Fukuyama Fails to Answer the Basic Questions of Liberal Political Theory

If Francis Fukuyama knew that his 1989 provocatively titled article for The National Interest would become the moment for some of the most intense discussion in global political theory, he doesn’t show it in the text itself. The then-obscure RAND political scientist writes with the intent of a polemical pamphleteer in “The End of History?” (with a question mark) , lambasting the incapacity of the doyens of magazines like Foreign Affairs of being incapable of understanding the historic moment that was just passing by under their noses. History, capital-H History, was over. Liberal Democracy was the End of History, not merely in the sense that after it, there would be no development in the ideologies on offer, but also that the entire history of man’s efforts was leading towards this point, the transhistorical triad of 1776-1789-1989, liberty and freedom. 

It is understandable that such a pronouncement was shocking to those to whom it appeared history wasn’t over. Some of less continental persuasions than Fukuyama found his claims manifestly absurd. Others understood the infrastructure of his thinking, but denied the grand teleological claim. After all, this was 1989. If Marxism was suddenly rendered unfashionable, its pater familias, Hegelianism, was even more unfashionable. And even more understandably, there were those who claimed that they were still living history, that Marxism’s promise wasn’t dead, that environmentalism was the beyond of liberalism. Fukuyama was nothing more than another false Messiah, a veritable Anti-Christ who displaced the true redemption of the future with a lie that covered up the catastrophic detour that was just occurring. A compendium of all of these critiques can be found, for example, in The National Interest’s 1999 review issue on Fukuyama.

Very well. All of this is acceptable. But “The End of History?” is polemical, and like all good polemics, is lightweight. Its claims that explanations for human behavior must not be located in the material realm, but in consciousness are well-trodden. Even its final claim, that the End of History will be a sad time, is hardly new. This is a seminar paper edited down for popular consumption, not a rigorous academic work. Can we fault Fukuyama for not considering every objection?  After all, Fukuyama does appear to see that the polemical intent of his original article is unsatisfactory for his purposes. Otherwise, his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, would be nothing but a retread. It is not.

It is my intent in this essay to discover exactly the thematic that governs Fukuyama’s work in End of History, and beyond. What does it mean for there to be an end to history, and does such an end actually occur? Is liberal democracy the be-all and end-all of ideological development of our times? And does Fukuyama actually provide an accurate picture of the world as it exists, one that is both congruent to his philosophical and sociological approach and can provide the answers that he thinks it can provide? I show that Fukuyama’s approach on all these questions is much more pessimistic than a triumphalist narrative of progress that many assume Fukuyama to hold, but that this pessimism does not actually save his project from critical scrutiny; indeed, it opens it up to even more troubling flaws. I show that these flaws, though somewhat noted by Fukuyama in his later work on political order, do not cease to exist, but are magnified to the point that the utility of his work for liberalism is brought into question. But in order to establish any of this, we must dive into Fukuyama’s work headfirst. 

Kojeve’s Hegel

We might begin with the End of History. The first indication of the fact that the book differs from its originating paper is that Fukuyama drops the question mark that appends his original article. The question itself appears less pertinent now, with the near-total collapse of the coherence of the “Eastern Bloc” that wasn’t apparent in 1989. The Owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk, and world-historical moments can only be understood after they had passed by. Hence, let us say, the book could only be written after the events that it speaks of and tries to understand. This, we will see, is both a benefit for Fukuyama and a stumbling block. 

The book itself is an odd sort of book. Though ostensibly a work of political theory, its ambitions appear much grander. It sets out not just to justify particular regime types, but also to sketch out a complete philosophical anthropology of what kind of being we are concerned about when we concern ourselves with the question of politics (Fukuyama 1992, xvi-xvii). This ambition leads Fukuyama to strange places, places that would only be known in the Anglophone world to fashionable theorists in the literature departments of Yale and Berkeley, and philosophers in the few departments that specialized in then-contemporary European thought.

Most notably, Fukuyama latches onto the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve (ibid., xxi). Kojeve stands as one of the most idiosyncratic figures in the history of 20th-century French philosophy, the transition point between a prior Bergsonianism and Neo-Kantianism to a concern with the grand systematicity of Hegel. His lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit were, to put it subtly, a hit in the pre-WW2 French philosophical scene. Yet unlike his compatriot in Hegel missionwork Jean Hyppolite, Kojeve’s interpretation is mediated through the work of Heidegger and Nietzsche, giving the arch-rationalist German Idealist a particular bitter tinge, a groundedness that rejected grand systematicity generally presumed in Hegel in favor of the phenomenon that showed itself in the struggles of everyday life. Without Kojeve, there is arguably no existentialism (Kleinberg 2006, 109-110)

Ironically, Kojeve was already unfashionable in France, then in the throes of an anti-Hegelian moment, seeing in it themes of totalization and subordination of difference that would likely be familiar to Anglophone anti-Hegelians (Descombes 1981, 3). Existentialism itself was then-unfashionable, displaced first by the triple attack of structuralist anthropology, neo-Freudian psychoanalysis and a resurgent scientific Marxism. These in turn were rejected by a crop of thinkers who are now misleadingly captured under the universal terms “post-structuralism” or “postmodernism”, despite their often radical disagreements with each other (Roth 2019, 189-224). 

It was this unfashionable doctrine that Fukuyama now adopted. Hegel held to a dialectical method, according to which incomplete concepts that only represented particular sides of the things that they were supposed to represent showed their internal constraints by following into contradictions, and then gave way to higher concepts that included both the older concept and its insufficiency together. For example, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel begins with sense-certainty, where we take objects as immediately given to our senses as a “this”, and nothing more (Hegel 1977 [1807], 58, §90). In sense-certainty, Hegel thinks, we are given an object here and now, but we don’t actually distinguish this object from any other object, since that would mean we would do so in relation to something other than the object given to our senses. Accordingly, if we are given this tree, at the level of sense-certainty we can’t distinguish it from this house (ibid, 58-59, §91).

But this is a problem for Hegel. Consider the case of the night. Sense-certainty comprehends the night as a “this now is before me”. But it does the same for the day, since both the day and the night are at their own times merely particular “this” that are present “now” before me! In this manner, sense-certainty’s certainty appears to collapse into something else vaguer and indeterminate purely out of an insufficiency internal to it. This is the abstract universal, that holds of everything without holding for anything specific. “This here now” could be anything! But the obvious problem is that we do take there to be distinctions in our ordinary experience of objects, and such universality itself is incomplete. Thus we return to our consciousness, and posit that what sense-certainty really considers is what I mean by it, that is, day vs night. But once again, the means of certification here, the “I”, is abstract . There are other “I”s equally certain of their own knowledge (ibid., 60-62, §95-103). What does it mean for “I” to mean something in its consciousness? 

What this “dialectical” method of showing the insufficiency of a concept to capture the reality it claims to capture aspires to is what is colloquially called the truth: the concept is true if it captures everything about the reality it seeks to express. The movement of the concept from one stage of truth to a higher stage, as one might note from the above process, is contained in the actual activities that people concern themselves with. Take the barest, most immediate experiential contents, and then subject it to the test of how we really go about experiencing things. But Hegelian truth is not merely concerned with the “what is”, but what should be. The concept not only changes form in accordance with the reality it seeks to capture, but in turn guides the activity of individuals in the world, who want to change it so as to bring it closer to the concepts they have of it (ibid., 53-55, §83-86). 

What does all this amount to? Hegel thinks the process’ culmination is the Idea, the complete unity of the concept and its object (Hegel 2010 [1830], 284, §212 {Addition}) . But in searching for this unity, consciousness goes through multiple stages, namely self-consciousness, reason and spirit. It is the self-consciousness and spirit that we are concerned with when we are talking about Fukuyama. 

It is here that Kojeve’s great innovation occurs. While for Hegel, the moment of self-consciousness is a brief part of the system, Kojeve transforms them into the very fulcrum upon which the Hegelian system lives or dies. Self-consciousness is after all the point in the journey of the consciousness where it sees itself as the Truth. But self-consciousness does not only relate to itself as truth, but does so by relating itself to sense-experience. “I am the truth” is really “I am the only person who knows the truth about things”. For Hegel, this means that self-consciousness is only self-consciousness in relation to what is other from it (see Roth 2019 for an account of Kojeve’s anthropologizing of Hegel) . 

How does self-consciousness resolve this contradiction? It desires the other as being for us. But in this process of desiring the other, self-consciousness inevitably finds itself desiring others who are unlike any other: living beings. And unlike inanimate matter, living beings seem to have their own internal logic that prevents us from capturing them altogether for us, despite us desiring them. But here is another contradiction: if the desire for the living other is satisfied, then we would negate the very thing that makes self-consciousness what it is. Self-consciousness realizes that it cannot merely destroy the other for self-consciousness’ own satisfaction, but must ensure that the relation to the other is a relation to an independent other.

