Comments on: Francis Fukyuama: learns nothing, forgets nothing

By: Fratguy

Fratguy — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:27:42 +0000

“he managed”

By: Fratguy

Fratguy — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:26:54 +0000

I remember hearing an interview with Fukuyama where he opined that the optimistic expectations for success in the Iraq invasion/nation building experiment stemmed from the stunning success of the velvet revolution. Perhaps his problems stem not from a selective memory, but an incomplete grasp of the complete geography of the Balkans. Then again he might simply not be listening to the words that are coming out of his mouth. I realize this might be cherry picking on my part, but I think that statistically it is remarkable that in the 5 minutes of total exposure to the guy me managed to have my jaw bouncing up and down off the floor within 2.

By: Janice

Janice — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:23:11 +0000

I love these predictions published by people who claim to base their ideas in history. They make for such amusing object lessons to hand to my grad students. . . .

By: cem

cem — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:42:02 +0000

Hegel, Marx, and Benjamin are getting a bad wrap here- I don’t think any of them, especially the latter two, are the functional or intellectual equivalent of Fukuyama, nor are they unaware of historicity and contingency. Benjamin described not simply secular time but liberal, capitalist, bourgeois time of the market as empty and homogenous, and his work among other things lends itself to the identifications of the disruptions in the image of linear progress and development. Anyone confused about this could do worse than to read Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, Perry Anderson’s essay on the idea of the end of history in the NLR and his Zones of Engagement book, and Michael Meranze’s WMQ article “An Ethics of Early American History.”

By: Northern Barbarian

Northern Barbarian — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 18:03:18 +0000

As a historian of the USSR, I have to join in! Marx’s vision of time was fundamentally religious: Walter Benjamin pointed out that secular time was empty of the meaning that Christian eschatology bestowed, but Marxism restored the hope of universal salvation. For Marxists, History ended when the dialectical struggle over the means of production ended (as the proletariat seized permanent control). Fukuyama replaces global proletarian control with global liberal democracy, but the vision is the same [again, the ultimate blame goes to Hegel].

Frankly, I can never keep straight in my mind which is “inductive” and which is “deductive” reasoning, but I can tell you that political scientists love their models, patterns, and huge generalizations while historians focus on the local-level details and particularities of a given event. I have worked in central and regional Communist Party archives, and I could talk the leg off Historiann’s horse about the importance of accident, stupidity, criminality, and just dumb luck in the development of this supposedly planned, scientific, and rational society!

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 04:26:45 +0000

I want to green light the guy on a non-sequel, or at least a non-linear sequel with the working title _The End of Geology_. In which, sediment remains suspended in seawater and stops depositing on the ocean floor. Water mysteriously loses its power to erode, even soil and sandstone, much less mica and schist. Then global warming in the atmosphere somehow results in planetary cooling at the core, so lava begins to look and behave like the pizza you forgot to collect after the party. That takes out three chapters on “metamorphics” right there. After that, literally everything goes loco. Speeding asteroids mysteriously swerve around Earth, cancelling several seemingly inevitable mass extinctions. The Appalachians go into reverse mode and begin growing in time-lapse fashion while (sorry, Historiann) the Rockies retract into the Earth, allowing the Great Plains to merge with the Sonoran Desert. People begin migrating down from the North land with the strange ability to “breathe quartz,” just like a weird kid in the lunch line at junior high school used to predict.

Back in graduate school one summer while hitch-hiking I got a ride from a young woman who claimed to be the neice (or maybe the great-neice) of Immanuel Velikovsky, the legendary theorist of interplanetary chaos. And what I’ve sketched above is as nothing compared to what “Uncle Manny” apparently intended to write, if he had lived forever. I had read a lot of his stuff in tenth grade, mostly just for relaxation and diversion, and while I realized even then it had a lot of empirical problematics to it, who would want any discipline to “end” if it jumped around spectacularly like that? The students in our mandatory survey sections, on the other hand, who are scattering to the holiday winds as I write, have been praying for the end of history ever since they got here and realized they were trapped.

By: Comrade PhysioProf

Comrade PhysioProf — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 04:00:31 +0000

It’s embarrassing how self-centered and unaware of it this douchebagge is. I’m neither a historian nor a political scientist, but it’s obvious to me reading excerpts of this dudes blithering that all he is basically saying is “where *I* am and what *I* prefer in history and politics must be the apotheosis”. He’s like some fucken college kidde in 1987 telling you that the Dead Kennedys are the “end of rock and roll”.

Oh, and DOY!

By: James Stripes

James Stripes — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:11:59 +0000

A long time ago, I think when I was still in graduate school, the University of Idaho hosted a debate between Francis Fukuyama and Alexander Cockburn. I remember a few things:

Fukuyama was arrogant.
Fukuyama had not read Cockburn’s work with any attention, if at all.
Cockburn had read Fukuyama’s work in great detail and was able to highlight a long list of gross errors, failures of logic, and clear contradiction.
Fukuyama’s reply to Cockburn’s interrogation provoked questions concerning whether Fukuyama had read his own work.

I think both men were paid for participating in the debate. Fukuyama thus gained the one thing he cares about: money. Truth did not appear to be among his interests.

By: Feminist Avatar

Feminist Avatar — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:38:27 +0000

The idea that history ends is based on a rather interesting idea that history is circular, rather than linear. So, ‘empires’ have models of progress, where they rise and then fall, and then a new empire rises from the ashes (almost a sort of Kuhnian paradigm shift model). The end of history is a sort of utopian vision, where the circular pattern of rise and fall is broken, and we all live happily ever after.

I quite enjoy it as a theoretical idea; like many fairy stories, its good to think with.

By: koshembos

koshembos — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:17:44 +0000

Since I am not in Poli Sci nor in History I fail to see the huge distinction between the two. I took quite a few logic courses and was never told that some use deduction and others use induction.

As a layman the idea that history ends sounded to me at the time as either intellectual laziness or utter stupidity. (Or in logic allows both to hold, which would be my choice.)

There are thousands of garbage books published annually; so we add one.