Grand Strategy Annex

14th January 2012

Post with 12 notes

Marx and Fukuyama

Over at my other blog I’ve just written another long post about Marx, Marxist Eschatology, arguing that the argument over whether Marx has been “proved right” or “proved wrong” by history is misconceived and short-sighted, because the conditions that could prove Marx right or wrong do not yet obtain.

I was very pleased to see a piece at the Foreign Policy website today, Misunderstanding Fukuyama (dated 30 December 2011), because it covers similar ground. Over at Foreign Policy (and in other venues), the debate is at least in part over whether Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis has been “proved right” or “proved wrong” by subsequent historical events. This makes the debate over Fukuyama’s thesis closely parallel to the debate over Marx’s thesis.  

Dan Blumenthal quotes Fukuyama as follows:

“In order to refute my hypothesis, then, it is not sufficient to suggest that the future holds in store large and momentous events. One would have to show that these events were driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that claimed to supersede liberalism. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan — horrible as that would be for those countries — does not qualify, unless it somehow forced us to reconsider the basic principles underlying our social order.”

It is admirable that Fukuyama does not here argue that he is not proved wrong by history, only that he has not yet been proved wrong by history. He leaves open the future possibility that there may someday come a reconsideration of the basic underlying principles of social order.

This is both a virtue and a weakness of Fukuyama’s thesis. With Marx, we can identify a “bend in the road” of history at which point Marx might be proved right or wrong. For some people — wrongly to my mind — this point was identified as the end of the Cold War. To my mind, it is the full industrialization of the world’s economy. Thus Marx’s thesis has the virtue of falsification.

Fukuyama’s thesis does not seem to provide the kind of “bend in the road” of history that would constitute the experimentum crusis of his “end of history” argument. The most we seem to be able to say here is that history is always open to revision. This is true, but it is true because it is trivially true, and because it is trivially true it is largely uninteresting.

Tagged: FukuyamaMarxMarxismhistoryend of history