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· Francis Fukuyama, who rode collapse to the top, now has a view of American decline.

By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL [Financial Times] – Where governments come from, what they’re for, who gets to form them – these questions have long fascinated philosophers. Hobbes saw a truce in a “war of all against all”. Rousseau described a “social contract”. The Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes we can do better than that. In the wake of Darwin and the great 19th-century anthropologists, we can move beyond parables and speculation. We can build a theory of the origins of government from what we know about biology and history…

Decline is Fukuyama’s claim to fame. In 1989, as a young policy analyst in the US state department, he wrote the essay “The End of History”, a first stab at making sense of the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Considering that the Berlin Wall was still standing at the time, Fukuyama’s analysis was impressive. Just as Hegel saw Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806 as marking the victory of French revolutionary principles over monarchical ones, Fukuyama declared that the end of the cold war was closing off alternatives to liberal capitalism. Fukuyama meant, for instance, that Soviet economists were suddenly flattered to be compared to Milton Friedman. He stressed that the end of history in this Hegelian sense “does not by any means imply the end of international conflict”. But every Balkan massacre or African uprising since has occasioned snorting at Fukuyama’s expense. Never has an essay been more thoroughly misrepresented by those who have not read it.

Fukuyama missed some things, of course. He did not see that capitalism would be a considerably more robust component of the post-cold war world than either liberalism or democracy. He was optimistic that US power could accelerate some of the positive trends he described, a view he repented a year into the Iraq war. One now reads in his writing signs of his own country in decline.

Continued at the Financial Times | More Chronicle & Notices.

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