By David Black
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, working at the Rand Corporation, wrote a policy paper for the US State Department entitled ‘The End of History?’ Published in National Interest magazine, it soon became a talking point amongst celebrants of the collapse of communism and was expanded into a best-selling book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992).
Fukuyama’s thesis was that liberal democracy and its market economy was, to use Hegel’s term, ‘an idea whose time had come’. Fukuyama argued that if there was to be any future for Civilisation, this was it – there was no alternative and it didn’t matter what ‘strange thoughts’ might occur to those who still thought there might be one.
Fukuyama, 35 years later, knows that History didn’t end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Resistance to (neo)liberal ideals has prevailed: amongst History’s discontents as well as authoritarian regimes. In the latter case, he insists that ‘illiberal’ societies – particularly Russia and China – are inherently vulnerable. Reliance on a single leader or clique tends to make governance ineffective, incompetent and corrupt. The absence of a free press and public participation in decision-making processes means that support for incumbent leaders can turn volatile. Fukuyama suggests that the USA – for centuries the beacon of liberty – has taken a decidedly illiberal turn:
‘Donald Trump is fundamentally a bully who wants to dominate everyone around him. Trying to placate him with concessions is a fool’s errand: he despises weakness and those who display it. Last spring, the EU cut a trade deal with him that accepted a 15 percent tariff on all European goods with no retaliation against American products. This was a bad decision…What makes any European think that conceding Greenland will mollify Trump? He will simply come back for more, later…
Fukuyama hopes the neoliberal centrism of European Union leaders will prevail and overcome ethnonationalism.
One of Fukuyama’s most important influences has been the philosophy of Alexandre Kojève. In May 1968 Kojève died in Brussels whilst negotiating with representatives of the European Economic Community in Brussels on behalf of the French government.
Kojève saw the failure of the fascist assault in World War Two as the final battle of the ‘anti-Jacobin’ wars. Hegel had prematurely projected the ‘End of History’ following Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena in 1807′; hailing it as a ‘World-Historical Event’ which saw the republican citizen-soldiers of France dealing a the fatal blow to the ‘lordship and bondage’ of feudalism. Kojève saw in the French Revolution the emergence of a new synthesis of war and industry in a ‘universal homogeneous state’
Until 1933, Russian-born Kojève lived in Germany where he lectured on Hegel, Heidegger and Marx. When the Nazis took over he decamped to Paris. There he met the American philosopher Leo Strauss, who thought of him as a genius. In his lectures on Hegel’s phenomenology of self-consciousness, published in 1947, Kojève suggested that modern society’s rationalisation of nature was actualised by the dialectic of Desire and Satisfaction in a universal homogeneous state. Hegel’s concept ‘Absolute Knowledge’ implied that although there might not be practical solutions for all of the problems in society, whatever political solutions were needed could be known in advance, without further need for nationalist ideology or conflict between capital and labour.
Kojève regarded Stalin as a potential ‘philosopher king’ and even offered his services to the dictator as court philosophe. Leo Strauss told Kojève that he was choosing the wrong side, pointing out that although the USSR had triumphed at Stalingrad, the Western Allies victory in Normandy had opened up a new and more promising future for Europe. Kojève, in response, reminded Strauss of the exemplary relation between Aristotle and Alexander, and that all the really important philosophical enterprises in history had been guided by philosophical conceptions. The tyrant could only ever triumph over the political idea by transforming the abstraction into reality. Kojève regarded Heidegger’s attempt to become the philosopher king of Hitler’s Nazi Revolution as a catastrophic miscalculation. Kojève read Heidegger’s Being and Time as a failed attempt to ‘correct’ Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with an anthropology of biological being which offered scarce insight into the relation of Dasein (Being-in-the-World) to action and political struggle in history.
Although wars, revolutions and class conflict drive history, for Hegel the ‘Cunning of Reason’ ensured that the particular purposes of the individual could be made to serve the true Substance: the will of the ‘World Spirit’. Once the objective of the ‘World Historical Individuals’ is attained they ‘fall off like empty husks from the kernel. They die early like Alexander, they are murdered like Caesar, transported to Saint Helena like Napoleon.’ Stalin’s Soviet Union imitated the universal-homogeneous state of Napoleon (‘who was an imitator of Caesar, who was also an imitator’).
The Cold War and the Anti-Colonial revolutions enforced a sort of structural adjustment on the Jacobin/Communist/Socialist Left to the rise of the European Union. Kojève believed that if Western capitalism divided itself into nationalisms it would lose. But if a Third Empire could emerge in Europe based on the Universal Homogeneous State with a ‘social charter’ supported by both Communists and Catholics, then the USSR would lose the Cold War.
