Fukuyama has had a falling out with his necon brothers. He thinks they have over reached in Iraq. In his article he does not mention the possible hubris and misconception his “end of history” thesis gave neocons. However, neocons may have been embolden by his theory, thinking they had the right to throw America’s weight around in establishing global hegemony.

Fukuyama came up with a worthy and legitimate theory. But like with most ideas put out by philosophers it has been hijacked and twisted by individuals – neocons – for their own self-interest. The trouble is, neocons are shallow thinkers who don’t delve into the deeper meaning of things. And as we see they have screwed things up because of their lack of insight. They are typical MBAers (Bush, for example) who think that they can correct or fix the world with a few little twists.

There is a lot more to be said about this. Fukuyama has opened up an new field of thinking and philosophizing that has only just recently come to our attention. He has really reintroduced a philosophical debate about universal human governance and what shape it should take, and how to implement it.

My feeling is that liberal democracy is an end point in human governance, as Fukuyama opines. In history I have seen a process of elimination in how humankind ought to be governed universally. The last two rival were liberal democracy and communism. Communism now has collapses, leaving only one alternative. Some scholars have grumbled that no new system has emerged from that rivalry. But to my way of thinking there is not alternative to liberal democracy in modernity. For me, it has legitimately reached the top, empirically.

The Hegelian scholar Kojeve believed that communism and democracy were in the same business, in determining how humankind should be ultimately organized and governed. With communism’s collapse the job was completed. In his article “Painting the White House Red” John Laughland essentially confirms this conclusion. He writes that the Bush administration has been acting in a way communism once did, talking about a universal governance. That universal governance will be run by liberal democratic principles.

But let’s return to the issue of mechanism. I certainly don’t disagree that with you, David, that Francis Fukuyama has had strong effects on the nature of the arguments we see within the field of international relations, by reinforcing the notion of democracy as a universal form of governance. But let’s be clear about what this is — a rhetorical position — and what it’s not — a testable claim about how human societies actually change and evolve.

I certainly have no problem with the former. Since my personal philosophical leanings tend to run in the direction of the pragmatists and certain philosophers of science (Dennett, Rorty, aspects of Dewey, Sellars), I definitely agree with the importance of opening up new lines of rhetoric about governance within the public sphere. I think it’s quite healthy for a people to discuss whether democracy (in any of its forms) is the best way to govern themselves, and how this relates to economic relations, cultural values, and so on. Heck, none of us would be here spending precious time discussing this stuff if we didn’t believe in the power of deliberative forms of social life.

Where I differ is that I draw a firm line (that I don’t see in your arguments) between “beliefs” and rhetorical stances — on the one hand, and empirical claims about the world on the other hand. The former are valuable even if they just make us think, if they open up new avenues of discussion, and even if they merely describe *possible* worlds, instead of the actual world we live in.

The latter, on the other hand, are valuable only if they describe the *actual* world, and the mechanisms and processes which cause change in the world. Add falsification and you essentially have something like the “scientific method” (although this is a bit of an oversimplification).

And while I accept the value of Fukuyama’s work as rhetorical stance, as a stimulus to democratic discussion about what is *desirable*, and as an exploration of a modern version of a very old idea (historical inevitability), I do not think his ideas go further than rhetorical claims.

You say that democracy has “legitimately reached the top, empirically.” What does this mean? What evidence can followers of Fukuyama produce that would convince a skeptic that no further innovation in political organization will occur? Getting to Ken’s point, can we even demonstrate, theoretically or empirically, that liberal democracy is stable over long time periods — what mathematicians would refer to as a “stable attractor” in the space of possible types of governance?

I certainly grant you that *recent* human history demonstrates a competitive arms race between two forms of *economic* organization (not political), with central planned economies demonstrably losing out to market economies over a 50 year period, due to the huge inefficiencies involved in central planning.

Incidentally, at a rhetorical level my opinion is that political organization is *partially* related to this, not wholly — in other words we’ve only seen *two* boxes in the matrix of possibilities: democracy/market and authoritarian/planned. One suspects that democracy/planned would fare poorly in competition with democracy/market simply given the efficiency arguments, and it seems like there are examples of authoritarian/market that are fairly successfully (at least at an economic level, and at least on short terms). The real question from Fukuyama’s perspective is whether we can demonstrate the absolute superiority of democracy/market over the long term, such that even relatively successful authoritarian/market systems don’t keep up, while the democratic/market system retains its stability and viability.

From a rhetorical and personal standpoint, I’m absolutely with you — I certainly *hope* democracy/market is stable and viable over the long term. I certainly do see it as better than any available alternative (at least at the level of granularity we’re discussing — more in a future post on the “granularity” issue).