But this is surely a contradiction: how can a self-consciousness be conscious of itself while there is something utterly independent in its presence? Hegel thinks that the only object that can possibly offer such an object is one that negates itself while preserving its independence: another self-consciousness. And the only way that such a negating self-consciousness can satisfy the desire of self-consciousness is by becoming a mirror for that self-consciousness: that is, the other recognizes the self-consciousness of the I. But self-consciousness does not seek mutual recognition from the other, but only recognition. And since self-consciousness is doubled in the moment of recognition, both demand one-sided recognition from the other.

Hence begins the life-and-death struggle for recognition, where each self-consciousness risks its own being to extract recognition from the other by threatening death. Inevitably, one side wins the struggle, and the losing self-consciousness’ only recourse, according to Kojeve, is to either die or work to satisfy the victor’s desire. Here is founded the master-slave relation that will be so important to Fukuyama. 

Kojeve further holds that the slaves were more human than their masters, since the master descends to mere self-satisfaction of his desire like an animal, whereas the slave, in doing work, separates himself from animals and becomes quasi-divine as a creator. It is in this product of work that the stage of spirit, or culture appears for Kojeve. But this asymmetry is clearly an unsustainable one: the animal master’s humanity is deprived on the falsely imposed recognition extracted from the slave, whereas the god-like slave finds himself deprived of recognition of his actually existing humanity from the master who dominates him. The slave will renew the struggle for recognition, and another life-and-death struggle commences. Such is the story of man for Kojeve until universal and mutual self-recognition appears. 

Kojeve in 1992

It might seem this long detour through Hegel and Kojeve is meaningless towards understanding Fukuyama, but this discussion should illustrate why exactly this unfashionable philosopher was so useful for him. In a sense, it is this very unfashionability that made him suddenly important in 1992. Fukuyama believes with Kojeve that protestors from behind the Iron Curtain to Tiananmen Square to the Carnation Revolution were willing to risk their lives to obtain recognition from their masters who held them in bondage (Fukuyama 1992, 150 & 179-180). This demand for recognition was what drove these global revolutionary movements. It was what discredited Soviet communism and right-wing authoritarianism, it is what destroyed fascism. None of these regimes provides mutual recognition to their subjects, instead violating their humanity by positing their elites as above the masses (ibid.). 

But why would the discrediting of these ideological alternatives (if they are indeed discredited) mean that the end of history (understood in Fukuyama’s reading of Kojeve as mutual recognition of each other’s human freedom) be liberal democracy? Why should we see history in the events of modernity in the first place? Fukuyama conditions this enquiry on the notion that there is an empirical secular drift that is notable from the French Revolution onwards in the direction of liberal democracy that requires us to explain why this specific regime type was victorious.

Fukuyama doesn’t ask himself whether or not he is falling to a classic problem of induction: if we had ended our analysis in 1940, we would have been deeply pessimistic about the chances of liberal democracy. Though he recognizes his interlocutors as historical pessimists, and accuses them of not being able to predict the 1989 revolutions as a result of aforementioned historical pessimism, he never questions whether or not he himself was falling to the trap of historical partiality, a failure to view historical events sub specie aeternitatis (ibid, xiii-xiv, “Our Pessimism”). Can Fukuyama explain the secular drift of states away from liberal democracy in the past 15 years? 

But let us accept that Fukuyama was onto something in 1992. It was true that there had been a broad empirically verifiable secular drift in the direction of liberal democracies by 1992. Why couldn’t this be explained materially? As we will see, Fukuyama does believe that, in a particular sense, this has a material explanation. Firstly, he begins with what he takes to be the one universally agreed upon phenomenon that illustrates progress, modern natural science (ibid., 72-73). Importantly, Fukuyama does not believe that the manner by which natural science directs history is morally progressive (ibid., 80). The fact that one of the generators of history is the arms race to become increasingly technologically advanced military powers better at war than other competitor states is taken by Fukuyama to be an example of this (ibid., 76). 

Fukuyama’s belief that military modernization can be the impetus for great social modernization is perhaps agreeable. Another agreeable manner in which modern natural science constitutes historical development is through expanding our productive capacities in the pursuit of the conquest of nature in order to satisfy our ever-expanding desires (ibid., 76-77). As technological capacities improve, the social conditions required to deploy them necessarily transform themselves as well. The vast economic growth in incomes unleashed by such technological advancement surely constitutes, purely by the metric of satisfaction of desires, progress. Whether or not modern natural science constitutes an universally progressive discipline, on the other hand, is more difficult to see: in what sense was 19th and 20th century race science and eugenics more scientifically progressive than the cultural racism that preceded it? Mere quantifiability constitutes a poor index of historical progress in science. 

Presumably, though, this refers to an individual case and is not pertinent to the broader point Fukuyama is making: that natural science is a massive engine of social transformation. That is unarguably true. Indeed, one of the stronger aspects of Fukuyama’s reading here that distinguishes him from Whiggism about history, is that he believes the logic of natural science is eminently social: development occurs as a result of social necessity in militarization and domination of nature, and in turn continually feeds into this. But this directionality towards greater satisfaction of desires also necessarily for Fukuyama leads to a particular form of social directionality: that of capitalism as the motor of history. 

The increasingly complex technical division of labor brought about by advancing natural science requires a social form that can appropriately manage such complexity. Communism has failed to achieve such a social form, as seen by the simple fact that communist states dependent on central planning produced not merely a smaller range of goods than capitalist states (ibid., 90-97). Even when they did produce goods, they did so less efficiently than their market-oriented counterparts. And, Fukuyama thinks, the bonanza that capitalism offers is not merely restricted to the core of the world economic system. The Asian tigers signify that even the periphery outside the West can rise up from poverty and rapidly improve its economic prospects, specifically by adopting the institutional forms and policies that engineered prosperity in the Global North (ibid., 102).

Thymos

Here, though, an interesting thing happens: Fukuyama acknowledges that the material engine of history fails to justify liberal democracy. Logically, this historical triad of social development-natural science-capitalism only leads to a regime that increasingly satisfies the desires of its subjects qua consumers without leading to liberal democracy. Sure, it seemed true that in 1992 increasing prosperity was related to liberal democracy. After all, the most prosperous countries in the world were liberal democracies, and South Korea and Taiwan had both recently become new democracies after reaping the benefits of capitalist prosperity. Nevertheless, this is mere correlation (ibid., 131-135). Liberal democracy being associated with prosperity doesn’t entail that prosperity causes liberal democracy. If Fukuyama has to succeed at showing that liberal democracy is the end of history, he must resort to something else altogether. He must sketch a Kojevean philosophical anthropology. 

But unlike Kojeve or Hegel, he cannot resort to either reason (which remains in mere calculation (see: ibid., 160)) or desire (which can quite easily be satisfied by a South Korean right-authoritarianism) (ibid., 177) (ibid., 206). Fukuyama needs a third term that explains why people risk it all for their dignity, for recognition of their humanity. This third term, borrowed from Plato, he calls thymos or “spiritedness” (ibid., 162). Thymos is in a sense the drive towards seeking self-esteem, to reject insults to one’s own sense of self. What communist states and right-wing authoritarian regimes fail at essentially is to satisfy people’s sense of thymos, and as a result people will always remain unsatisfied with such regimes (ibid., “A Vacation in Bulgaria”). But does this mean that liberal democracies satisfy thymos? 

Fukuyama’s genealogy of contemporary liberalism begins with a strangely Straussian moment: with Machiavelli’s rejection of political philosophy as a normative science telling us how the world should be, in favour of recognition of how the world actually is (ibid., 274). Machiavelli thinks that both the elites and the masses are counterposed to each other in two senses: princes demand megalothymia, the desire for glory and mastery over others. This megalothymia is counterposed to isothymia, the desire for recognition as an equal (ibid., 182. Machiavelli sees how princely megalothymia can overcome popular isothymia, and derives a political philosophy that illustrates how the two can be brought together in a fruitful manner that allows for the internal stability and freedom of a regime. But in this self-restriction of megalothymia in favour of isothymia by external constraints, Machiavelli already undermined the model of Plato’s Republic, where megalothymia is restrained only by educated guardians restricting themselves. All men shall live in a state of suspicion from now on (ibid., 184). 

Hobbes and Locke pick up Machiavelli’s challenge of restraining megalothymia, but unlike Machiavelli’s countervailing drives, they subordinate megalothymia under the mark of sovereignty by ensuring that no one is capable of realizing their own megalothymia (ibid., 158-159). But can such a totally isothymic society explain the risk that actual, flesh-and-blood human beings take when they participate in protests? After all, Hobbes’ and Locke appear to be (rightly or wrongly) thinkers of self-preservation. Megalothymia is exterminated because of one’s impulse towards self-preservation. But such an impulse towards self-preservation could not possibly explain the abandonment to death humans are willing to take on in their struggle for recognition (ibid., 177-180). Only the Kojevean “first man” can explain such a thymotic struggle for recognition. 

The Kojevean “first man” is not an innovation of Hegel for Fukuyama, nor is he a figure who stands radically counterposed to the Lockean tradition that is traditionally taken to be the source for Anglophone liberalism. In the works of the American founding fathers, especially Hamilton and Madison, Fukuyama sees the domestication of megalothymia in democratic politics (ibid., 186-187). Think of the great helmsman of state, a Roosevelt or a LBJ who dominates the political space he inhabits. These are megalothymic men, but not tyrants who overtake democracy and subjugate isothymia (ibid., 318).

