Fukuyama’s Technocratic Misanthropy

Fukuyama’s classical and conservative sounding language masks a fundamental liberal nihilism...

[Photo Credit: By Melberg - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83664035]

Landmarks is delighted to welcome to our pages the following essay by Mark Shiffman, a political philosopher whose deep and varied interests include Simone Weil. 

Shiffman’s essay adds further evidence to the hypothesis that (Lockean) liberal freedom empties things of their inner goodness.  As Shiffman demonstrates, it turns out that this ‘emptying’ process extends also to philosophical concepts.  

Hegel, of course, is the supposed source of Fukuyama’s famous end of history thesis.  But how different is the actual Hegel from Fukuyama’s!  In Hegel, things like the human desire for recognition, or even our self-interest, are not ends in themselves. They may be expressions of the ‘cunning of reason’ acting through this or that individual; or, in the case of a noble soul, such motivations may merge with Spirit itself. As Shiffman notes, the ‘effectual truth’ of Fukuyama’s understanding of recognition boils down, in stark contrast to Hegel’s, to nothing more than empty ‘self-esteem.’

We can’t help recalling, in this same connection, Hegel’s critique of just this type of ‘virtue’ among those who take up Kant’s formalistic approach to morality.  Morality now becomes a duty which must take a particular form (universalization) but it has no knowable content.  In the case of the self-involved bourgeois, this leads to a penchant for self-praise and “the hypocritical presentation of oneself as a completely virtuous being.” Ironically, this last insight into Hegel comes to us from none other than Ivan Ilyin — alleged by some to be ‘Putin's favorite philosopher.’ Ilyin’s extremely dense academic study of Hegel, in two volumes, was published in 2011 by Northwestern University Press — at a time, to be sure, when you could still get away with publishing such dangerous stuff. -- The Editors

A few months ago, the journal Modern Age republished online an article from the year 2000, “Francis Fukuyama as Teacher of Evil,” by my late friend and mentor Peter Augustine Lawler. The editors of Landmarks asked whether I might like to comment upon it or its themes. On the usual topics treated in this journal regarding Russia, geopolitics, and how these relate to the traditions of the West, I have neither extensive knowledge nor many settled judgements. I have, however, thought quite a bit about Fukuyama as a political thinker and am grateful to have an occasion to develop and sharpen some of those thoughts.

Fukuyama’s original writings on the end of history were published and much talked about in the two years between my graduation from college and the beginning of my graduate studies in political philosophy. It was inspiring to read an author so well informed about world affairs drawing upon the great philosophers, both ancient and modern, to shed light on some of the most exciting questions faced by what suddenly seemed like a new world, especially to those of us whose youth had passed under the cloud of the Cold War. Plato’s psychology of appetite, spiritedness, and reason had already become the adjustable wrench of my political philosophy toolkit, and the use of Hegel as leverage to apply it to discerning our future, whatever questions it might invite, was certainly ingenious and suggestive.

Three subsequent decades of reflection on politics, philosophy, and the condition of our world have convinced me, upon reading Fukuyama’s recent books and revisiting his earlier ones, that philosophical integrity was never a priority in his appropriations of the great thinkers. In the end, both Platonic thumos and Hegelian desire for recognition are reduced to Rousseauian amour-propre, which is to say a satisfied self-consciousness which requires little if any connection to concrete reality or character and action. I have written about that elsewhere. Here I am more interested in the instrumental role the desire for recognition plays in Fukuyama’s practical project. That role, I believe, is fundamentally technocratic.

If Fukuyama is at heart a technocrat rather than a philosopher or historian, then the book that is most revealing about his real concerns is the one that has drawn the least attention, the dry and wonkish 2004 State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21^st Century. Drawing on technical social science research in development and organization theory and public administration, Fukuyama tries to sketch some guidelines for liberal governments and internationalist agencies to push forward the work of organizing the world into a global order of functioning states. In practical terms, this is the bottom line, so to speak, of his vision of the necessary direction of history, as well as the agenda upon which he has spent his time and energy in the various international policy and development organizations in which he has been active. 

