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Therapeutic Democracy
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20396 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
2,475 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN
Francis Fukuyama
New York: The Free Press, 1992
400 pp., $ 24.95
THE DEMOCRACY TRAP
Graham A. Fuller
New York: Dutton, 1992
267 pp., $ 19.95
The presentation of "the end of history" by Francis Fukuyama in the National Interest (summer 1989) has led to spirited comment by a growing body of journalists. Among others Charles Krauthammmer, George Will, and a feature writer of Time have assessed Fukuyama's arguments that the world may be moving toward a democratic capitalist final age, a world without war and, therefore, without, serious politics--the End of History in which boredom, not strife, will be the major human problem. History as a critical and challenging time will thereby end and human society will thereafter exist in a conflict-free, prosperous, and increasingly homogenous world environment. In Fukuyama's defense, it should be noted that he does not advocate anywhere in his essay that steps be taken to turn utopia into reality; nor does he express breathless enthusiasm for what he treats as a merely possible future. His book The End of History and the Last Man offers sobering reminders that a world characterized by peacefulness and material gratification need not be an object of moral admiration. Particularly in his concluding chapter he invokes the images of spinelessness and moral timidity for example, Nietzsche's "last man," a self-satisfied seeker of creature comforts, and C.S. Lewis' "men without chests" that convey emphatically negative views of modern materialism and modern social disintegration. It is also possible to cite observations made in this book as a refutation of the criticism that Fukuyama is awaiting his hypothetical final age with open arms. He devotes considerable space, for example, to working out the distinctions made by the ancients between humans with megalothymia, high-spiritedness, and those with isothymica, phlegmatic dispositions. And though he places both Nazi Germany and Tojo's Japan into the obviously unsavory category of bold, self-assertive societies exhibiting megalothymia, he also seems to regret the prevalence of phlegmatic self-centered types in the contemporary democratic West. Fukuyama seems to be weeping over the passing of more heroic age and the corresponding human type even while indicating the advantages of a money-grubbing society. He also notes, in a comment borrowed from Irving Kristol without acknowledgement, that modern liberal
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