Hi and welcome to Ones and Twos, FP's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron, FP's deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us as always is FP's economics columnist and Columbia University professor Adam Tooze, this week in New York. Hi Adam.
So, we have one data point for you all this week and that is based on Francis Fukuyama's memoir that was just released called In the Realm of the Last Man. The data point is 1989. That is the year that Francis Fukuyama at the age of 36 years old, he was a State Department planner at the time. And it was that year that he delivered a conference paper arguing that liberal democracy had won permanently as humanity's ideological end point. A few months later, of course, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet collapse followed not too much long thereafter. All of which seemed to vindicate Fukuyama's thesis. And here we are 37 years later and Fukuyama's published that memoir I mentioned and he tries to account for everything that's happened since that landmark paper he delivered that ultimately became a book. Fukuyama though recounts among other things how he became estranged from his own intellectual circles, how he became a kind of neoconservative apostate recanting his support for the Iraq war and also laissez-faire economics and in some ways Fukuyama seems like a representative intellectual of this entire era which is why it struck us as an apt book to discuss. And to start off with, Adam, obviously Fukuyama is famous for that end of history thesis, and I'm curious, yeah, how does that original statement stand now in light of this memoir he just published?
I mean, I was impressed and not a little charmed by the robustness with which he, you know, sticks to his guns. And I thought this memoir for those who were curious, you know, who maybe read or have read the '89 or the early '90s book that came out of the essay, you know, that anyone who was curious about where Fukuyama went afterwards with his thinking and maybe didn't want to wade through the many books that he's written which are very weighty, this is a great place to drop in on his thought and I do recommend it in that way. And as you say, it's a great read through the last 40 years or so of American, last 50 years really of American political history. Fukuyama was born in the early 50s to a Japanese American family. Worth saying much more about that. So he trained in college in the 70s and then moved his way through the American policy and academic establishment. Think a kind of think tank university life. But yes, the end of history thesis, you know, for those who aren't familiar with the story, with the idea, has a kind of inherent implausibility to it and it courts that and owns it and faces up to it because the idea is okay, what do you think history is? Well, there's different ways of thinking about history. It could be cyclical. It could be inherently meaningless. But a very powerful brand of thinking about history indelibly associated with the name of Hegel, the German philosopher of the late 18th, early 19th century, the period of Napoleon and the late enlightenment, romanticism, is that history is if you like the working through of a problem and namely it's about the question of freedom and how it works its way out into human institutions. How you might be able to bring together the logic of commercial society from 18th century Adam Smith type diagnosis, the logic of enlightenment thinking which reaches its climax in Kant for German idealists and the classical images of stability and political order that we associate with classical Greece and the polis and how under these modern circumstances you could get back there is one way of thinking of Hegel's problem and Hegel thinks of history as working its way towards a resolution of that question and Fukuyama owns that and says right this I think is the best way to think about historical development as the working through of problems.
And in his essays in '89 or the book in early 90s he said look I think we, you know, we should face the fact that under any reasonable construction of human nature and this is an element that he adds which is not as powerful in thinkers like Hegel but in anthropomorphized, you know, humanlike readings of Hegel because Hegel can have a very unhuman feel. Like you can project the story of the development of a human personality into Hegel and the great Russian interpreter of Hegel, Kojève, did this in a famous lecture series in the 30s that Fukuyama picks up on. Anyway, long backstory. If that is your view of the development of humanity through history, you might say that a rule-bound, law-bound, participatory, if not democratic, market economy with the free movement of ideas and the free unfolding of science is the answer to this question of how we reconcile enlightenment, commercial society, political order in the best possible way. And so the argument is not that other things don't happen in the world and that there aren't other places which aren't on this timeline. But the argument was that there are certain places which have converged to a stable set of answers to these questions and they are broadly speaking that set. So rule of law, democracy, freedom of ideas, market economy, that kind of vision of the post-Cold War world and he hasn't budged from that. He really hasn't. He basically believes that that still is the central set of issues. What, where he's shifted is a bit of logic and a bit of kind of narrative balance and we'll keep coming back to this in the course of this conversation I'm sure but one element is to say look okay that idea which you get from mainstream American social science not just from high Hegelian philosophies of history that market economics and democracy and state building and the rule of law all go together as a single package.