Where I strongly disagree is that I simply do not see any warrant, empirically or philosophically, to claim that democracy and market economies are *a priori* superior, are “inevitable” in any sense, or will be “final” end states of human social organization from which we will not change over historical time.

If you do see mechanisms which create the kind of long-term historical stability and persistence for democracy/markets that Fukuyama claims, I’d love to see them described in more detail.

More comments later — my next topic is likely going to examining the “granularity” of what we mean when we talk about “Democracy” and “Capitalism” and how the “big capital letter” versions of these concepts, bandied about so readily by Fukuyama and other inheritors of Aristotelian essentialism, really mask a lot of variation. And I’ll argue, in typical post-Darwinian fashion, that the variability is where all the interesting “action” is.

I have concluded that “maintenance” is the foremost concern in life. If we don’t constantly maintain things, they fall apart, including ourselves. Maintenance includes the growing of food to the discovery of new resources. Maintenance has become more imperative in this modern world because of its faster pace. Economics is the discipline of maintenance, the only one. Maintenance can not be accomplished by any other means but by economic ones.

At moments like this I think of the movie “The Graduate” and a sage saying to our hero “plastics”, like that’s where it’s at. I would have said “maintenance”, that’s where its at. However, maintenance isn’t as glamorous as plastics. Yet it is the largest industry in the world.

Communism ultimately collapsed because its economic system was lousy at maintenance and paying for it. I would say that maintenance, or the lack of it, was what ultimately did in communism.

Ten years after he wrote “The End Of History” Fukuyama wrote a “Second Thoughts” article. He said he still believed in most of what he said, but that history would not end until science ended. I found that interesting because science is where much of our maintenance technology comes from and is renewed. So when humankind no longer needs to maintain itself or needs science to help do so, then it will be the end of history. And what affords scientific development? Economics.

Vermeij is a top-notch paleontologist, who has specialized in the study of ecological relationships through deep evolutionary time, especially “arms races” between species which result in the exploitation of new ecological niches (in other words, economic relations). So his study of the relationship between economics and evolutionary ecology starts right at the level you’re discussing — it’s all about the maintenance of life, whether we’re talking mollusks filtering nutrients out of water or people farming corn, or corporations selling product. An excellent book.

Nevertheless, I think you’re still making a leap I’m not willing to make. The mere fact that economics/ecological relationships are utterly fundamental to life doesn’t mean that any *specific form* of economic relationships are “natural” or “inevitable.” The comparison between “planned economies” (I’m not using “communism” because it can mean a bunch of different things – am trying to be precise) and “unplanned economies” is a very recent one.

Just because one economic system won and the other lost (which of course I agree with) is insufficient evidence, in my book, that the winner (1) is absolutely better than all possible alternatives, (2) is inevitably the winner in such conflicts with alternative systems. Both of these claims — made explicitly by Fukuyama, by Hayek, and at least implicitly in your comments — simply don’t follow quite that easily from your initial premise.

What I’m getting at is that in both of your comments, and our previous discussions on the topic, you seem to be making the following argument (in outline):

(1) Planned economies competed against unplanned market economies for much of the 20th century and lost due to inefficiency.

(2) Unplanned market economies are the only ones left standing today.

(3) Therefore, unplanned market economies will continue to win forever against all challengers.

(4) Because unplanned market economies will always win against any challenger, they represent an ideal “end state” of economic development from which a population will likely not deviate once attained.

I agree with steps (1) and (2) in the argument above; both are relatively simple empirical observations (actually, the “simplicity” of (1) is not really clear — inefficiency is certainly one causal factor in the collapse of the actual planned economies of the Soviet bloc, but only one).

Step (3) is where I start to disagree. Not because I think it’s necessarily incorrect — it may in fact *turn out* to characterize much of our future history. I disagree because I simply don’t see a way to demonstrate or prove — or *disprove the opposite* of this statement.

First of all, how can we possibly assume that “capitalism” and “communism” exhaust the space of “all possible alternatives” for ways to organize an economic system? We *know* historically that market economies often co-existed with various types of reciprocal or redistributionist economies, just looking at classical history through the present (Rome, Egypt, certain Near Eastern civilizations). We also have plenty of ethnographic evidence that very stable long-term economies existed among Native Americans which involved some trade (i.e., simple form of market exchange) but also a great deal of reciprocity and redistribution (e.g., potlatching).

