Selections: Last And First Man

The philosopher Hegel grappled with a sense of the directionality perceivable in the history of freedom, keeping in mind the ambiguity of ‘direction’ in rival linear, or cyclical, interpretations. The acuteness of his thinking is veiled in the philosopher as a metaphysical Sphinx all too liable to misinterpretations, and some earnest questions in the face of his reticence near Prussian censorship. The accusations of defending the reaction forget the brief period of the progressive

Prussia

. Even as he is defended from the charge of ideologist, he appears to be doing remarkably well in this role for post-Communism as the historical grand finale wished for in a new Restoration of classical liberals. Suffice it to say he, or some phantom by that name, seems to confirm Marx’s warnings, as the current bald eagle for the ‘end of history’. This concept of the ‘end of history’ has been so abused as to seem worthless.

End of eonic sequence? Our model produces a parallel, though quite different, idea of the ‘end of the eonic sequence’. This makes no definite statement about the social form of the period after the last transition, save that the self-evolution of freedom must replace that of the eonic sequence. The ominous possibility of the next ‘revolution’ (as man-made micro-action or pseudo-transition) to reach the ‘end of history’, or the end of the ‘end of history’, lurks beyond bourgeois propaganda in the mideonic wasteland of political systems deviating from the classic period of the divide.

Hegel’s metaphysics apart, his commentary on liberal modernity is classic. Hegel was an acute critic of the limits of civil society. As S. Avineri notes,

Hegel accepts Smith’s view that behind the senseless and conflicting clash of interests in civil society lies a hidden assumption which implies that everyone in society is thus being well taken care of. Poverty, which for Smith is always marginal to his model, assumes another dimension in Hegel. For the latter, pauperization and the subsequent alienation from society are not incidental to the system but endemic to it…the only problem which remains unresolved according to Hegel’s own admission is the problem of poverty.[i]

Before the leftist tide caused social conservatives to close ranks around Adam Smith, the flaws in the emerging capitalist system were obvious to many, one of them Hegel. But should we man the barricades for Hegel’s political suggestions? His critique of the stark contradiction at the root of the emerging capitalist order makes him the direct inspiration for his well-known and less compliant successor. Hegel hesitates, Marx cuts the Gordian knot. Hegel’s seminal study of the English political economists nonetheless distorts his ‘cunning of reason’ idea, and for all his daring with teleological thinking gets it mixed with the ‘invisible hand’ thinking of the capitalist ideologists.[ii]

In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama steps without hesitation into this Hegelian vein, anxious to sneak the kludges of teleological idealism into the barren mechanics of sociology, and finds in liberal democracy the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution ” and the “final form of human government”. This was the Hegel of the philosopher Kojeve. The basis of the ‘end of history’ idea is open to challenge, and the idea is not present in Hegel in the fashion now imagined. A far more interesting approach might be our eonic model, with a question, to be developed, ‘Have we reached the end of the eonic sequence?’ With the eonic model, we know at once what Hegel is driving at, but can’t quite put his finger on.[iii]

The course of the idea of the Hegelian ‘end of history ’, the idea that history had ended in 1806 after the Battle of Jena, i.e., the principles of liberty and equality had become the ‘limits of convergence’ of the global system of Universal History , fails as linear directionality, and changes its meaning with context and is bound in the equivocation created by ambiguity between the ‘end of history’ and the ‘end of antiquity’, and Hegel himself a harbinger of a New Age, yet haunted by the memory of the Great Terror, and the wish to justify the passage to new and different futures in the collisions of that era. But the New Age is secure, and grants no further proofs of justice, as liberal systems emerge in temporal form guaranteed no Whiggish certainty by the arguments of Hegel. Anyone who uses this nearly hopeless terminology ends up mesmerized. In any case, the rise of pragmatism with its ‘naturalized Hegelianism’ makes us forget that ‘geist’ is the fuel for the motor, and a theory of evolution, de facto, and its status as a design argument is like all the rest. The lesson suggested by our discrete freedom sequence is well suggested by the founders of the American system, ‘Democracy, if you can keep it’.[iv]

Meaningful summons of Hegel requires the use of his ‘dialectic of stages’, which fell, however, into an unfortunate Eurocentrism. Freedom does not proceed from East to West, but along the mainline of the eonic sequence. And this ‘dialectic’ cannot be tacked onto a sociological argument about the influence of economics or technology on history, for it is a challenge to the very foundation of normal logic, to say nothing of physical causality. The ‘end of history’ argument in its current form proceeds from the philosopher Kojeve, in a hybrid of Hegel, Nietzche, Marx, and Heidegger. In the end one might do better to backtrack to the buried Kant whence ‘ideas for a universal history’ have sprung, to find there a more realistic sense that a teleological view of history would do better to adopt a stark realism about the future, in the progression toward the perfect civil constitution, even given the great achievements of the Age of Freedom beautifully reflected the critique of the Dialectic of Illusion.