Not one of Fukuyama’s apparent philosophical or anthropological preoccupations receives direct attention in State Building. Someone first encountering him through this book would never suspect that the desire for recognition plays any significant role in history or politics. The Fukuyama the rest of us know shows up in a single sentence: “While there have historically been many forms of legitimacy, in today’s world the only serious source of legitimacy is democracy.”¹ Again, if we imagine reading this book in ignorance of his other work, one might be excused for translating the claim into a seemingly fatuous tautology: “In the parts of the world where democracy is assumed to be the source of legitimacy, the only serious source of legitimacy is democracy.” Even in that version, it is not clear that this is true.

Indeed, to judge by State Building, it is not even clear that it is true for Fukuyama. The guiding aim of his developmental agenda is prosperity everywhere—the rising tide lifting all boats that is the promise and gamble of Lockean liberalism. The main aim of the book is to correct the erroneous belief of the 1990s that foreign aid and developmental pressure can beneficially focus on limiting the scope of government and liberating markets. States must first and foremost have the strength to provide “order, security, law, and property rights. … The essence of stateness is, in other words, enforcement.”² The criterion for adjusting and combining the proper degrees of state strength and state scope is the “consequences for economic growth.”³

The real source of legitimacy, then, is growth. Democracy serves as a fallback when necessary. The problem with authoritarian states is lack of resilience: “when growth ceases or turns into decline … legitimacy disappears and instability ensues. Democratic countries are often better able to survive economic setbacks because their legitimacy comes from democracy itself.”⁴ The current strains on the sense of legitimacy in America suggest a slightly different inflection of the same observation: when growth ceases or turns into decline, democracy allows replacement of the regime without replacement of the form of regime, as long as it can still offer the hope of a return to growth. When that hope falls into question—when it does not feel like all boats are being lifted or likely to be—democracy itself comes into question. 

Thus, State Building reveals the real structure of Fukuyama’s thought. Growth economics is the legitimating end of modern political order, not explicitly identified as such but felt to be so. It requires that strong and stable states be universally established as the frame of political and economic order. The stability of states requires a resilient official legitimating principle to fall back on when the unofficial legitimating principle of growth and the widespread distribution of its benefits fails. Democracy provides this.

It is now possible to recognize the subordinate and limited role that desire for recognition actually plays in Fukuyama’s thought. Consider the observation: “Insufficient domestic demand for institutions or institutional reform is the single most important obstacle to institutional development in poor countries.”⁵ Is it the job of global technocrats, then, to figure out how to supply something for which there is insufficient demand? How can such a mission be legitimated on the basis of democracy or the market? Apparently on the basis of implicit demand. Everyone, whether they know it or not, wants economic growth because they have appetites, and wants liberal democracy because they have the desire for recognition.

From this vantage point, the desire for recognition may be characterized as a resource for democratic legitimation. In development terms, it might be described as a raw material, to be extracted and shaped into a demand for democratic institutions.⁶ In technocratic terms, it might be described as a standing reserve, a source of democratizing energy waiting to be tapped and channeled. The belief in the liberal-democratic end of history, and the confidence of the foreign policy dedicated to bringing that end to completion regardless of the costs, rests upon the supposition that this standing reserve is present and ready to be released in every human being.

The political view of human beings as raw material and standing reserve dominating Fukuyama’s thought puts him in the tradition of Machiavelli. This is what Lawler implied by invoking Leo Strauss’s description of the “simple” (but not altogether mistaken) opinion that Machiavelli is a “teacher of evil.” In Pierre Manent’s reformulation, Machiavelli’s novel view is that “‘evil’ is politically more significant, more substantial, more ‘real’ than ‘good’” such that Machiavelli set in motion a new (“modern,” including “liberal”) development of political thought based upon a “change in what has to be called the status of the good.”⁷ The consequence of this change may be aptly described as technocratic political thinking.