What we have then in liberal democracy is a mode of governance that provides for the simultaneous allowance of megalothymia and isothymia, without holding them in contradiction. Only liberal democracy appears to be capable of doing so, for any other regime concedes either one or the other in their political ends. The concrete fact of communism fails to be isothymic, since in practice it introduces divisions between the Honeckers of the world and their subjects. The idea of communism fails for it cannot recognize the thymotic desire to be equal to the capitalist world in prosperity (ibid., “A Vacation in Bulgaria”). Liberal democracy, as a result of thymos, has triumphed over its enemies on the world-historical stage (ibid., xix). 

There is a fear here, however, a fear that Fukuyama already prefigures in the original article that served as the source of this book. Is democratic man the last man? Is he, as Nietzsche indicates in Thus Spake Zarathustra, incapable of exerting any megalothymia? (Fukuyama 1992, 301) Much of the great deeds we associate with historical personages appear to be the result of megalothymia. Is there a Michaelangelo pushed to increasingly greater limits without the demand to be greater than Da Vinci, to prove oneself as above and beyond others? Could such megalothymia even be possible in a world where one’s isothymia is satisfied? If not, then we would likely lose something significant about what makes existence on earth worth living, as though we are mere beasts, completely satisfied, only concerned with the satiation of our desires (ibid., 311). We would become nothing but the Kojevean master, who cannot be fully human as he cannot affirm himself as human. This would indeed be a great loss, and make for a “very sad time” (Fukuyama 1989, 18) 

Presumably the existence of titans of industry, of democratic politicians, of democratic artists might counter Nietzsche’s critique, however. Is it a critique after all? But the bond trader, the plutocrat, the Congressperson, all know in their hearts that their megalothymia is a restricted sort of megalothymia. It doesn’t call for genuine risk of life, nor for genuine recognition of one’s superiority (Fukuyama 1992, 328-329). A politician is a mere servant, a mere public functionary. The CEO is nothing but the instrument through which a company earns its shareholders greater value. These figures are not Michaelangelos. Fukuyama delights in recounting the example of Kojeve himself, who, realizing the end of history, stopped philosophizing and dedicated the rest of his life to the bureaucratic drudgery of the European Community (ibid., 67). If all men were to be bureaucrats, what is left of man? 

He once again turns to Kojeve for an answer.  Located in Kojeve’s valorization of Japanese formal art, which concerned itself not with anything of substance but the pure interplay of different elements producing aesthetic pleasure, an art form that is capable of relaying true megalothymia, true creativity and affirmation of oneself. Then, arguably it is not the East that is becoming Westernized, but the West that is becoming Japanized (ibid., 320). 

But something has gone significantly awry here, and Fukuyama knows it. Japan is not a competitive democracy, with the hegemony of the LDP ensuring that most politics occurs within the bounds of the dominant party as opposed to between parties (ibid., 239-241). Japan, under Fukuyama’s read, is also culturally distinct from the West: instead of placing thymotic value in recognition of individuals, Japan’s thymos is group-like, with the members of Japanese cultural community concerning themselves with the advancement of the group as opposed to that of their own self (ibid., 239). Remember that spirit or culture is for Hegel the form through which we relate to each other, and recognition occurs through individual cultures that result as a product of the slave’s work for his master. Does Japanese thymos somehow provide an impoverished form of recognition compared to Euro-American thymos? 

To answer the question, the similarities between Japan and then-contemporary Western European states must be illustrated first. Both were capitalist regions, and both are formally democratic at the very least. In this sense, they possess the trappings of liberal democracy. They also serve as concrete bridges for the two motors of history, natural science-capitalism and recognition, to meet. It seems that liberal democracy as the end of history requires natural science-capitalism as its condition, for only with it can it refute communism’s egalitarian aspirations. But as we have already noted, such requirement is not reciprocal: capitalism certainly does not require liberal democracy for its success (ibid., 134). And here Fukuyama’s worry deepens: it appears that countries like Japan might offer a more efficient end for capitalism than Western liberal democracy (ibid., 241-243). 

This claim can be brought into relief better by contrasting Western liberal democracies with Singapore, which Fukuyama takes to be an extreme sort of such a contrast. Singapore has the formal trappings of a democracy, but with so many structural constraints that it cannot reasonably be called a liberal democracy. It is also highly economically successful, and more importantly, there doesn’t appear to be any thymotic deficiency in its culture. In fact, Singapore’s simple thymotic valuation of something other than the individual appears to have resolved the problem of recognition without adopting liberal democratic rights (ibid., 241). Is Singapore simply better both rationally and thymotically than Western liberal democracy? Is illiberal democracy better? 

The fear haunting Fukuyama goes deeper however, though he perhaps doesn’t see it himself. Thymotic pride after the End of History is in a sense irrational. As noted, Japanese art is a purely formal game, with no reference or substance outside itself. There is no rationality or justification to culture after the apparent satisfaction of thymotic desire occurs at the End of History. Indeed, such desire might not be satisfied after all. Megalothymic individuals, chafing under the sheer boredom of liberal democracy, might choose to revolt, choosing alternatives such as nationalism and religious fundamentalism that promise a yet better, yet more exciting world (ibid., 330-332). For Fukuyama, such a return to megalothymia (which might indeed constitute a return to history) would be highly irrational. For after all, religious fundamentalism and nationalism are partial, limited perspectives that cannot be justified in reference to universal humanity. Not every man is a German (ibid., 335-336). 

But Fukuyama’s solution to this problem of resurgent megalothymia is where his entire apparatus collapses. He recognizes that liberal democracy cannot be the source of its own stability, and must induce a particular irrational pride among its citizens for its possession (ibid., 334-335). Such irrational pride is from outside liberal democracy, re-introducing something foreign to Fukuyama’s story of the end of history. But more importantly, as Hegel would say, this very irrationality collapses the distinction between liberal democracy and megalothymic nationalisms, for preferring one irrationalism over another is surely a matter of arbitrary choice. 

A neoconservative turn

This sense of failure clearly haunts Fukuyama, who now discarding Kojeve’s Hegel, returns to the Hegel of the Philosophy of Right, the Hegel of war. Liberal democracy is irrational, so be it. How can it generate this irrational pride, however? Through war. Only through war is man broken out of his private existence and converted into citizens of a state, who are willing to die to defend their own right to existence. Only war serves as the simultaneous mediation of megalothymia and isothymia. A short war, once in a while, ends up healthy for liberal democracy (ibid., 329). 

Fukuyama’s trajectory here is obvious. His project of relaying the “good news” that he prophesied at the beginning of the book has failed. Liberal democrats, in order to be good liberal democrats, must necessarily be neoconservatives. Note, not mere liberal interventionists, seeking to restore civil liberties and prevent genocide. No, war is not good for others, it is good for the liberal community itself. The end of history is no longer something to be longed for, but something to be avoided through deliberate blood sacrifice. Otherwise a universal Singapore awaits us. Perhaps Fukuyama sees the universal Singapore as a positive, the real end of history. But as charitable readers, we should take Fukuyama at his word that the good news is liberal democracy. 

In fact, the neoconservative direction of Fukuyama’s thought is clear in his discussions of excessive isothymia. Environmentalists, “blacks” (his usage) and other egalitarians seek to produce an increasingly larger slate of social rights that destabilize liberal democracy from the inside (ibid., 118, 237, 296-298) . Unbridled isothymia, like seen in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, will inevitably run up against the limits imposed by nature. Furthermore, there is something morally suspect in such excessive isothymia for Fukuyama, a failing he locates in the all-important liberal principle of toleration (ibid., 305-306). The self-esteem movement, for example, esteems everyone for simply existing, but in doing so lies to itself: the neglectful mother, the alcoholic father, the dishonest daughter, they all know that what they do is not worthy of esteem (ibid., 303). Self-esteem is only important if it is merited and deserved.

The macro-scale impact of such an analysis shows itself in Fukuyama’s analysis of the history of African-Americans after the Civil rights era: after achieving formal equality, affirmative action programs aiming at substantive equality ended up affirming cultures of poverty that prevented African-Americans from truly becoming productive capitalists. Such persistent failure has apparently driven African-American community leaders to deny “European” cultural values as ethnocentric, racist and so on. The demand is for black culture to be recognized as a culture worthy of recognition on its own terms. This demand, Fukuyama thinks, has replaced the demand for recognition of human dignity (ibid., 237). Why, unlike European and Asian culture, black culture is not reconcilable with human dignity, Fukuyama never answers. Nevertheless, the consequences for Fukuyama are clear: demanding recognition of black group dignity ensures a culture of self-segregation and a repudiation of individual achievement and economic activity as the means of social advancement. 

In other words, for Fukuyama, black people are culturally lazy. 

