![\"History](\"https:\/\/standfirst-thecriticmag-production.imgix.net\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Starkey-pic-e1632755915641.jpg?q=75&auto=compress&w=1024&h=522&fm=default\")
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By David Black<\/p>\n
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, working at the Rand Corporation, wrote a policy paper for the US State Department entitled \u2018The End of History?\u2019<\/strong> Published in National Interest<\/em> 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<\/a> <\/em>(1992).<\/p>\n Fukuyama\u2019s thesis was that liberal democracy and its market economy was, to use Hegel\u2019s term, \u2018an idea whose time had come\u2019. Fukuyama argued that if there was to be any future for Civilisation, this was it – there was no alternative and it didn\u2019t matter what \u2018strange thoughts\u2019 might occur to those who still thought there might be one.<\/p>\n Fukuyama, 35 years later, knows that History didn\u2019t end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Resistance to (neo)liberal ideals has prevailed: amongst History\u2019s discontents as well as authoritarian regimes. In the latter case, he insists that \u2018illiberal\u2019 societies \u2013 particularly Russia and China \u2013 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:<\/p>\n \u2018Donald Trump is fundamentally a bully who wants to dominate everyone around him. Trying to placate him with concessions is a fool\u2019s 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\u2026What makes any European think that conceding Greenland will mollify Trump? He will simply come back for more, later\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Fukuyama hopes the neoliberal centrism of European Union leaders will prevail and overcome ethnonationalism.<\/p>\n One of Fukuyama\u2019s most important influences has been the philosophy of Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve. In May 1968 Koj\u00e8ve died in Brussels whilst negotiating with representatives of the European Economic Community in Brussels on behalf of the French government.<\/p>\n Koj\u00e8ve saw the failure of the fascist assault in World War Two as the final battle of the \u2018anti-Jacobin\u2019 wars. Hegel had prematurely projected the \u2018End of History\u2019 following Napoleon\u2019s victory at the Battle of Jena in 1807′; hailing it as a \u2018World-Historical Event\u2019 which saw the republican citizen-soldiers of France dealing a the fatal blow to the \u2018lordship and bondage\u2019 of feudalism. Koj\u00e8ve saw in the French Revolution the emergence of a new synthesis of war and industry in a \u2018universal homogeneous state\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n Until 1933, Russian-born Koj\u00e8ve 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\u2019s phenomenology of self-consciousness, published in 1947, Koj\u00e8ve suggested that modern society\u2019s rationalisation of nature was actualised by the dialectic of Desire<\/em> and Satisfaction<\/em> in a universal homogeneous state. Hegel\u2019s concept \u2018Absolute Knowledge\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Koj\u00e8ve regarded Stalin as a potential \u2018philosopher king\u2019 and even offered his services to the dictator as court philosophe<\/em>. Leo Strauss told Koj\u00e8ve 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. Koj\u00e8ve, 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. Koj\u00e8ve regarded Heidegger\u2019s attempt to become the philosopher king of Hitler\u2019s Nazi Revolution as a catastrophic miscalculation. Koj\u00e8ve read Heidegger\u2019s Being and Time<\/em> as a failed attempt to \u2018correct\u2019 Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em> 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n Although wars, revolutions and class conflict drive history, for Hegel the \u2018Cunning of Reason\u2019 ensured that the particular purposes of the individual could be made to serve the true Substance: the will of the \u2018World Spirit\u2019. Once the objective of the \u2018World Historical Individuals\u2019 is attained they \u2018fall off like empty husks from the kernel. They die early like Alexander, they are murdered like Caesar, transported to Saint Helena like Napoleon.\u2019 Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union imitated the universal-homogeneous state of Napoleon (\u2018who was an imitator of Caesar, who was also an imitator\u2019).<\/p>\n 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. Koj\u00e8ve 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 \u2018social charter\u2019 supported by both Communists and Catholics, then the USSR would lose the Cold War.<\/p>\n In 1999 Le Monde<\/em> revealed that from 1938 to 1968 Koj\u00e8ve had been working with Soviet secret intelligence, passing on information that might enlighten Stalin and his successors as to where \u2018Europe\u2019 at was really going. Enlightenment to what? one might ask – if not their own unviability.<\/p>\n The claim that Hegel\u2019s \u2018Absolute Idea\u2019 includes a notion of the \u2018End of History seems to have originated with Engels\u2019 essay, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy <\/em>(written post-Marx in 1886). Engels argued that the real \u2018absolute truth\u2019 to be discerned in the Hegelian dialectic was that it was philosophy, not history, which had come to an end. Hegel\u2019s achievement was to have \u2018unconsciously\u2019 shown the way to a \u2018real positive cognition of the world.