According to Machiavelli, the true or paradigmatic prince is the founder, the “new prince of a state that is wholly new.” This prince is paradigmatic in part because he does most radically what all rulers must do: he takes a quantum of human material and gives it the form he requires. The criteria of success are primarily stability and strength—as they are, on the organizational level, in Fukuyama’s State Building. The first abandonment of the good as criterion is thus metaphysical or structural: rather than the human good or the common good as guides to wise statesmanship, we have power as both the origin and the end of a project of construction.

Machiavelli’s insight into the primary condition of success of this construction project leads to the second, more political or practical, abandonment of the good. For the sake of both strength and stability, the prince should forsake the aristocratic politics of the past, in which he is first among peers who would themselves like to be first. He should found his state upon the people, who do not want to be oppressed by the great. The aim of political order is no longer to accommodate and order competing goods (virtue and wealth, freedom and security), but to draw forth and draw upon predominant passions as a standing reserve for the power to rule and shape. Political legitimation is the successful channeling of these reserves of fearful and resentful energies into approval of the ruling regime. Property rights—and the accumulation of property to have rights to, and the optimistic industriousness preoccupied with accumulation—serve this function in liberal regimes.

When Fukuyama pointed out, in The End of History and the Last Man, that liberal theory (especially economic theory) tended to reduce human desire to interest and appetite and to leave out a vitally important aspect of our nature, he forcefully highlighted an important corrective to the dominant forms of modern political and social theory. By appealing to Plato and Hegel in identifying this missing piece as both thumos and the desire for recognition, he seemed to be grounding his corrective in something like a classical account of virtue and the ordered soul, or a German account of Bildung and the concrete realization of freedom, or some amalgam of the two. This appearance, however, was entirely illusory. The “effectual truth” of Fukuyama’s “desire for recognition” is an agreement with Rousseau that legitimation on the basis of “the people” must in some way satisfy their amour-propre, perhaps best translated as self-esteem.

In Fukuyama’s hands this correction serves as little more than an addendum to the Machiavellian program—the identification of a standing reserve of regime legitimation that perhaps could only fully come to light when “the people” understood themselves as in principle the whole of the polity. In the democratic age “the great” had become a category that simply ought not exist, even if still needed by the ruling class as a focus of the people’s resentment (in the form of “the rich” or “the oppressors” of whatever description).

Despite his nod to Nietzsche, Fukuyama has no Machiavellian ear for this darker resentful side of the people as legitimating resource. In the end, the desire for recognition is just another need to be satisfied, a need for a self-image as a being entitled to and accorded respect by others. Since liberal democracy purports to satisfy this desire universally, it meets the need and thus channels the resource toward legitimating the regime that provides this satisfaction. As is the case for Rousseau (in contrast to Plato or Hegel), it is sufficient that this recognition come from others. It is part of our “nature” only as a passion, not as an ordering principle impelling us to form ourselves into a being worthy of respect or inherently directed toward fulfilling the goodness of our being.

Accordingly, despite its subtitle, Fukuyama’s more recent Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment has very little to say about resentment, other than to suggest that the resentments voiced by identity politics on the left are valid while those voiced by identity politics on the right are not. Either way, however, identity politics is the problem, because it diverts the vital resource of the desire for recognition away from the liberal regime. Rather than demanding universal recognition of all individuals, identity politics demands recognition for members of a sub-national group.

