end of history, to be a liberal socialism, a society of free men, free of the constraits of capitalist domination.
The idea was something Marx and Engels could not grasp. What to say of the degenerations of leftists of the French (and American) Revolution in the nineteenth century.
It is a remarkable thought to consider that Fukuyama cleverly distorted the question in this way. It has led us to consider that capitalism is blessed with the same aura of Hegelian mystification as liberalism. But that was a clever switch.
This might help to challenge the left also: there can only be a liberal socialism. There is no other kind. To take away all the gains of human rights fought for in modern revolutions, as Marx proposed, was a calamity of bad theory. And it is all a little too conventient for those obsessed with that other ‘fetish of the commodities’: the revolution, with its mystique of grand historical dynamics, a washed out variant of Hegel’s teleology of freedom.
Kant, Hegel, the ‘end of history’ | Kant’s Challenge said,
November 28, 2009 at 12:23 pm
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