Saturday, February 08, 2025
012 - At History’s End (Part II): Fukuyama on Kojève
In this episode, I begin a deeper dive into Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” essay, including his discussion about Hegel as interpreted by Kojève, the role of culture on the adoption of Liberalism, and the case study and potential counterpoint of contemporary Japan.
Duration: 00:11:59
Episode Transcript
Foreword
This is the second installment of “At History’s End,” a subseries exploring the contextual underpinnings of the disposition and psyche of contemporary American politics and culture. If you’re just now listening in, you may want to consider starting from part one.
Previously, I introduced Francis Fukuyama and the conception of the end of history he popularized during the twilight of the Cold War. In this episode, I’d like to go into greater detail about his essay, and highlight some of the key points which seem relevant to this ongoing exploration.
Let’s begin.
Intro
Good morning. You’re listening to the Reflections in Beige Podcast, hosted by Michael LeSane. The date is Saturday, February 8th, 2025.
Fukuyama on Hegel and Kojève
I am not a scholar of philosophy, and so I do not feel qualified to muse about the philosophical underpinnings of Fukuyama’s writing which he spent some time discussing in detail in his essay, The End of History?, except to say that it was from Hegel that his conception of the “end of history” was derived.
Quote:
End quote.
Fukuyma also dedicated some time to discussing the distortion of Hegel’s philosophy by Marxism, which he argued Hegel has since become associated with as a precursor.
In contrast, Fukuyama touted Kojève as a modern philosopher who could resurrect Hegel as the philosopher who most correctly speaks to our time.
Quote:
End quote. He also wrote:
End quote. Fukuyama noted that the world wars of the following century would expand those principles and force western nations – which according to Kojève embodied the concept of the “universal homogenous state” – to more fully implement liberalism.
Food for Thought
Reading through Fukuyama’s essay, there were a number of other interesting points raised which caught my eye and I would like to shed light on as potential food for later discussion.
Consciousness and Culture
Fukuyama stressed that consciousness and culture was as important to economic growth as economics and political stability, citing cultures of the Ummah – at that point in time, anyway – and their religious prohibitions as a counterpoint to the spectacular and rapid economic successes in East Asia. Quote:
End quote.
Elaborating on this, he wrote:
End quote.
He suggested that the catalyst for the economic liberalization of the Eastern Bloc and China in the 1980s – and not sooner – was not the recognition of the material shortcomings of the Communist system as compared to the Liberal alternative, which he argued were noticeable as far back as the 1940s or 1950s, but rather a shift finally occurring in the views of the ruling class, or as he put it, “the result of the victory of one idea over another.”
Competing Frameworks
If the end of history is the triumph of Liberalism, and the triumph of Liberalism is the exhaustion of politically formidable alternatives addressing contradictions deemed irreconcilable with it, the last two major challenges to Liberalism were, according to Fukuyama, Fascism and Communism.
He argued that fascism emerged to rectify contradictions that included materialism and a lack of cohesiveness with a strong state with an exclusive national identity. Though the major fascist states were materially destroyed in World War II, with respect to the realm of ideas, the system’s association with conflict and catastrophic defeat – or that is to say, with inevitable self-destruction – was what ended its appeal in the realm of ideas.
Meanwhile, he argued that Communism – the more serious of the two threats – emerged to rectify the contradiction between capital and labor. However, Fukuyama, citing Kojève, argued that Western Liberalism had indeed resolved the class issue, suggesting that, in his words, “the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx.”
Fukuyama added:
In other words, Fukuyama believed that Liberalism as embodied by modern America had resolved the issues Communism emerged in response to – particularly economic inequality – and any remaining sociological issues were downstream from factors independent of or predating Liberalism.
Fukuyama on Japan
Before I conclude this lecture, I’d like to briefly cover Fukuyama’s discussion on Japan. Following the defeat of the fascist alternative to liberalism as embodied by Imperial Japan during the Pacific War, the United States imposed liberal democracy, and in his words:
End quote.
He noted that while the Japanese implementation of political liberalism and industrial organization were noticeably different from their western counterparts, they were successfully integrated into Japanese institutions and traditions in such an intrinsic manner where their preservation was secured.