Fukuyama manages to avoid seeing the emergence of identity politics as a threat to his implicit two-tiered legitimation theory. “The diminished ambitions for large-scale socioeconomic reform converged with the left’s embrace of identity politics and multiculturalism in the final decades of the twentieth century.”⁸ Apparently it is only due to an accidental convergence of distinct historical timelines, cultural and economic, that democratic legitimation seems not to be providing the backstop to a (presumably temporary) loss of hope for economic growth. This is a technocratic problem which must have a technocratic solution. Identity politics

is a natural and inevitable response to injustice. It becomes problematic only when identity is interpreted or asserted in certain specific ways. Identity politics for some progressives has become a cheap substitute for serious thinking about how to reverse the thirty-year tend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality.⁹

Fukuyama knows the broad shape of the solution, even if he has little guidance to offer on its implementation:

The remedy is to define larger and more integrative national identities that take account of the de facto diversity of existing liberal democratic societies. … National identities can be built around liberal and democratic political values …. Such an inclusive sense of national identity remains critical for the maintenance of a successful modern political order.¹⁰

In other words, the problem is how the standing reserve of desire for recognition is channeled and the consequences for how the human material is configured into fractious rather than harmonious forms.

Of course, in Fukuyama’s liberal idiom, “national identity” doesn’t really mean national identity. In his latest writings the nation is nothing other than the territorially bounded collection of individuals belonging to the same state, who have signed on to a social contract to have their rights protected on the same terms by the same legislating and enforcing entity. “National identity begins with a shared belief in the legitimacy of the country’s political system.”¹¹ In Liberalism and its Discontents he usually uses “state” and “nation” interchangeably. The fact that, over the course of the last two decades, Fukuyama has not found it necessary to take seriously the distinction of usage between “state” and “nation” seems to be a marker of his unquestioning faith in the liberal state as the endgame of history.

One might summarize Fukuyama’s embrace of the Machiavellian change in the status of the good as follows. The “demand for dignity” in the subtitle of Identity does not point to a humanistic concern for the flourishing of human possibilities or the fulfillment of our nature. That would be the original meaning of the classical term philanthropia: love for the beauty of human nature fulfilling and enacting its distinctive goodness. “Demand” here is rather a term of what we might call technocratic political economy: demand as an energy to be released and rationally directed to a stable form of organization. This reduction of the human being to a troublesome factor in the achievement of technocratic order amounts to misanthropy. 

Lawler observes that “Fukuyama, in spite of himself, finally explains how human history will end. Human beings will drug out of existence everything that makes them miserable—love, death, anxiety, spiritedness, depression.” If human dignity only requires the recognition of my right to immunize myself against such humanizing experiences, then the humanity-generating history that begins with the demand for recognition of my willingness to risk my life for respect can very well end with my humanity-abdicating enjoyment of government-guaranteed recognition for my choice of a risk-free satisfaction with myself—as long as it is guaranteed to be universal. 

In short, the abandonment of the good enables Fukuyama to use “dignity” to mean self-satisfied mediocrity, “spiritedness” to mean one more need to satisfy (namely, a petulant demand for esteem), and “human nature” to mean a bundle of minimally-specified urges. It enables him to sound like he is offering a lesson in classical Aristotelian prudence when, in State Building, he warns us against seeking a science of public administration that is “more ‘scientific’ than the underlying subject matter permits,” whereas, rather than respecting the complexity and specificity of the multiple goods balanced by prudent statesmanship, he is really curbing the excesses of technocratic ambitions in the face of cultural and historical diversity. He is able to couch in the language of classical humanist philanthropia a technocratic misanthropy. As Lawler recognized, Fukuyama’s classical and conservative sounding language masks a fundamental liberal nihilism, and a cosmopolitan humanitarianism that is ultimately willing to dispense with the human.

1. Francis Fukuyama, State Building, p.26

2.  State Building, p.6

3.  State Building, p.11

4. State Building, p.28

5.  State Building, p.35

6. “It has become much more fashionable in recent years to argue with [Amartya] Sen (1999) that democracy is both an object of development in itself and a means toward economic growth.” (State Building, pp.27-28)

7.  Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, pp.13-14

8.  Fukuyama, Identity, p.113 (emphasis mine)

9.  Identity, p.115

10.  Identity, p.123

11. Identity, p.126