\u2019<\/p>\n However, as Perry Anderson points out, Hegel did not actually use the term, \u2018End of history\u2019. Hegel\u2019s concept of universal history in owes much to Kant, who had ridiculed the Christian dogma of the \u2018Last Judgement at the End of Time\u2019 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\u2019s philosophy, nature and history were two sides of self-mediating spirit. Acting through nature<\/em>, spirit unconsciously <\/em>produced tribal and family relationships which grew into the state and began working its modes through history consciously<\/em>. 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 \u2018concrete totality\u2019.<\/p>\n George Luk\u00e1cs , in The Young Hegel<\/em>, saw Hegel\u2019s explication of Absolute Knowledge as an idealist projection of the \u2018End of History\u2019 which amounted to its \u2018self-annulment\u2019. <\/em>Hegel\u2019s absolute knowledge involves an internalising of recollection as summation of the past, whereas Luk\u00e1cs rejected this as \u2018something which is internal, which is nothing other than the supercession of the forms of objective reality so created and their reintegration into the subject.\u2019<\/p>\n For Luk\u00e1cs, the dialectic of alienation and externalization defined Hegel\u2019s analysis of the post-revolutionary bourgeois world but Hegel\u2019s only \u2018alternative\u2019 was a utopian vision of a Napoleonic Germany\u2019, \u2018lacking in content\u2019. Hegel\u2019s \u2018positive\u2019 achievement was to have seen that,<\/p>\n \u2018The 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 \u201cexternalisation\u201d [of human imaginative powers],in which \u201cobjective society\u201d becomes the real substance \u201con behalf of the subject.\u201d Only by estranging [alienating] itself can the subject recognise itself in theory and practice to be identical with substance\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Luk\u00e1cs was opposed to the \u2018idealist’ project of realising of a goal inherent in the subject, prefigured in its beginning. Instead Luk\u00e1cs saw the history-making spirit as the emerging \u2018actual driving force, the motor of history\u2019. In Luk\u00e1cs view, Hegel annuls the subject\u2019s theoretical and practical objectivity, and blocks what would would otherwise be a smooth road via Feuerbach to Engelsian \u2018dialectical materialism.’<\/p>\n Gillian Rose in Hegel Contra Sociology<\/em> (1981) disagreed with Luk\u00e1cs\u2019 pronouncement that \u2018alienated spirit\u2019 could be productively<\/em> expressed as \u2018externalisation\u2019. Rather, alienated spirit was specific to the pre-capitalist world; it did not<\/em> characterise capitalism. Surprisingly perhaps, many latter day Marxists who follow in Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s footsteps, apply Hegel\u2019s Lord-Bondsman dialectic – mark the name – to the issue of \u2018recognition\u2019 in modern-day class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.<\/p>\n According to Rose\u2019s Hegelian-Marxist analysis, the newly-discovered moral autonomy in post-(French) revolutionary consciousness \u2018misunderstands<\/em> 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\u2019. This abstraction of freedom is objective in serving the bourgeois<\/em> order, which Hegel represents as the \u2018spiritual animal kingdom\u2019: \u2018<\/em>Spiritual\u2019<\/strong> because of the apparent harmony of universal and individual as expressed in political economy; \u2019animal\u2019<\/strong> because in reality the rule of abstract property relations serves the particular ends of individuals and not<\/em> the whole society. That, according to Koj\u00e8ve, was something to look forward to in the Universal Homogeneous State of the European Union..<\/p>\n REFERENCES<\/strong><\/p>\n Perry Anderson, Zones,<\/em> pp. 315-16.<\/p>\n Kevin B Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism<\/em>\u201d (University of Illinois Press: 1995), pp. 12-15.<\/p>\n Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology<\/em>, p. 186.<\/p>\n George Luk\u00e1cs, Young Hegel<\/em>, part IV, section 4 (\u201cEnt\u00e4usserung<\/em> (\u2018externalization\u2019) as the central philosophical concept of The Phenomenology of Mind.\u201d).<\/em><\/p>\n Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel<\/em> (Cornell University Press: 1980) 162-3.<\/p>\n GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, (Baillie trans), p. 808.<\/em><\/p>\n Heger Weslati, \u2018<\/sup>Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s Letter to Stalin\u2019, <\/a> Radical Philosophy<\/em>, #184, Spring 2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By David Black In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, working at the Rand Corporation, wrote a policy paper for the US State Department entitled \u2018The End of History?\u2019 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 … Continue reading “History Never Ended”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,58],"tags":[149,121,148],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5807"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5810,"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5807\/revisions\/5810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebarbarismofpureculture.co.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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