After the End of History

Fukuyama’s immediate works after End of History reiterate this increasingly conservative stance that he adopts. In Our Posthuman Future, he recognizes that increasingly sophisticated advancements in biotechnology can allow those in elite positions to radically transform themselves and become literal superhumans, a permanent structural inequality with the underclass. To the discerning reader of End of History, this complaint will appear odd: Fukuyama concedes that social inequality is not exterminated by liberal democracy. Nevertheless, Fukuyama does concede here the failure of his original thesis, and the necessity of a cultural conservatism that rejects the increasing natural-scientific transformation of the body to become something other than it is. It is not a surprise that the article that prefigured Our Posthuman Future was called “Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle”. He puts his failure clearly there: history cannot come to an end unless natural science comes to an end, and it appears with the biotechnology revolution that such an end is unlikely to come soon, and if it does come, it might be a horrifying vision of dystopia (Fukuyama 2002, xii). 

But here a strange game begins. In 1989, history ends with “The End of History?” In 1992, history remains finished with The End of History and the Last Man. In 1998’s “Second Thoughts” and then again in 2002's Our Posthuman Future, history is not yet finished, for natural science is not yet finished. But in 2001, “History is still going our way” writes Fukuyama in the Wall Street Journal. In 2014, he admits to the Times that history’s death was exaggerated and that his 1992 thesis was obviously wrong (though perhaps he knew that back then already). In 2022, he writes in The Atlantic that it is still the end of history. But in the same year, he tells the New Statesman that we really could be seeing the end of the end of history. 

What is going on? Which Fukuyama is the real one? 

Perhaps an answer is to be located in the later Fukuyama, the duology of texts that constitute The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay. As empirical works of anthropology, these books can be considered quite bad. Nevertheless, like with End of History, these books are not empirical works of anthropology, or if they are, only insofar as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are, or Foucault and Nietzsche are. Fukuyama is instead trying to trace a narrative about institutions, trying to understand contemporary institutions in light of particular stylized stories we like to tell ourselves. One reason to believe this approach to Fukuyama’s thinking is his open allegiance to the tradition of “state of nature” thinking undertaken by the social contract theorists, or the historicist approach of Hegel, who himself rejects mere empirical history (see Fukuyama 2011, “The State of Nature”). The historical stories these figures tell can be completely false, as Nietzsche’s or Hegel’s are. But they are still useful in understanding what we are ourselves. Of course, if one finds such a project suspicious (and there are numerous reasons to be suspicious of such a project, as I will discuss at the end of this article), one can skip ahead. 

Another qualification must be made regarding any discussion about the duology, specifically about their anticipatory nature. The first text in the series, The Origins of Political Order, is by Fukuyama’s own claim written in anticipation of the second volume (ibid., xiii). Its independent project, insofar as one exists, is not to explain how to construct resilient and superior institutions today, but asking how at least a few societies where such institutions exist came about to be in the first place (ibid., 15). In doing so, Fukuyama also intends to illustrate that these institutional complexes are superior to their alternatives in the vast sweep of world history. This project of simultaneous explanation and rationalization is described by Fukuyama as, appropriately, “getting to Denmark” (ibid., 14). 

The first condition that Fukuyama directs his attention to is the state. Fukuyama does not drop into his analysis of the state form in a vacuum, but places it within a developmental schema that goes “band”→”tribe”→”state” (ibid., 53). The “primitive” band form, which defines the pre-communitarian existence of man, is established by Fukuyama through analysis of our near primate ancestors such as the chimpanzees, along with the dual phenomena of kin selection and reciprocal altruism (ibid., 30-33). These bands are familial units of close kin, introducing a political problem that will persist throughout the development of political society.

Bands, through necessity of primitive warfare, “integrated” into a higher level tribe that is capable of deploying resources more efficiently and on a mass-scale. It is important to note here that Fukuyama does not claim that the exigencies of warfare provide legitimacy for the continued unification of tribal societies. This role can be filled by other phenomena, most notably religion, exemplified at this stage as ancestor-worship, which establishes a supernatural justification for the importance of kin established by biological kin-selection. Nevertheless, the underlying reason for the transition from one state to another remains war (ibid., 62-63). 

This justificatory rationale does not change in the jump to the state-form, as Fukuyama explains: “war did not just make the state, it made the tribe as well” (ibid., 62) The state-form is defined by its properties for Fukuyama: it possesses centralized authority and a monopoly on legitimate violence, it is territorial instead of kin-based, and is more unequal and stratified by definition than their tribal predecessors (ibid., 80-81). This last requirement in itself is an innocent proposition unless one is an anarchist about political regimes. It remains true today even in democratic republics that the executive and other sources of authority have powerful privileges of governance in relation to the public they represent. There is a final requirement, which does not appear as significant as the other requirements to us today: possessing a more sophisticated form of religion than tribal societies (ibid., 81). While it is possible that Fukuyama intends to extend to contemporary forms of secular religion, as far as I can tell, he does not do so explicitly and either way does not identify religious authority with sources of legitimacy as such. 

The second condition is the rule of law. Fukuyama defines the rule of law as the priority of the law over legislation, where law is defined as “a body of abstract rules of justice that bind a community together” and legislation is defined as “the ability of a king, baron, president, legislature, or warlord to make and enforce new rules based ultimately on some combination of power and authority.” This is in essence the distinction between constitutions and the power delegated from them (ibid., 245-246). Fukuyama appears clear that the rule of law is not purely customary and pre-legislative, contra Hayek, originating as a result of repeated local interactions that required consistent rules of the game. Instead, Fukuyama rightly points out that in most cases what we consider successful “rule of the law” (English common law being the paradigmatic example) arose as the result of self-conscious decision-making and executive authority (ibid., 260). 

The third and final condition is accountability, which is defined as a government where “rulers believe that they are responsible to the people they govern and put the people's interests above their own” (ibid., 321). It is somewhat difficult to disentangle accountability from respect for the rule of law. Following the rule of law presupposes mechanisms of the sovereign’s recognized accountability to other social actors such as the aristocracy (e.g. Fukuyama’s discussion of French respect for aristocratic taxation in ibid., 250). One explanation can be that the scope of accountability is wide and democratic, but this cannot be. Fukuyama’s paradigmatic examples of developed societies, England and Denmark, were “elite” societies until a very recent period, and depending on particular normative models, still are. But this potential oversight does not go against the substantive point that Fukuyama is making, that getting to developmental modernity in all senses (“getting to Denmark”) requires respect of the roles and rights of other social actors. 

Immediately perceptive readers will notice one glaring problem with this schema: it begs the question that “getting to Denmark” is superior to the alternative. Fukuyama’s strategy here is solid and a repeat of the Hegelianism we previously saw: everyone today thinks that liberal democracy is the sine non qua of political ideology today, and since political debate about institutional forms has been finished, all that remains to be done is to explain how to get to this specific institutional form (ibid., 420). But this is exactly to beg the question that the problem that Fukuyama sets out to solve, that of the persistent and stable political order, is already solved. 

Consider this: “Denmark” in its current form is a remarkably modern innovation, all adult male citizens winning the franchise only in 1849. It has been less than two centuries since the advent of this event. Compared to the 500 years of monarchist government preceding this (still incompletely) democratic state, Danish democracy’s institutional stability is still an open question. One way to illustrate the starkness of the temporal problem is return to the 1940s, on the eve of the destruction of the French Third Republic. The French Third Republic remains the most persistent and long-lasting French regime even now. But during the Fall of France, with totalitarian states rampaging over all of Europe, would the Fukuyaman observer turn his eye around and note from the self-abolition of the French republic that liberal democracy was a failed enterprise? After all, the French Third Republic had all three of the conditions for “Denmark” that Fukuyama thinks important (For a discussion of the history of the French Third Republic’s successes and failures, see Popkin’s History of Modern France, which remains the most comprehensive textbook on the time period). 

All this is not to say that liberal democracy is discredited, but that Fukuyama’s story’s assumptions are not uncontroversial, especially in a time period when alternatives to liberal democracy such as Orban’s “illiberal democracy” make a resurgence across the globe. Liberal democracy is a relatively young and historically contingent type of regime that does not necessarily “show itself” to be immediately correct. One reply to this criticism of temporal specificity might be that regimes such as fascism have discredited themselves in the crucible of history, and as such, liberal democracy has illustrated itself to be superior. The problem with this reply is that it amounts to the statement “just because it happened so, it must have been so”. That is, there is no intrinsic connection with justness that liberalism possesses by virtue of military victory over fascism. Just because liberalism won does not mean that it would have won in every possible world. A second problem is that it confuses what is good with what happened. This problem, along with the problem of treating the history of societies as an evolutionary history will be treated together later. 

Evolutionary psychology

Moving on from Fukuyama’s Hegelianism, many of his starting assumptions also show some glaring flaws in reasoning. First off, nearly everybody knows by now that evolutionary psychology as a discipline has significant problems (John Dupre’s “Against Maladaptationism” being a classic introduction to the critical literature on the scientific status of the kind of evopsych that Fukuyama relies on). But let’s ignore that frankly tired debate for now. A significant problem is that Fukuyama makes an illicit jump from the evolutionary logic of kin selection and reciprocal altruism (widely accepted results in evolutionary biology) to communitarian solidarity. 

