TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/090489/09048900.059

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 101 lines

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.