In 1999 Le Monde revealed that from 1938 to 1968 Kojève had been working with Soviet secret intelligence, passing on information that might enlighten Stalin and his successors as to where ‘Europe’ at was really going. Enlightenment to what? one might ask – if not their own unviability.
The claim that Hegel’s ‘Absolute Idea’ includes a notion of the ‘End of History seems to have originated with Engels’ essay, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy (written post-Marx in 1886). Engels argued that the real ‘absolute truth’ to be discerned in the Hegelian dialectic was that it was philosophy, not history, which had come to an end. Hegel’s achievement was to have ‘unconsciously’ shown the way to a ‘real positive cognition of the world.’
However, as Perry Anderson points out, Hegel did not actually use the term, ‘End of history’. Hegel’s concept of universal history in owes much to Kant, who had ridiculed the Christian dogma of the ‘Last Judgement at the End of Time’ and put forward his own concept of history as a purposeful, yet never-ending human progress towards a state of moral good and growing prosperity. In Hegel’s philosophy, nature and history were two sides of self-mediating spirit. Acting through nature, spirit unconsciously produced tribal and family relationships which grew into the state and began working its modes through history consciously. The reconciliation between nature and history, between the bourgeois and the citizen, would not end in an enclosed and frozen ontology but in freedom, as a living process of becoming in a ‘concrete totality’.
George Lukács , in The Young Hegel, saw Hegel’s explication of Absolute Knowledge as an idealist projection of the ‘End of History’ which amounted to its ‘self-annulment’. Hegel’s absolute knowledge involves an internalising of recollection as summation of the past, whereas Lukács rejected this as ‘something which is internal, which is nothing other than the supercession of the forms of objective reality so created and their reintegration into the subject.’
For Lukács, the dialectic of alienation and externalization defined Hegel’s analysis of the post-revolutionary bourgeois world but Hegel’s only ‘alternative’ was a utopian vision of a Napoleonic Germany’, ‘lacking in content’. Hegel’s ‘positive’ achievement was to have seen that,
‘The enlightenment, capitalism and the French Revolution formed the climax of the journey towards the abolition of every sort of natural immediacy and the realisation of “externalisation” [of human imaginative powers],in which “objective society” becomes the real substance “on behalf of the subject.” Only by estranging [alienating] itself can the subject recognise itself in theory and practice to be identical with substance’.
Lukács was opposed to the ‘idealist’ project of realising of a goal inherent in the subject, prefigured in its beginning. Instead Lukács saw the history-making spirit as the emerging ‘actual driving force, the motor of history’. In Lukács view, Hegel annuls the subject’s theoretical and practical objectivity, and blocks what would would otherwise be a smooth road via Feuerbach to Engelsian ‘dialectical materialism.’
Gillian Rose in Hegel Contra Sociology (1981) disagreed with Lukács’ pronouncement that ‘alienated spirit’ could be productively expressed as ‘externalisation’. Rather, alienated spirit was specific to the pre-capitalist world; it did not characterise capitalism. Surprisingly perhaps, many latter day Marxists who follow in Kojève’s footsteps, apply Hegel’s Lord-Bondsman dialectic – mark the name – to the issue of ‘recognition’ in modern-day class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.
According to Rose’s Hegelian-Marxist analysis, the newly-discovered moral autonomy in post-(French) revolutionary consciousness ‘misunderstands the conditioned law now prevalent, the accident of private possession formalised as property, to be an absolutely unconditioned law of freedom, which is found as an inexplicable fact of reason’. This abstraction of freedom is objective in serving the bourgeois order, which Hegel represents as the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’: ‘Spiritual’ because of the apparent harmony of universal and individual as expressed in political economy; ’animal’ because in reality the rule of abstract property relations serves the particular ends of individuals and not the whole society. That, according to Kojève, was something to look forward to in the Universal Homogeneous State of the European Union..
REFERENCES
Perry Anderson, Zones, pp. 315-16.
Kevin B Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism” (University of Illinois Press: 1995), pp. 12-15.
Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 186.
George Lukács, Young Hegel, part IV, section 4 (“Entäusserung (‘externalization’) as the central philosophical concept of The Phenomenology of Mind.”).
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press: 1980) 162-3.
GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, (Baillie trans), p. 808.
Heger Weslati, ‘Kojève’s Letter to Stalin’, Radical Philosophy, #184, Spring 2014