Fukuyama’s theory that the threat of violence forces band-level societies to group together in tribal social life is problematic for two reasons. One, Fukuyama’s underlying thesis for primitive human violence is heavily reliant on comparison with our near primate ancestors, notably chimpanzees, who are extremely violent in a warlike fashion. However, Fukuyama ignores another equally near primate ancestor, the bonobo. The bonobo is, contrary to myth, not a peaceful species. Nevertheless, there are important behavioral distinctions between chimpanzee aggression and bonobo violence. Whereas chimpanzee violence operates across groups of fighting males and oftentimes involves significant amounts of death, bonobo violence is highly individualized and rarely culminates in fatalities. Extrapolating from chimpanzees to human band-like societies therefore turns out to be a radical mistake, since there is an alternative model of violence available: that of the bonobo, which indeed short-circuits the notion of pre-tribal warfare. 

The second reason why Fukuyama’s proposition unfortunately does not pass muster is more mundane: it has an explanatory gap. While kin-selection might explain the immediate solidarity in band-level social life, it does not explain the vast breadth of moral behavior that both band-level societies and tribal societies adopt. Consider the phenomenon of justice for example. Justice is an “abstract” phenomenon, something that does not directly relate to either immediate strangers nor to our own kin. When a juror sits in front of his peer in silent judgement of his fate, his obligation is not one of mutual benefit: no reciprocal altruism is entailed by his position. Nevertheless, we take it to be a fact that to do justice without personal benefit is an obligation that compels us in an especially strict manner. 

Now, one might reply that justice’s obligation can be given a functionalist explanation: presumption of such abstract behavior is necessary for social stability and is therefore “selected for” socially. But this is obviously not something we hold to be a cultural fact, or at least contemporary Western liberal democratic society does not. The prospect of an Omelas, where justice has to be suspended for general social welfare so horrifies us that even the strictest utilitarians tend to attempt to explain this scenario away. This sentiment is best expressed by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I’s motto: fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus. Either way, this is just one moral phenomenon that we take to be essential to what constitutes “human sociability” that is not explained by the austere foundations Fukuyama begins his analysis from. 

There remains basic facts about human behavior that require explanation beyond what is entailed by reciprocal altruism and kin selection. The reply might come that “recognition” takes the place of this suite of prosocial human behavioral tendencies that are not explained by kin selection and reciprocal altruism, but I would refer anyone making this reply to the previous criticisms of Fukuyama’s conception of recognition (what recognition? Whose recognition? A question Fukuyama himself ironically raises in the End of History (Fukuyama 1992, 303)) to see the problems in such a reply. And besides, Fukuyama’s explanation for recognition is biological and rooted in chimpanzee biology (Fukuyama 2011, 41), which—once again—is an impoverished way to think about human origins.

This just opens a very basic problem of where recognition actually comes from. If recognition is not fundamental, and in fact is parasitic on some other value such as justice or moral righteousness and so forth, once again the problem of the explanatory gap is reintroduced: where did these dispositions come from? But even conceding that recognition is somehow fundamental and Fukuyama is right about chimpanzee ancestry for a moment, recognition still does not exhaust the entire suite of socially relevant human behavioral traits.

Instead of Hegel, here we can turn to Rousseau in the Second Discourse on Inequality to illustrate the pitfalls of a purely recognitional approach: in order to elicit recognition, subjects misrepresent their own internal beliefs to others (Rousseau 2008 [1755], 118-122). The subject craves acceptance and power and capacity of participation in one’s political regime. This is a transhistorical phenomenon, and all of our mythologies are full of liars and tricksters and craven fools who misrepresent themselves. Let us call it the Grand Vizier problem, where the Grand Vizier misrepresents his real oppositional attitudes towards the grateful Sultan who in turn showers all glory and resources upon the Grand Vizier for good advice.

The Grand Vizier enjoys the attention and his power and all the gifts that accrue with it, despite knowing that the Sultan is an autocrat. Generalize this to society, and we can discover a country of generally satisfied subjects who have surrendered all their rights and powers to an autocrat who provides social stability and security to them. This autocrat governs with a gentle hand, only punishing those who violate criminal laws. Many believe it would be more appropriate for there to be a democracy, but since the autocrat provides so many benefits, they do not care enough (or even worse, believe the autocrat provides more stability than the democratic regime). 

The Grand Vizier just does not care about “abstract” political rights, he enjoys his comfortable life. Clearly in a democratic epoch, we believe that such an autocracy is illegitimate. Nevertheless, it is not clear what Fukuyama can offer to us that helps us distinguish the recognitional politics of this autocracy which has satisfied all wants and desires to a “good enough” level that all other desires are suspended from a democratic government. This is not a mere hypothetical. This is the theory of legitimacy that multiple real world autocracies have adopted, including most notably China today (see Eaton & Razmath 2020 for a nuanced discussion of how this actually operates in the real world), and is what kept Fukuyama up at night in End of History. Clearly something more is required to “get to Denmark”. 

Taken together, this fundamental problem with Fukuyama’s story of origins leaves us to ask about the explanatory power of his general story of development. If we can draw on a much wider and diverse set of drives, incentives and behavioral dispositions than what Fukuyama believes we can, it means that our imagination can stake out a much wider space of alternatives than what Fukuyama believes we can. There might yet be riches unconsidered in the historical development of our societies that operate even in modernity and require our satisfaction. 

Political decay

Nevertheless, the problems that Fukuyama believes describe political decay and which turn away societies from pursuit of Denmark are dangers regardless of whether or not Fukuyama’s understanding of social origins is correct. These are namely the inherent conservatism of institutions and repatrimonialization. The first one is fairly easy to understand. Institutions are “sticky” and do not immediately respond to change (Fukuyama 2011, 16). Built to last, their incapacity to accept the necessity for reform oftentimes ends up undermining themselves. 

Repatrimonalization however is a trickier problem to define. Repatrimonialization, straightforwardly speaking, is the devolution of the state form to a prior tribal stage in political development. What Fukuyama means by this is not a literal destruction of the state-form in order to become tribal again, but the restoration of kin-based ties as the grounds for distribution of governmental power (ibid., 81, 229). The principle of kin-selection being enshrined within the state ensures that its impersonal, abstract character instead becomes directed solely towards the benefits of the relevant kin-lineages. Just like the actual operation of kin-selection, this does not mean that repatrimonialization or patrimonial regimes are actually only directed towards the enrichment of biological kin (see ibid., 453 for discussion of patron-client relationships in this context).

In nature, for example, cuckoos are free-riders of kin-selection through fooling other species to raise their children up as their own. Using a similar logic of “proxies” for kin selection, friends and colleagues can be “selected” for in social logic. With such a description of a patrimonial regime, a regime such as Putin’s Russia with its oligarchs can also be described as a patrimonial regime. Repatrimonialization is intrinsically opposed to both the rule of law and accountability, and any modern developed state must deal with this issue in a persistent (if not permanent) manner if it is to reproduce itself as a stable state. It is here that it is worth turning to a discussion of the second book in the duology, Political Order and Political Decay.

Fukuyama’s analysis of political decay on taking up a more abstract view from the specific examples he employs comes down to the following six dimensions: the necessary elements of a stable political order (accountability, state and rule of law), plus the phenomena of social mobilization, economic development and legitimacy/development of ideas (Fukuyama 2014, “Dimensions of Development”). 

Fukuyama’s thesis is this: in modernity, under the conditions of the three developmental phenomena, if the elements of the political order do not “keep up” with them, they will inevitably decay (Fukuyama 2014, Ch.1, “Political Decay”, para. 1). In order to prevent this from occurring, a necessary balance must be struck between the three elements, one that will differ across societies depending on their needs, but will generally hew close to each other (ibid., Ch.1, “Getting to Denmark”, para. 1)  

What is the optimal form of each of these elements, however? Fukuyama correctly notes that the quality of state institutions ought to be measured by state capacity, or the capacity of the state to actually deliver what it promises it can. A strong state that is capable of fulfilling its functions appears straightforwardly better than a weak state that doesn’t deliver any public goods (ibid., Ch.3, “Why Governments are necessary”, para. 14). 

Here, Fukuyama isn’t suggesting anything as simplistic as a claim that dictatorship = strong state and democracy = weak state. Police power isn’t the only measure of state capacity, and in fact, as Fukuyama points out, there is much greater police power in voluntary compliance of a state’s directives than there is in visible issuance of it (ibid., Ch.20, para. 7). Instead, a strong state delivers results to its public. It is capable of enforcing the law, yes, but it is also capable of providing welfare to the poor, keeping records of births and deaths, issuing driver’s licenses, etc. A strong state can penetrate society through its actions in a substantive and transformative manner (see ibid., Ch.3, “Measuring the Quality of Government” for a discussion of how all these elements interlink). 

Furthermore, Fukuyama is also correct that the quality of the rule of law seems to track bureaucratic autonomy. Allowing a bureaucracy to operate according to its mandates with general independence allows it to perform its functions without being reliant on the changes in the prevailing headwinds, and also produces a history of institutional knowledge and competence that can be applied to solving problems (ibid., Ch.35, “Bureaucratic Autonomy”. Cf. discussion of Prussian bureaucracy in ch.4) And finally, accountability manifests itself in the other two elements’ responsiveness to the demands of the public that it governs, whether it be democratically or in any other manner (ibid., Ch.1, para. 5). 