And therefore we would expect them to converge in the transition of Russia towards market democracy and China as well that was oversimplified. In fact there are the different tendencies which may or may not coincide but we shouldn't jump to conclusions about this. And even when they are realized there are fundamental problems to do with questions of delegation and procedure which can subvert the real intent behind that convergence. And then more fundamentally and this is where he really takes up his older ideas also in the title of this book. What comes after the end of history? People after all go on living. What comes after? And as Fukuyama was clear-headed enough to see the German philosophical argument goes on in the 19th century. And if it were to be the case that we had reached the end of history, what then would be the status of its man? This is 19th century gendered language but really humanity. The idea is that in the age of the last man, we live in a time in which time in a sense has lost its point because it's no longer about the surging, thrusting search for answers to fundamental questions. And so what are we then left with? Well, then we're left with vanity. We're left with the pursuit of the, you know, the satisfaction of this impulse he calls thymos, the desire for and often a very exaggerated desire for respect and recognition and acknowledgement. And rather than reading so much the derailment of the last 20 to 30 years of the western liberal project as a refutation of the fact that that was the trajectory of history. In this version, what Fukuyama very calmly says is the stakes are low. You know, they act as though what we're talking about is bringing America back to greatness, but no one really takes it seriously. Putin sounds off and of course he also launched a war, but really what is this about? Is this a serious political project? No. No. No. No. No. So, in fact, what we're witnessing here is precisely what you would expect from a kind of zombie politics conducted under the condition of the end of history and by people who don't really maybe quite know it, but actually are just a bunch of last men. Men preoccupied, people preoccupied above all with this vain pursuit of recognition. And I think you would even read identity politics and these kind of phenomena as expressions of the state of the last man. And so MAGA's reaction against identity politics then itself becomes a form of this. And so we live in this, it's a way of making sense of the bizarre, weird, unreal, surreal, post-truth kind of world that we're in. Because in the end after the end of history things don't matter in the same way as they used to. The dots don't join up, we lose a kind of coherence. So this, that's how I, this is how I read this memoir. Surprisingly, I thought, robust defense of the original position.
Yeah, he is clearly at pains to say and clearly has always been at pains to say. I think that's what he sort of suggests in the memoir that this idea of the end of history does not mean the end of problems, like does not mean the end of even kinds of conflicts because he has this idea of a kind of remainder of anthropological need or philosophical anthropology that does not get integrated into political life and that's this thymos idea and that will always generate conflict. It just I guess in his terms or in Hegel's terms, take your pick, it's not properly political at that point because it doesn't, it's not producing history in his viewpoint. Now like I'm, I think there's a whole another set of questions that I'm not sure he adequately deals with whether there are other ideological models now that are substantively different than liberal democracy that are being, that are on offer in the world and I think he kind of is a little dismissive in discussing say China or Russia's models and whether they are actual alternatives but this kind of other underlying anthropological point that there is a kind of need for recognition that people have that is not necessarily generating politics or history but will always kind of generate conflict I think is a really useful idea to have and from his memoir I take it that he traces this back to one of his big introductions to intellectual life which came in college when he went to Cornell University and he took a class or I don't know if it multiple classes now off the top of my head, but with Alan Bloom, a kind of storied professor there of political theory who himself was a student of Professor Leo Strauss. And I'm curious what you think Fukuyama took away from that education with Bloom and from, you know, Strauss indirectly. It seems to me like he's really at pains to say that history and philosophy have a depth that he is intent on always preserving in his kind of political and policy analyses. You know, almost a kind of skepticism of all received wisdoms that he encounters after encountering these figures at college.