“More important,” Fukuyama wrote, “is the contribution that Japan has made in turn to world history by following in the footsteps of the United States to create a truly universal consumer culture that has become both a symbol and /an underpinning of the universal homogenous state.”
End quote.
Fukuyama would go on to note how Japanese consumer product advertising could be seen even in Iran following the revolution, and wrote that, quote:
End quote.
I’m tempted to dispute the insinuation that the Japanese economy was not already capitalistic prior to the war, especially in the wake of the Meiji restoration, but the economic restructuring and democratization for lack of better words which occurred during the U.S. occupation seemingly contributed to a far more vibrant economy in the years which followed in what has since been referred to as the Japanese Economic Miracle. But I digress.
In the footnotes to the essay, however, Fukuyama would briefly mention Japan – previously cited as a country which successfully integrated economic and political liberalism into its society and culture – as a potential counterpoint. He wrote:
End quote.
This is, as I’d perhaps read it, an acknowledgment that societies can adopt political and especially economic liberalism while still preserving local cultural structures, and even resist a total absorption of Western modernity.
In saying this, I cannot help but think of Singapore, its governance informed in part by learning from the lessons and mistakes of modern American economic and social policy, and the People’s Republic of China following the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, which embraced the productive capabilities of privatization while resisting the political liberalization often associated with it. But that’s a discussion for another time.
Conclusion
Let that be all for today.
My exploration of Fukuyama’s essay will continue in the next installment or two of this subseries.
Thank you for listening and sharing, and have a good day.
This is the second installment of “At History’s End,” a subseries exploring the contextual underpinnings of the disposition and psyche of contemporary American politics and culture. If you’re just now listening in, you may want to consider starting from part one.
Previously, I introduced Francis Fukuyama and the conception of the end of history he popularized during the twilight of the Cold War. In this episode, I’d like to go into greater detail about his essay, and highlight some of the key points which seem relevant to this ongoing exploration.
Let’s begin.
Intro
Good morning. You’re listening to the Reflections in Beige Podcast, hosted by Michael LeSane. The date is Saturday, February 8th, 2025.
Fukuyama on Hegel and Kojève
I am not a scholar of philosophy, and so I do not feel qualified to muse about the philosophical underpinnings of Fukuyama’s writing which he spent some time discussing in detail in his essay, The End of History?, except to say that it was from Hegel that his conception of the “end of history” was derived.
Quote:
For better or worse, much of Hegel's historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian societies, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science, insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed "natural" attributes. The mastery and transformation of man's natural environment through the application of science and technology was originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout court, however, Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.
End quote.
Fukuyma also dedicated some time to discussing the distortion of Hegel’s philosophy by Marxism, which he argued Hegel has since become associated with as a precursor.
In contrast, Fukuyama touted Kojève as a modern philosopher who could resurrect Hegel as the philosopher who most correctly speaks to our time.
Quote:
Kojève sought to resurrect the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806. For as early as this Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality.
End quote. He also wrote:
While there was considerable work to be done after 1806 - abolishing slavery and the slave trade, extending the franchise to workers, women, blacks, and other racial minorities, etc. - the basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved upon.
End quote. Fukuyama noted that the world wars of the following century would expand those principles and force western nations – which according to Kojève embodied the concept of the “universal homogenous state” – to more fully implement liberalism.
Food for Thought
Reading through Fukuyama’s essay, there were a number of other interesting points raised which caught my eye and I would like to shed light on as potential food for later discussion.
Consciousness and Culture
Fukuyama stressed that consciousness and culture was as important to economic growth as economics and political stability, citing cultures of the Ummah – at that point in time, anyway – and their religious prohibitions as a counterpoint to the spectacular and rapid economic successes in East Asia. Quote:
Surely free markets and stable political systems are a necessary precondition to capitalist economic growth. But just as surely the cultural heritage of those Far Eastern societies, the ethic of work and saving and family, a religious heritage that does not, like Islam, place restrictions on certain forms of economic behavior, and other deeply ingrained moral qualities, are equally important in explaining their economic performance.
End quote.
Elaborating on this, he wrote:
FAILURE to understand that the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of consciousness and culture leads to the common mistake of attributing material causes to phenomena that are essentially ideal in nature.