No clear path

But how do you go about bringing these elements? Fukuyama offers a dimmer solution for any liberals here. State building, for example, goes hand in hand with national identity (ibid., Ch.12, para. 1-3). Is national identity constructed out of thin air by mere policy or by reasoned dialogue and disputation? Fukuyama would be the first to tell you no, the formation of national identity goes hand in hand with violence and repression (ibid., Ch.12, “Historical Amnesia”). 

All of Fukuyama’s case studies, from the United States to Tanzania, underwent significant violence on their pathway to national identity formation. Or take the development of bureaucratic autonomy. Fukuyama focuses on the notion of “sequencing” here for an account of how the three elements in modern liberal democracies ought to come about (ibid., Ch.1, “After the Revolutions: The Plan for this Volume”, para. 6). For example, Wilhelmine Germany’s famed high-quality bureaucracy possessed its autonomy without much democratic accountability (ibid., Ch.4, “Bureaucratic Autonomy and the Paradox of Democratic Accountability”). Its origins were in the military necessities of managing an increasingly strong Prussian state. The Stein-Hardenberg reforms, coming hot on the heels of the Napoleonic Wars, was the pinnacle of this state-guided bureaucratic autonomization (ibid., Ch. 4, “History Ends in Prussia”, para. 2).

Germany, of course, does not get a stable liberal democracy until over a century after these reforms are finished.  On the other hand, the weak state-compact that has defined Greece and Southern Italy (see ibid., Chs. 6 & 7) has had the consequence of producing a clientelistic and corrupt bureaucratic apparatus that is rendered inefficient by distribution of resources by governing authorities to their supporters. Fukuyama illustrates that democratic accountability here further reinforces the problem by ensuring that no single government can overcome its obligation to its supporters to redistribute patronage (ibid., Ch.6, para. 6). 

Of course, one might point out to the United States and the United Kingdom as democratic counterpoints to this pessimistic conclusion. And Fukuyama does indeed do so as proof that an alternative pathway to bureaucratic autonomy and non-patrimonial or clientelistic government exists for new and weak liberal democracies: that of social mobilization (ibid., Ch.8, para. 1-14 for the British story). But this approach seems difficult to pursue, if one considers the details of the approach Fukuyama suggests. Consider Fukuyama’s story about the reform of the United States Forest Service as opposed to the Interstate Commerce Commission, for example. In both cases, the organizations were a result of reforming zeal during the American Progressive Movement of the fin de siècle (ibid., Ch.11, “Capture and Autonomy”, para. 1). But whereas the Interstate Commerce Commission was bogged down into inefficiency, the Forest Service became (at that point) the exemplar of governmental quality (ibid., Ch.11, paras. 3-4.)

It is fairly simple to say why this happened for the Interstate Commerce Commission. It was never particularly autonomous, burdened with contradictory political mandates that eventually destroyed any capacity it had to actually regulate the railroads (ibid., Ch.11, “Railroads and the Long Road to State Power”, paras. 16-17.)  But why did the Forest Service have a successful reform and not fall to the same problems? One easy answer is that it is because of the presidential nature of the organization itself, as opposed to the Interstate Commerce Commission’s board system (for an example of this in Fukuyama, see ibid., Ch.11, “Capture and Autonomy”, para. 3). But that can’t be it. The Federal Reserve is widely respected as one of the highest quality branches of the government today, and most of its innumerous decisions are made by a Board of Governors. The Federal Open Markets Committee, perhaps the most powerful peacetime entity in the world through its maintenance of American economic stability, is remarkably efficient. On the other hand, the Department of Defense, with a top-down hierarchical model guided by a Secretary of Defense is famously inefficient and bogged down in red tape. 

The Forest Service’s efficiency is explained by Fukuyama thusly: one, it was organized around a specific value-culture that emphasized the new scientific forestry, two, it had a remarkably intelligent and persistent Secretary of Agriculture in James S. Wilson who gave fiat to agency head Gifford Pinchot, who was himself a highly energetic, capable and charismatic leader (ibid., Ch.11, “Capture and Autonomy”, paras. 4-6.) Fukuyama’s discussion of Pinchot reveals some troubling dimensions to the Forest Service’s efficiency. One of Pinchot’s advantages seems to be that he was, in the Weberian sense, a “charismatic leader” who stepped outside his bounds as an agent of the state and instead became a political entrepreneur of his own, hobnobbing with celebrities and playing the game of politics in D.C. (ibid., Ch.11, “Gifford Pinchot and American Forests”, paras. 12-13).

That this did not lead to the politicization of the Forest Service is a remarkable fact, one that Fukuyama explains appropriately with reference to the character of Pinchot. But this character in turn is explained by reference to the traits of an “elite American” class (of Anglo-Saxon stock, puritan religious persuasion and education in colleges like Yale) that Fukuyama sees to define the New England patrician milieu from which reforming figures like Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt came from (ibid., Ch.11, “Capture and Autonomy”, para. 6.)

Disregarding the actual truth of this remarkable claim for the moment (any social scientist knows the extreme difficulty of actually disentangling causation from mere correlation), what does this say about the possibility of bureaucratic reform? That we must push our policy another step backwards and breed a new culture from which charismatic authorities that revolutionize the government appear? That is absurd and surely not what Fukuyama wants here. But does that mean that there is no policy? Are weak liberal democracies condemned if they do not possess such a culture that instantiates values of honesty and public service? One might say that I’m being unfair to Fukuyama; after all, the underlying cause of the social mobilization was the rising middle class seeking a new stake in government against existing social actors in America. And Fukuyama does talk about the need for the “idea” of anticorruption, here arising from copying European examples, as a necessary prerequisite (ibid., Ch.10, “The Birth of Bureaucracy”, para. 3; “Economic Growth and Political Change”, para. 2, ). 

Only, as Fukuyama points out correctly, the rise of the middle class did not end corruption in Italy or Greece, where said middle class was co-opted into existing clientelistic relationships (ibid., Ch.13, “Corruption and the Middle Class”, paras. 3-4.) A remarkably contingent result. You either have a set of contingent circumstances that allow for particular policies to occur, extending back centuries and even millenia. Or you don’t, and are doomed to repatrimonialization and clientelism. Perhaps there is some solace here in that Fukuyama’s account of the so-called northeastern patrician culture is straightforwardly wrong. Thomas C. Platt, the corrupt political boss of the New York Republican Party during the turn of the century, exemplified exactly those traits that Fukuyama believes defined the class that Roosevelt and Pinchot arose from. 

Fukuyama says over and over in the duology that nothing in his books should indicate that societies are condemned by history (see for e.g. ibid., Ch.1, “After the Revolutions: Plan for this Volume”, para. 2). But reading his work, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how this could not be the case. Mistake after mistake, failed opportunity after failed opportunity, defines Fukuyama’s treatment of the failed state. Is there any simple policy solution for this? No, Fukuyama tells us. Is there any hard policy solution for this? Fukuyama refuses to say. 

Take an example of Fukuyama’s historical pessimism: he takes it to be that the least developed countries today either lacked strong precolonial state institutions or transplanted colonial institutions. How do we go about possibly changing this? Clearly we cannot travel back in time to induce a history of strong states in sub-Saharan Africa, nor can we recolonize these societies as settler colonies (a proposal that Fukuyama correctly notes as outrageously immoral). Fukuyama says that colonial African governments, instead of constructing strong state institutions, instead created remarkably weak ones and allowed capture by precolonial Big Man, who exploited transplanted formal institutions to destroy the egalitarian tribal organization of precolonial society (ibid., Chs. 19 & 20). This manifested in a culture of rapaciousness and dictatorship in sub-Saharan government.

How could we possibly change this? Fukuyama says Africa is not condemned by its history. But what pathway does Fukuyama offer? Tanzania? Does Nigeria need to go through a period of dictatorship by a charismatic authority who develops a coherent national identity over a period of decades while suppressing opposition? Or does Kenya, whose clientelistic politics marks a divergence from Tanzania explained by Fukuyama in terms of the former possessing a few significant ethnic groups (and thus greater concentrated power) as opposed to the hundreds in the latter (ibid., Ch.22, “Oil and Ethnicity”, para. 24), need to homogenize itself through violence? China lucked out on the Fukuyaman worldview, it would seem.

Here the worry that haunted Fukuyama in End of History reasserts itself with full force: what if sequencing is set in stone? What if a Singapore or a South Korea, with a visionary autocrat enforcing the rules, is necessary to get to Denmark? Fukuyama says that this is an immoral proposition, and that democracy is morally necessary (ibid., Ch.1, “Three Institutions”, para. 1). On this, we agree. But what pathway does Fukuyama’s analysis actually leave for this solution? In political philosophy, there exists the problem of dirty hands: should political leaders violate moral norms for the avoidance of disaster on the behalf of their communities? Much of the discussion of such emergency situations has focused on stable liberal democracies where emergencies of such a calibre (at least on the surface) appear rare and unusual.

