TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090489/09048900.059

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                                                                                IDEAS, Page 57

Has History Come to an End?


A provocative case: democracy has outlived Communism

By John Elson


    The final days of the '80s, to many commentators, represent a
kind of farewell to arms. The cold war appears all but over;
peace seems to be breaking out in many parts of the world. Even
Moscow, the international capital of Marxism, has openly
succumbed to the lures of creeping capitalism. To Francis
Fukuyama, 36, deputy director of the State Department's
policy-planning staff, all these events point to something of
far broader significance than the reform policies of Mikhail
Gorbachev. "What we may be witnessing," he writes, "is not just
the end of the cold war, or the passing of a particular period
of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is,
the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form
of human government."

    Fukuyama's provocative thesis, spelled out in the summer
issue of the National Interest, has stirred up a heated debate
in neoconservative circles both in the U.S. and abroad. Around
Harvard Square in Cambridge, reports Owen Harries, co-editor of
the quarterly, the issue is sold out and copies have even been
filched from subscribers' desks. Anthony Hartley, editor of
Britain's prestigious monthly Encounter, adds his voice to the
debate in the September issue. Translations of Fukuyama's
article, titled "The End of History?," will soon appear in
Japanese, Italian and Dutch journals. The French quarterly
Commentaire will also publish a translation, along with
critiques by leading intellectuals such as Jean-Francois Revel.
The National Interest, which accompanied Fukuyama's article
with responses by such pundits as Allan Bloom (The Closing of
the American Mind) and New York's Democratic Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, will print two more lengthy reactions in its
autumn issue.

    The best-known propagator of the theory that history has an
"end," meaning its fulfillment in an ideal political system, was
Karl Marx. He believed the contradictions of all previous
societies would be resolved by the emergence of a Communist
utopia. Marx borrowed his concept from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, who argued that history would culminate, as Fukuyama
puts it, at a moment "in which a final, rational form of society
and state became victorious."

    For Hegel, history "ended," in this sense, with Napoleon's
triumph over the Prussian forces at Jena in 1806. That battle,
to Hegel, marked the vindication by arms of the libertarian and
egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution. True, Napoleon was
eventually defeated and authoritarian monarchy restored. But
Fukuyama approvingly cites the argument of a little-known
French-Russian philosopher, Alexandre Kojeve, that Hegel was
essentially correct. The reason: it was at Jena that the
"vanguard" of humanity implemented the French Revolution's
goals.

    Fukuyama, who considers Hegel an unjustly neglected thinker,
argues that those ideals, as embodied in liberal democracy, have
outlasted two principal 20th century competitors for the hearts
and minds of Western men. "Fascism was destroyed as a living
ideology by World War II," Fukuyama writes. As for
Marxism-Leninism, he notes that "while there may be some
isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang
or Cambridge," no large state that espouses it as an ideology
even pretends to be in the vanguard of history. Witness, as
evidence, the glasnost-inspired admissions of economic failure
and bureaucratic bungling that emanate almost daily from
Gorbachev's Moscow.

    Fukuyama has no illusions that the end of history represents
the beginning of secular paradise. In fact, he sees it as a "sad
time," when ideological struggles that called for "daring,
courage, imagination" will be replaced by the "endless solving
of technical problems." He worries about the cultural banality
that pervades liberal societies obsessed with consumerism, and
notes that nationalism and religious fundamentalism continue to
appeal to many Third World peoples. While it is impossible to
rule out the emergence of new ideologies, or indeed of entirely
new political systems, Fukuyama argues that for the foreseeable
future it will become ever more widely perceived that liberal
democracy is the most equitable form of government that man has
ever devised. Thus the ideal state should be "liberal insofar
as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man's
universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists
only with the consent of the governed."

    Irving Kristol, founding publisher of the National Interest,
says Fukuyama's article serves to "welcome G.W.F. Hegel to
Washington." To Harries, the piece "de-parochializes the debate
over Gorbachev's policy and removes it from a cold war context."
But Fukuyama also has plenty of critics. In general,
conservatives, like historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, argue that
he is excessively optimistic in predicting that Marxism's demise
as an ideology means that the era of superpower conflict is
over. Liberals like Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic charge
that he is too complacent in proclaiming the triumph of
democracies that have done too little to resolve such social
contradictions as poverty and racism.

    Fukuyama, a Sovietologist with a Harvard Ph.D. who
previously worked for the Rand Corp., is pondering the
criticism and will respond in the winter issue of the National
Interest. And if he can take time from readying position papers
for his new bosses at State, he hopes to explore his thesis at
greater length. Unlike history as he sees it, the debate sparked
by Fukuyama may be just beginning.