End quote.
He suggested that the catalyst for the economic liberalization of the Eastern Bloc and China in the 1980s – and not sooner – was not the recognition of the material shortcomings of the Communist system as compared to the Liberal alternative, which he argued were noticeable as far back as the 1940s or 1950s, but rather a shift finally occurring in the views of the ruling class, or as he put it, “the result of the victory of one idea over another.”
Competing Frameworks
If the end of history is the triumph of Liberalism, and the triumph of Liberalism is the exhaustion of politically formidable alternatives addressing contradictions deemed irreconcilable with it, the last two major challenges to Liberalism were, according to Fukuyama, Fascism and Communism.
He argued that fascism emerged to rectify contradictions that included materialism and a lack of cohesiveness with a strong state with an exclusive national identity. Though the major fascist states were materially destroyed in World War II, with respect to the realm of ideas, the system’s association with conflict and catastrophic defeat – or that is to say, with inevitable self-destruction – was what ended its appeal in the realm of ideas.
Meanwhile, he argued that Communism – the more serious of the two threats – emerged to rectify the contradiction between capital and labor. However, Fukuyama, citing Kojève, argued that Western Liberalism had indeed resolved the class issue, suggesting that, in his words, “the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx.”
Fukuyama added:
This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the "legacy of slavery and racism" which persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery.
In other words, Fukuyama believed that Liberalism as embodied by modern America had resolved the issues Communism emerged in response to – particularly economic inequality – and any remaining sociological issues were downstream from factors independent of or predating Liberalism.
Fukuyama on Japan
Before I conclude this lecture, I’d like to briefly cover Fukuyama’s discussion on Japan. Following the defeat of the fascist alternative to liberalism as embodied by Imperial Japan during the Pacific War, the United States imposed liberal democracy, and in his words:
“Western capitalism and political liberalism when transplanted to Japan were adapted and transformed by the Japanese in such a way as to be scarcely recognizable.”
End quote.
He noted that while the Japanese implementation of political liberalism and industrial organization were noticeably different from their western counterparts, they were successfully integrated into Japanese institutions and traditions in such an intrinsic manner where their preservation was secured.
“More important,” Fukuyama wrote, “is the contribution that Japan has made in turn to world history by following in the footsteps of the United States to create a truly universal consumer culture that has become both a symbol and /an underpinning of the universal homogenous state.”
End quote.
Fukuyama would go on to note how Japanese consumer product advertising could be seen even in Iran following the revolution, and wrote that, quote:
“Desire for access to the consumer culture, created in large measure by Japan, has played a crucial role in fostering the spread of economic liberalism throughout Asia, and hence in promoting political liberalism as well.”
End quote.
I’m tempted to dispute the insinuation that the Japanese economy was not already capitalistic prior to the war, especially in the wake of the Meiji restoration, but the economic restructuring and democratization for lack of better words which occurred during the U.S. occupation seemingly contributed to a far more vibrant economy in the years which followed in what has since been referred to as the Japanese Economic Miracle. But I digress.
In the footnotes to the essay, however, Fukuyama would briefly mention Japan – previously cited as a country which successfully integrated economic and political liberalism into its society and culture – as a potential counterpoint. He wrote:
I use the example of Japan with some caution, since Kojève late in his life came to conclude that Japan, with its culture based on purely formal arts, proved that the universal homogenous state was not victorious and that history had perhaps not ended.
End quote.
This is, as I’d perhaps read it, an acknowledgment that societies can adopt political and especially economic liberalism while still preserving local cultural structures, and even resist a total absorption of Western modernity.
In saying this, I cannot help but think of Singapore, its governance informed in part by learning from the lessons and mistakes of modern American economic and social policy, and the People’s Republic of China following the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, which embraced the productive capabilities of privatization while resisting the political liberalization often associated with it. But that’s a discussion for another time.
Conclusion
Let that be all for today.
My exploration of Fukuyama’s essay will continue in the next installment or two of this subseries.
Thank you for listening and sharing, and have a good day.
Episode Sources
- “The End of History?” by Francis Fukuyama, The National Interest (1989).
- “Occupation of Japan” on Wikipedia.