But for a Global South state, every moment of governance involves the “problem of dirty hands”. Would a charismatic reforming leader, given the stark choice between democracy and prevention of civil war, choose democracy?  That was the choice facing Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, who inevitably ended up choosing authoritarianism and rejecting pluralism (ibid., Ch.22, “Oil and Ethnicity”, para. 25.) And would any would-be policy entrepreneur reading Fukuyama’s duology not come to the same conclusion, considering Nyerere is one of the examples in his text of successful state-building? 

But what about more advanced democracies? Take the United States for example, Fukuyama’s own homeland and one he discusses more extensively. He accurately describes the United States as a vetocracy, a country with so many checks and balances that any necessary institutional reform is slowed down to the pace of nothingness (ibid., Ch.34, “Veto Players”, para. 8.) This vetocracy doesn’t merely consist of the three branches of the federal government, but also of the relationship between the states and the federal government, and is reproduced even within the legislative apparatus of American democracy through its remarkably high degree of proceduralism. 

All these moving parts together ensure that interest groups can efficiently invest in capturing one area of the vetocracy and slow down any institutional or policy reform to a halt. This in turn ensures that ordinary decision-making is slowly abdicated by the legislature, leading to institutional decay and rot in all three of the elements that constitute America’s strong government (ibid., Ch.34, “Veto Players”, para. 9-13.) The dynamics of how interest groups go about capturing different areas of government on Fukuyama’s account are interesting and couched within a critique of pluralist political theory (see ibid., Ch.33, “Passions and Interests”). Instead of ensuring the formation of an efficient consensus from the input of multiple social groups, more politically activist groups who have greater resources than the median citizen (and whatever social group they inhabit) distort the political equilibrium in Washington. 

I have already mentioned how due to American vetocracy, interest groups only need to capture a small number of groups (or in some cases, a single especially well-placed group) in order to grind down legislation to a deadlock. This interplay of activism and interest groups, instead of bringing about efficient policy outcomes, ends up creating sub-optimal policy consensus. A classical example of this is free trade, whose affirmation was once described by Paul Krugman as the closest thing to an economist’s creed. But ever since NAFTA, the distributional consequences of that specific trade agreement for specific social groups within the American social compact has led to a significant political shift (as illustrated by Choi et. al (2024) and Autor et. al (2020)) that has convinced large interest groups within both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party of the political risk of free trade. Both Biden and Trump, for example, continued a fairly protectionist trade policy that widely deviated from the post-Reagan policy consensus on the issue. 

Fukuyama would likely agree that this deference to the interests of a fairly small and declining social group at the cost of the common good would be a classic example of political clientelism, and a modern democratic example of repatrimonialization. But that’s not the only manner in which repatrimonialization occurs through interest groups. Recall the Interstate Commerce Commission’s failures as a result of an expanding set of mandates that were impossible to fulfill simultaneously. Fukuyama points out that tragically the same situation has been reproduced in the Forest Service, with varying interest groups capturing different parts of government and forcing numerous mandates that are impossible to fulfill simultaneously (ibid., Ch.31, “Smokey the Bear; Or, How the Forest Service lost its Autonomy”.)

This phenomenon is widespread in most parts of the US government, on Fukuyama’s account, and the reason for the institutional decay of the US’ political order ( (ibid., Ch.31, “Across the Board”, para. 1.) On this he is right. He also correctly describes a catch-22 in American political culture. Americans deeply distrust their government, and this causes them to vote for people who declaw government and produce suboptimal outcomes, confirming for people that government is indeed bad. Bad governance then causes public distrust, and undermines the stability of a liberal democratic state  (ibid., Ch.34, “The Madisonian Republic”, para. 3.) 

The current crisis of democracy

What is the alternative to this dysfunctional political order? Fukuyama suggests perhaps a Westminster style democracy in the model of the United Kingdom might be more appropriate (ibid., Ch.8, paras. 23-24; Ch. 10, para. 2 & “Routes to Modern Government”, para. 8;  Ch.34, “Veto Players”, para. 9-14 & “How Different is the United States”, para. 1 & “The Madisonian Republic”, para. 7) Perhaps. Anyone who has read the work of Juan Linz (see: his classic “Perils of Presidentialism”) is privy to the fact that the democratic presidential republic is in many ways inferior to a Westminster democracy. But that is clearly not enough to prevent the degree of political decay that characterizes the United States. 

Why do I say so? Examining the United Kingdom more closely, it is difficult to say that its political order has somehow secured trust for itself. The most trusted British state institution is its national civil service, which comes out to a whopping 45% who describe possessing high trust in it. Clearly lacking a “vetocracy” is not the only thing that induces political trust. If one is inclined to believe this is a result of some common Anglophone cultural factor, one can turn to trust levels in Germany, which exhibit similar numbers (trust in the German Parliament by the public is 35%, for example.) True, more trustworthy than the Anglo-Saxons, but not exactly a high trust society. What is the explanation for this low trust in institutions across liberal democracies? Fukuyama correctly observes that the UK and Germany are not vetocracies. The only thing they share in common are liberal democratic regimes. And Denmark itself? Much better than its European neighbours, coming out to a remarkable 47% in trust in its national parliament. What is our hypothetical and charismatic political leader to take from this?

Of course, we don’t really need to deal in hypotheticals to know what the political base has to take from this. Liberal democracies across the world are under intense threat from a resurgent far-right. In the United States itself, one of the world’s most extreme-right political parties now governs. In Germany, the quasi-fascist AfD has become the second largest party in the Bundestag. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is increasingly poised to take over the reins. In all cases, perception of some sort of crisis has led electorates to increasingly move to the extreme right compared to where they were in the past. Does Fukuyama offer a solution to this crisis? 

There are none forthcoming. Fukuyama states that this duology does not intend to offer any policy solutions ((ibid., Ch.1, “After the Revolutions: The Plan for this Volume”, para. 28), but the descriptive tack he takes to the problem of political order itself cannot remain policy-neutral. It is clearly not political order itself that exhausts what is necessary for its own reproduction, as the similar experiences of the US, the UK and Germany indicate. There must be an actively vigilant policy towards the reproduction of this political order. This necessary vigilance is something Fukuyama accepts: after all, no political order is safe from political decay, he states (ibid., Ch.1, “After the Revolutions: The Plan for this Volume”, para. 23). But what tools does Fukuyama give to someone to force through such a policy? In Fukuyama’s pessimistic reading of America, the necessary policy required would be a massive transformation of the very basis of the constitutional regime of the United States, something he admits might be impossible (ibid., Ch.34, “The Madisonian Republic”). In the Global South, he is remarkably pessimistic about the possibilities of democratic accountability actually producing the required quality of government. In Italy and Greece, early democracies are read by him to have doomed their countries to repatrimonalization.  

The specter of illiberalism

Fukuyama writes the history that haunts him. He seeks to promote liberal democracy, but from underneath his own feet the specter of illiberalism reproduces itself. He still believes in the duology that there is no serious intellectual challenge that can be exported worldwide that serves as a coherent opposition to liberal democracy. But a decade later, with liberal democracies under siege by a global cohort of fascists, “post-liberals” and ultraconservatives who kowtow with each other under the watchful gaze of Viktor Orban, can anyone say there isn’t any intellectual opposition to liberal democracy? Fukuyama might say that these “illiberal democrats” are not serious intellectual contenders to liberal democracy, nor are they correct. I would agree. But Fukuyama himself does not offer any reason to think this in his book. 

It would not be right to take from this that Fukuyama is an unconscious fascist or apologist for dictatorship, however. Far from it. As he has accurately pointed out throughout his career, the quality of most dictatorships is not very good, and many of them are even more privy to the clientelistic problems that undermine liberal democracies. Repeating something that has been a theme of democratic political theory since Machiavelli described a republican regime as more flexible than a monarchical regime, Fukuyama also points out the bad emperor problem: one bad autocrat can unravel an entire political order in the way a democratically elected government cannot (ibid., Ch.25, “The Accountability of the Chinese State”, para. 9)

Stuck between two ends, then, of the decaying liberal democracy and the catastrophic dictatorship, Fukuyama returns to the historical pessimism that defines End of History. Here the magic key to understanding his conservative impulse is finally discovered: like a perverse Hegelianism gone wrong, he simply does not believe that there is anything to be done. We are caught within the constraints of our histories so totally, incapable of avoiding political decay due to so many mistakes, so many contingent factors in the past, that we come out with no real answers at all. Fukuyama’s work is not political theory. It is the dissolution of political theory, a claim to show that it is impossible after all. No political regime is the best regime (or more accurately, the best regime is a regime of thought), some are just better suited to some communities than others. And even they falter and fail and collapse. The cost of constructing a more moral, utopian regime might just be too expensive, and either way might just be impossible. In the words of Joseph De Maistre, nations get the governments they deserve, after all. 

