Francis Fukuyama Is The Last Grandpa

If you’re not following Francis Fukuyama on Instagram, you’re missing out. His posts exemplify a Boomer picaresque aesthetic: the occasional typo in his captions, pictures of electronic parts that he’s fiddling with, a linear algebra textbook, a landscape shot of the Danube, mysterious but alluring architectural highlights of various European cities, and unsmiling selfies while wearing a ballcap. It’s all charming, yet interspersed within the grid are more eyebrow-raising indications: a debate with Peter Thiel at the Aspen Ideas Festival; pictures of meetings with various political figures, including a former PM of Turkey and Alexei Navalny; highlights of conferences and summits featuring a program he runs at Stanford University, the Leadership Academy for Development; and giving a talk to an organization called the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. How did he get here? Fukuyama’s memoir In the Realm of the Last Man offers a kind of answer, though perhaps not in the way that he intended. The title of Fukuyama’s memoir references the 1992 book that made his reputation. Long after Fukuyama is dead, and the rest of his work is gathering dust in libraries, The End of History and the Last Man will remain a point of reference. The book was an expansion of an earlier 1989 article he wrote as a first attempt to historicize the meaning of the end of the Cold War. Fukuyama in the book took a particular interpretation of Hegel as propounded by the Russian-French philosopher and civil servant Alexandre Kojève. Given Marx’s line that he stood Hegel right side up, Fukuyama can be said to have turned Hegel sideways: History has a kind of structural developmental logic to it, as determined by the human drive for recognition and respect, encapsulated by the Greek term thymos. Iterations of the demand for thymos have created conflict and change throughout history, determining the form of the state through time. For Fukuyama, the liberal capitalist order that won the Cold War, as led by the US, was the end of history, in that there would be no further political developments towards new kinds of state orders. This is not a triumphant vision, however, as at the end of the book he theorized the Last Man, a product of this world capitalist order, whose needs would be easily met and who would have no desire to strive for achievement or greatness, as his thymos would be so easily assuaged. This Last Man would be a pathetic figure, a mere passive consumer and the society that created him would stagnant culturally and politically. Eventually this society would collapse, as the Last Man would himself destroy it out of boredom. History itself for Fukuyama then is a process that can never satisfy humanity, and his Hegelian inspired theory of structural historical development at the end reveals itself to be another high-level cyclical interpretation of history as eternal conflict. Fukuyama notes at the beginning of the memoir that “I have been asked several times a week over the past three decades whether I wished to recant my argument.” In sum, no, Fukuyama sticks to his guns, but clarifies that his suggestion was more “that History, rather than ending, had simply paused on its way to an uncertain future.” So, what is life like in the realm of the Last Man? As a memoir it is less the story of a life than a narrative of intellectual development. The incidents and chapters have no discernible order, Fukuyama simply plucks things from his mind and memories at random to stage out. It makes for oddly compelling reading, mixing anecdotes with study guide-esque write-ups of various intellectuals and books. Fukuyama's life is full of improbable connections and moments, with his family background ensconced in elite academic and political circles. His maternal grandfather was Shiro Kawata, an academic agricultural economist who was part of Japan's modernization drive. Kawata studied in imperial Germany before WWI, where he was somehow able to gain access to parts of the personal library of the economic historian and theorist Werner Sombart. Sombart, alongside Max Weber, was one of the great intellectuals of late-imperial Germany, before supporting the Nazis in the 1930s. Sombart's work influenced generations of German-speaking academics, which was then translated and widely disseminated in English among American academics, and thereby influencing Anglosphere scholarship as a whole. Sombart is widely credited as having developed the term and theory of “late capitalism.” Fukuyama notes that from his grandfather's portion of Sombart's library, he inherited a first edition copy of Das Kapital.

Read it at Defector ↗

← Front page