Fukuyama thus falls back on standard historical theory, and asks, “Do all or most societies evolve in a certain uniform direction, or do their histories follow either a cyclical or simply random path?” Fukuyama proposes to find the historical mechanism in relation to various candidate factors, e.g. the development of scientific knowledge, as a cumulative force whose development can ‘clock’ the ‘irreversibility’ of progressive time and asks, “But if history is never to repeat itself, there must be a constant and uniform Mechanism or set of historical first causes that dictates evolution in a single direction, and that somehow preserves the memory of earlier periods into the present.”

This states the problem of historical causality quite directly indeed, and in a fashion that makes the linear or uniform and the cyclical mutually exclusive. But here is the exact difficulty, for the mechanism that Fukuyama might wish could show a cyclical character beyond the modern rise of science and technology that seems to hold sway only after 1500, and as much a series of effects as drivers of the motion. And what is the relevance of Hegel here? Hegel’s argument is not causal. The ‘mechanism’ of the ‘end of history ’ is the dialectic of stages in the emergence of Freedom. Normal causality fails as a candidate for the Grand Mechanism. All such efforts amount to variants of macroeconomic models of growth, and they don’t work. Sneak in Hegel draped in the. American flag. We will soon look at the case of the missing centuries, in relation to science, to discover that science, at least so far, could not be the candidate for this generation of uniform direction, bound up itself in the dynamic history.

The great historical Mechanism that Fukuyama describes must pass muster throughout Universal History, in the record of civilization . It is not sufficient to begin with the rise of modernity and find therein the resolution of Universal History in its effects, rather than its causes. Thus, we cannot assume the implied conclusion of his ‘if’. What if history does repeat itself? Such arguments assume, perhaps, the Judeo-Christian ‘mythistorical’ discovery of linear progressive time as a fait accompli.

It is significant to consider the appearance of modern forms of Freedom (and equalization), and the Communist explosion, in its proper context, of 5000 years, the entirety of what we call ‘civilization’, unable to establish a practical equality of economic justice, except for one brief period near -600. The modern world of Freedom was the child of revolution . This led to the rise of the notion of the ‘permanent revolution’, when, in fact, a flawed system was simply becoming stable. This stability is guarded by reasonable compromises, and the unique experience of American economic and political success. But the issue remains, for the gains of freedom are never secure. The discrete veiling of this fact by those who wish to brand ‘revolution’ as a pathological aberration or the will to power is a token of the brevity of historical memory. Our memories are short if we forget the birth of a left that sprang into existence before the abolition of slavery.[v] But the original sense, and the real heart of Fukuyama’s argument, is the preservation of the gains made at the ‘end of modernism’, and an attempt to insist the technological gains of modernization should be accompanied by the gains of liberty, even as desperado traditionalist cultures wish the fruits of technology while calling liberal modernization ‘ethnocentric’. We are forced to consider this thesis to be Hegelian propaganda. Let us, however, take the thesis seriously to this degree: we might reach the ‘end of history’ if we are successful in achieving true democracy for the first time!

Could humanity regress completely, find itself reviving slavery , theocracy, aristocratic society? Unfortunately it could, because it has, the more so as its experimental ‘communist’ fail-safe itself deviated and proved an abysmal failure, precisely on this score. Armed with Darwinism regression is already underway! What then is the source of freedom? Part of our confusion is the assumption of pure linear advance, and the viewpoint this creates, that particular forms, cultural states, or periods are islands of random rationality adrift in time. Our study might attempt to give a better meaning to the term ‘end of history ’, as the passage of a divide, and, more basically, a phenomenon related to what we will call eonic transition . And our study might highlight, and possibly reconcile, the contradiction in these linear views of progress into which the cyclical factor would threaten to return, and in the process make us less sanguine about the inevitability of any simple form of short-term political directedness.

[i] Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), “Poverty and the limits of Civil Society”, p. 147. Steven Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[ii] Harold Mah, The End of Philosophy, the Origin of ‘Ideology’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). James White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York: Norton, 1974), Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), M. Steger & T. Carver, Engels After Marx (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

[iii] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). Jon Stewart, The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1996). Fukuyama’s interpretation is influenced by the works of the philosopher Alexander Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1969). Cf. also, Shadia Drury, Alexander Kojeve, The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994). Cf. also After History? Francis Fukuyama and his Critics, Timothy Burns (ed), (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994). Cf. “The Tower of Babel Rebuilt”, Peter Fenves traces the Kantian origins of the ‘end of history’ idea and the reservations of Kant in his “An Old Question Asked Anew”. George Kelly, Idealism, Politics, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969). For a discussion of Kojeve on Kant and Hegel, cf. Patrick Riley, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), Bhikhu Parekh, Marx’s Theory of Ideology (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982).

[iv] For all the efforts to debrief Hegel by the Left Hegelians, none can seem to match the acutely ‘demystified’ Schopenhauer. But Hegel, in ponderous magnificence, leaves a philosophic daguerrotype, ‘cliché’ with idealist flash, much better than Hollywood, of the surging moment of Napoleon riding through Jena. It is never noticed, that the ahistorical Schopenhauer has a potentially superior inverted philosophy of history hidden behind his rejection of progress and a science of history. Note quietly the hidden resemblance of ‘will’ and ‘geist’, then the many (inferior) involutionary triadisms of ‘will’, and their concocted divinities.

[v] Cf. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford, 1966), Slavery and Human Progress (1984), David Brion Davis.