Where does this leave us? Paradoxically, from what we have seen, this anti-political political theory only appears to open up a deeply cynical theory of politics. If fundamental political reform that institutes the best regime is impossible, then all that is left is the securing of political order. Our hypothetical charismatic leader ought to govern not according to the good, because doing the good might face the cold hard truth of political decay. If liberal democracies are more suited to political order in a particular situation and particular time than dictatorship, so be it. If otherwise, then so be it too. 

There is no real way to say this from the internal perspective of Fukuyama’s political theory. Hard-nosed political realism that evacuates moral judgement from politics itself isn’t an unpopular position to take in the academy, and indeed many liberals have adopted such a position in advocating for liberal government. A contemporary revival in political realism (led by Liberal Currents author Matt Sleat) produces incredibly sophisticated arguments for why moralism is not a good thing in politics, though I politely disagree with their position. Such political realism speaks of an empirically grounded approach to political problems. But consider the empirical examples that produce Fukuyama’s dispositional conservatism. Consider the war-like biological roots of his entire story. Consider the fact that it might just be better for a developing state to have an autocratic regime for its development than a liberal democracy. This is a political realism that leads not to mere a-moralism, but to immoralism. 

Let me add a second test for any liberal political theory worthy of that name in addition to the “Grand Vizier” test that I added above. Let’s call it the “dining room test”. You are a prominent German constitutional lawyer committed to the Weimar Republic’s democracy, but you’re also a fairly urbane sort of chap. You like to hang about your high society intellectual opponents, you see. And you’re a delight to be around. Carl Schmitt, another prominent conservative constitutional lawyer and one of your primary intellectual opponents invites you to a dinner party with a group of other high-society thinkers and figures. Over a glass of some pretty good pinot noir (some grumble it is not an authentically German varietal, but no matter), the conversation moves towards a discussion of the internal stability of multiparty democracy. 

You give a valiant defense for Weimar democracy. Professor Schmitt, in response, gives the following three criticisms of liberal democracy: one, liberal democracy by allowing liberty of political speech allows for the undermining of its own stability through the growth of undemocratic organizations; two, liberal democracy’s party nature ensures the breeding of factionalism that breeds clientelism and strife and fails to provide the necessary policy solutions that would authentically reflect the general will of the people; three, liberal democracies conceive of their justification on the grounds of a contract-right, but cannot reconcile the fact that this conceptualization of rights is oftentimes contradicted by a democratic public’s political interests in seeing these rights overcome. With a serene smile, Professor Schmitt states that for these reasons, a regime can never be both liberal and a democracy in the long run. 

If you are a liberal political theorist, you should be able to have a reply to all three of these critiques. Fukuyama clearly has a reply for the first criticism. It's just not straightforwardly true that freedom of speech breeds the undermining of a liberal democratic political order, and many authoritarian states have died when their repression of political speech came back to haunt them. But what replies could he possibly muster from within his thought to the second two criticisms? After all, his study of political regimes appears to confirm both. Too early a democracy (or too vetocratic) indeed does breed factionalism that undermines democratic trust. But from the examples of Germany and the UK, clearly having democracy later does not resolve this problem either. And our continued discussion of the stark choice of the charismatic leader with the people’s trust seeking to do public good in relation to Fukuyama’s descriptive sociology clearly confirms the third proposition, that liberal-democratic rights might in fact be detrimental to the future stability of a political order.  I presume, sitting at that dinner table, not having the safety of knowing the final victory of liberalism, Fukuyama would be utterly incapable of giving a satisfactory reply to Schmitt. And perhaps Fukuyama does accept this proposition. But for that, I point any readers to Paul Crider’s brilliant critique of his reading of “woke liberalism”.

Fukuyama’s errors

It would be an extremely depressing thing indeed if we ended on this note. If Fukuyama were right, what real hope is there for global liberalism? Fortunately, there are good reasons to think Fukuyama is not right. Let me get to the biggest fish in the pond first: Fukuyama’s model of utilizing evolutionary “big” histories is remarkably implausible. As David Graeber and Daniel Weingrow point out in their Dawn of Everything, there is a remarkable diversity of political regimes, trajectories and social forms that anyone can adopt and live a life well. There is no reason that we must buy Fukuyama’s restricted set of examples as evidence for a vast socio-historical story that governs our lives. 

Which leads me to the second point: Fukuyama’s unimaginative choice of Denmark as the end-stage of liberal democracy. What if there is something beyond Denmark? Perhaps there is still some form of liberal democratic political order that secures in a self-reproducing manner its own stability and avoids political decay. Perhaps this is a political order that secures recognition for its members better than a Scandinavian welfare-state. Maybe not, but is the question not worth asking? If he blocks off the question in the first place, how would we ever know the answer? Fukuyama’s evolutionary political theory by definition cannot be prospective, it cannot offer anything that we already do not know. We cannot predict future contingencies and policy choices and the manner in which they will guide us. Fukuyama’s political theory tells us by his own admission nothing of what we ought to do, but asking about this ought always guides us beyond that which exists into that which should be.

This is not a silly thing to ask. But this requires us to accept that history has not really ended yet. It requires us to accept that the rational shell in our violent histories still has some actualization to bring forth. For example, perhaps a transition from liberal capitalism to a property-owning democracy where continuous redistribution of wealth and income secures a common social compact and prevents massive inequality would secure our political order. Perhaps nationalization of all land and other common resources would render a radical transformation in our political attitudes. These questions are not questions I can answer within the bounds of this essay, nor one that I can hope to do so. But I offer these questions as a cause for optimism about the possibility of a better future, a better political society. 

Due to my status as a citizen of a developing country, I would like to offer some solace to any liberal policymaker from those countries who might by chance come across Liberal Currents. Your countries are not condemned to penury and clientelism simply because you made the choice to adopt democracy. Just something like a simple choice to increase government audits have a significant effect in reducing corruption. And don’t worry about growth. We have ample evidence that human capital growth through education is remarkably useful in growth. And we’re increasingly finding ways to solve many of the traditional problems with schooling too, like getting teachers to actually teach. Of course, there’s many problems still left to solve. But if there is one thing Fukuyama is right about, it is that securing political order is a long-term project, and a constant war against social ills. Policy is important, and there are many examples of fairly low hanging policy that a charismatic democratic leader can implement to jumpstart development while not conceding on democratic governance. If anything, such delivery will reward our hypothetical leader as incomes begin to rise. 

Of course, all of this relies on the notion that our political leadership is interested in reform. So far no one has discovered a solution to the problem of political evil. But I would rather live with evil leaders in a liberal democracy, where their power can be displaced, than in an autocracy, where they rule by relative fiat. I would rather be the adversary of a fellow citizen in electoral combat than be subject to the whims of a dictator who offers me development but at any moment might consider me an enemy. 

This freedom is nothing without development and prosperity. One cannot live free if one is subjugated by a myriad different social ills that democracies can’t fix. But one cannot live free if they aren’t free. The Grand Vizier knows that he is cared for, secured for, and he is not at threat of harm from the Sultan. But the Grand Vizier doesn’t really govern himself. He only subjectively believes he does. But a man who is fooled into thinking that he isn’t really a fool is someone who is hoodwinked by everyone else, and the Grand Vizier here too is hoodwinked into believing that it is in his interests to concede his freedom to another above him. The Grand Vizier lives a profoundly impoverished, private life, caring for others only insofar as they care for him. But a public political culture cannot perpetuate itself on the grounds of mere interest of what one desires for themselves. 

Any such society would inevitably break apart once what is desired conflicts. The Grand Vizier’s desires coincide with those of the Sultan, but only do so accidentally. To borrow from Hegel, there is no inner rationality to this recognition. But to bring reason is to bring something other than recognition into our analysis of politics, and it is to see that there is something loftier than a set of biological drives at play in our political lives. We do not merely seek recognition from others. We seek recognition from others insofar as we believe ourselves to be worthy of producing something for the world to come, as capable of something that our reason decides is worthy of recognition. 

Wilhelm von Humboldt states in his Limits of State Action that any single man is capable of only partial cultivation alone in his own life, but together with others in a social union, he can produce something lasting and profound (Von Humboldt 1969 [1792], 16). The Grand Vizier will produce nothing profound. Perhaps a few of the artists to whom he is patron will, but he will never appreciate these works in the manner a democrat, a free man would. After all, the Grand Vizier hasn’t really contributed anything but money to these works of art, he is not particularly interested in these works of art as they are in themselves, as goods. He merely cares for self-glorification. He might believe otherwise, but he would not spend an iota on these works if he were a mere bourgeoisie, nor if they weren’t the taste of the town.  A democrat, a true democrat, believes on the other hand, that these works of art are not merely good insofar as they are good for him, but good insofar as they are good. They are a testament to the objective freedom of man and his independence from brute nature, as well as the artist’s belonging to the community that the democrat helped create in all fashions. 

In the end, Fukuyama’s thought leads to nothing but his feared last man, the spiritually impoverished Grand Vizier. But all is not lost. If anything should be taken from Fukuyama’s work, it is this: throw away the ladder after you have climbed it, and upon transcending this history of failure, you will see the world aright. 

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Featured image is Francis Fukuyama no Fronteiras do Pensamento São Paulo, by Fronteiras do Pensamento | Greg Salibian