When Dartmouth's most prominent student philosopher Mr. Won Joon Choe mentioned to me last term that he was working on an interpretative essay of Francis Fukuyama's widely controversial article "The End of History," I was surprised to learn that Fukuyama's article was profound enough to invoke Mr. Choe's serious reading. The few times I had encountered the article had simply instilled in me the belief that Fukuyama was a faithful, and somewhat ethnocentric, champion of liberal democracy.
Mr. Choe challenged my position and encouraged me to read Fukuyama's "The End of History" and "The Last Man" -- his extensive analysis of the progress of humanity, published a couple of years following the appearance of his article in "The National Interest."
He explained how numerous scholars mistakenly ignored the book because they assumed it would only regurgitate the gist of his article. Mr. Choe hoped that I would understand through the book his thesis that Fukuyama is far from an advocate of liberal democracy and in fact anticipates its implosion.
After reading the book, I was struck by the truthfulness of Mr. Choe's interpretation. Fukuyama indeed perceives a problem in liberal democracy that will lead to its demise as nation-states increasingly adopt this form of government. He concludes that its principle of equality is the source of such bane, because it stifles the inherent human desire for inequality.
Fukuyama's conception of human history is based on Hegelian dialectics, which progresses as theses and antitheses struggle to yield syntheses. A thesis is a stage in the history of human thought characterized by a contradiction, giving birth to an antithesis, or another stage of human thought that attempts to resolve this contradiction. The result of the conflict between these two stages is a synthesis, achieved by an evolution in human thought.
An example that illustrates a set of Hegelian dialectics well consists of events surrounding the American Civil War. The thesis, in this case, would be American democracy prior to the war, which was contradictory because all men, contrary to its reputed principles, were not equal. The abolitionist movement, addressing the contradiction of the thesis, characterized an antithesis. The result was the Civil War, which led to a synthesis--the emancipation of African-Americans.
Fukuyama examines liberal democracy as the ultimate synthesis fostering no contradiction. He does so by determining the essential factor that has contributed to the prosperity of liberal democracy. This factor, he thinks, is the desire for recognition, or the aspiration for human dignity, which many philosophers have attributed to the fundamental aspect of human nature.
Economic rationality is not the primary force of human behavior, according to Fukuyama. His belief conflicts with the popular assumption of modernization theory, which claims that one's protective desire of his wealth triggers his want of a liberal democracy that can most efficiently ensure his economic well-being.
Unfortunately, modernization theory fails to explain the motives of a Japanese samurai committing suicide to preserve his family's honor or an American soldier fearlessly fighting in the war for independence. This is because the desire for recognition, exerted by a person assuring his dignity as a man, overwhelms his rational capacity.
Various great philosophers observed this powerful human desire; Plato, Hobbes, and Nietzsche called it thymos, glory, and will to power, respectively. All of them believed that this desire was most frequently manifested through struggles among men.
The reason liberal democracy has prevailed is because centuries of bloody struggles caused by conflicting desires for recognition exhausted men. Prior to liberal democracy, society was constantly stratified into the oppressor and the oppressed, the latter of which would persistently fight to defeat the former. But the liberal democratic principle of rights freed humans with its system of mutual recognition, which provided them with the ideal compromise.
However, this state of mutual recognition is currently stable only because of a still widely-available outlet -- war -- to which one's desire for recognition can be channeled. As long as war remains an inevitable product of human interaction, humans have the opportunity to struggle to overcome others in attaining recognition -- a chance that liberal democracies have successfully confined.
If the history of peace so far among liberal democracies is in fact their permanent feature, then war will one day become obsolete as autocratic regimes transform into liberal democracies. Devoid of a way in which man can satiate his thymos, society will collapse, as Fukuyama predicts. The only solution may be to establish a liberal, but nondemocratic, society, where men can oppress the weak; that is, a society that blooms under the principle of perfect inequality.