Yeah. Fascinating moment this in American intellectual history. Public service announcement for those who aren't immersed in this kind of thing. You might easily get your Blooms muddled up because Fukuyama's trajectory goes from Cornell to a brief stint at Yale to Harvard and at Yale there is not Alan Bloom but Harold Bloom. Both Harold Bloom and Alan Bloom, unrelated, born in the same year I think 1930. Both prominent figures in this sort of Cold War era American discourse. One in political theory, that's Alan Bloom, who was the Straussian, and the other in literary criticism at Yale, and that's Harold Bloom. Both have a kind of, and I'm going to drop the analogy at this point, but it's worth saying, I think, that both are concerned with the canon. They're both concerned with the formation of Western culture and western civilization from these grand institutions of North American higher education because Alan Bloom ends up at Toronto and does a stint at Chicago. So it's that kind of, you know, upstate New York Midwestern kind of intellectualism and Alan Bloom for Fukuyama is a kind of touchstone I think as you say quite rightly of a kind of intellectual seriousness of a commitment also to a rather tragic view of the unreconcilable relationship between philosophy and politics. And this is a tension I think for Fukuyama in his relationship with people like Alan Bloom because though he culturally in his search for profundity perhaps also search for identity having grown up in a family that was multiply disrupted by World War II by its Japanese American identity by its encounter also with Christianity, searching for a kind of secure founding for his own identity is deeply attracted by the seriousness of figures like Alan Bloom, Leo Strauss that he never met but by way of Bloom was heavily influenced by and yet at some level he's far too much of a Hegelian for either of them I think Alan Bloom or Leo Strauss because both of them are quite committed to the idea that politics and philosophy are fundamentally at odds, that they will not reconcile, right, that there is something about the deepest truths of the world which is not amenable to power, that is not amenable to politics, that requires a kind of retreat, that requires also a kind of mind which Fukuyama who is a, he comes across as a very modest person whose thymos, whose desire for recognition doesn't articulate itself in needing to be chosen as one of the elect as the great philosophical minds that Alan Bloom and Leo Strauss both in a rather obnoxious way kind of selectively cultivated.
So Fukuyama is not there, right? He's a worker bee, he wants to be in the process of policymaking. He ends up at RAND. He somewhat surprised I think himself to end up as a tenured high status professor in lots of very fancy institutions and there's a real, there's a deep disjuncture here but the cultural pattern and the cultural force and the insistence on the binding logic of western civ of course exposes if you like in the reverse mirror a kind of incoherence of the position of the Straussians and Bloom as well in that for Fukuyama it's perfectly obvious that this has immediate practical implications for instance in everyday politics and the resistance of identity politics, a deep skepticism and some readers may find it unattractive in Fukuyama, a refusal to back away from questions of human nature, right? Fukuyama is insistent on this as a central problem of all thought including modern thought as a progressive problem as well. In other words, our understanding of human nature has been changed by science. Which he then lays out for us his understanding of what it is, behavioral psychology, evolutionary psychology, you know, has taught us that we need to know. So there's a sort of independence of mind also in the distance that he has but a common sense exactly as you put it of a kind of depth perception that is crucial to navigate the world and then adherence, right, the loyalty, a kind of fidelity to certain sorts of culture of knowledge that are precious and that should be preserved and passed down.
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, my sense was also that he really has a feeling that politics needs to have stakes, like it is embedded in some kind of broader deep historical sense of stakes and that's really what motivates him but that could also cut in multiple directions. I mean what those stakes could or should be I think that's interesting because, you know, as he recounts his own biography the directions in which it takes I think are in the memoir's own terms are maybe a little like under explored. I mean he, I did not know that he started out studying in a graduate program after leaving Cornell he entered a comparative literature graduate program. He had brushes with all of the French greats, with Barthes, with Derrida, with Foucault.
Yeah. Seemingly that was his intention was to devote his life to studying those figures of lit theory. And then he seemed to have a kind of some kind of what I would call like an aesthetic turn against them. I mean, it was almost like there was a rejection of what he took as their ethical viewpoint, what he describes as a nihilism of this kind of strain of comparative literature and deconstructionism that he felt compelled to reject.
And also a kind of insistence on plain speaking. Right? There's some rather I think inadequate, I don't know whether they're willfully naive sort of criticisms of the rhetoric and the language of people like Derrida and Foucault and Barthes as he just literally calls it.
And I mean I think that's cheap and there's more to be said. But for him it seems to be quite grounding, right? And he goes from there then to off to the Kennedy School essentially in Harvard to do not just political science but international relations.
Yeah. I think his thought was originally that he would do political theory, but in preparing to enter graduate school, he describes reading the works of Winston Churchill, which I thought was fascinating and he was so swept up in the memoirs of Winston Churchill that he decided upon entering then graduate school for political science that he would be devoting himself to international relations. And I thought there was something very telling about this rejection of deconstructionism and its nihilism and the attraction to the moral seriousness as he describes it of Winston Churchill. And I'm curious what you make of that and what that might be revealing about his own temperament.