We also know that “market exchange” is a very big and broad category, and simply calling it all “capitalism” masks a huge range of ways to organize such an economy (this will be the subject of a future post on “granularity” of our concepts, by the way…). Are all ways of organizing a market-exchange economy equally powerful, equally conducive to liberty, equally superior to non-market system? This is the type of question I think is far more interesting, and far more relevant to political deliberation, than the claim that our way of life is inherently superior and will end all further innovation in economics and politics — which is precisely the kind of non-verifiable, boastful claim that I take Fukuyama and his former neo-con buddies as making.

The *long* view of history, instead of focusing just on the period from 1917 through 1989, would tend to demonstrate (at least to me), that technical and organizational innovation has continually disrupted any and all notions humans beings have had that a particular way of life would be either permanent, inevitable, or the “best” of all possible worlds. And that we’d be fools if we thought our current way of life — regardless of its benefits right now, many of which I agree with — could possibly represent something eternal and inevitable, considering how many times in the past people who have believed that have been utterly surprised at “what came next.”

I’m enjoying this conversation greatly…thanks for writing back!

Mark, you make many good points, leaving me in the dust. So I will only take up one point, planned vs unplanned economies. I don’t consider liberal democracy as the host of unplanned economics. Why it won out over communist economics is not because it is unplanned but flexible in its planning. That behavior requires a lot of sophistication, a sophistication communism lacked. Communism was far too planned and rigid, thus inflexible and thus incapable of dealing with the economic changes that the world hurled at it. At its core communism was static, incapable of change. Economics is about constant change and flux, about deterioration and renewal. Communism inherently couldn’t cope with such dynamics.

Economics is not just a willy nilly thing. It requires and has solid principles. Most of it has been developed and learnt empirical over a long period of time in the West. These sound principle are now finding their way around the world. Communism tried to circumvent these principle by manipulating its market and fabricating them. Communist economics didn’t reflect the true nature of reality and what was available. It distorted its economic activity. It cheated when its goals weren’t met. It lacked the feedback system that could have rejuvenated it, because it discouraged competition and dissent. In a way communism’s economic nature and activity sounds a bit like Enron’s, built on illusion.

I am also enjoying this exchange.

Communism might have been built on an illusion, but so was Enron, which at one time was considered the exemplar of the good capitalist corporation.

Capitalist economies are good at one thing and one thing only: the distribution of goods and services. To act as if the political valence of this distribution is inherent within the efficiency of the distribution itself is to ignore a veritable host of malfeasance and a history of savage inequality.

I definitely think your point, David, about the flexibility of unplanned economies is a good one. This is basically what Hayek tried to point out in his classic The Road to Serfdom. And despite the purposes to which Hayek gets put to by the right, it’s important for those of us on the left to acknowledge the ways in which Hayek was correct about the inflexibility and “hooks” for tyranny that command economies have built in. This is a key reason why the “traditional” Marxist left lacks credibility today — not because the left failed to identify an important problem, but because the solution set they proposed (whether in authoritarian Bolshevik form or more decentralized democratic form) turned out to be a cure that was *at least* as bad as the disease it tried to cure, and occasionally turned out much, much worse.

But there is a steady and subtle trend occuring which is trying to discredit the left’s identification of the *problem* as valid, now that leftist solutions have largely fallen by the wayside. And what Ken points out, I think, is that the job of identifying how liberal democracy can solve the *problem* of widening unfairness and inequality within a market economy only becomes harder if we consider “capitalism” and “liberal democracy” to be virtually untouchable ideals that aren’t subject to criticism or deconstructive analysis.

Sure, market economics and liberal democracy are the “platform” upon which much of the “relatively free world” runs, but let’s be honest about how large the bug list still is. And whether we can dream up a couple of patches, or even a good Service Pack, to make market-based liberal democracy run even better. Because if we just bury the bug list and act like it doesn’t exist, we have to remember that somebody *still* benefits, but it isn’t all of us.

Or maybe that’s not quite what Ken was pointing out, but I suppose it *is* what I’m claiming. Or maybe both of us are claiming it.

Alright, more later. That wasn’t as short a comment as I’d intended, but I do tend towards verbosity. Talk to you guys later.

Fukuyama’s theory is based on a realization that is responsible for liberal democracy’s ascendency and communism’s collapse. That realization is a child of the enlightenment, that there is only certain ways you can ultimately govern humankind in it predisposition, so as to fulfill its needs and aspirations. Of the two remaining alternative, fighting it out to see who would carry out the ultimate duty, liberal democracy won because it had what it takes to meet humankind’s needs and aspirations in the modern world.

One point of friction is, what about those who don’t fit in or don’t want to fit into the scheme of things.