Abstract
This latest book by Francis Fukuyama (2022) is significant in one way, and one way only: it shows not just how its defenders try to legitimize capitalism, but also how weak and unpersuasive the resulting case turns out to be. Because it is ‘under severe threat around the world today’, he announces that his object is to provide ‘a defence of classical liberalism’ (p. vii). The latter is equated by him with a 17th-century doctrine emphasizing the necessity of protecting individual freedoms by placing constitutional or legal constraints on state power. As well as limited government, classical liberalism is a moral project based on law, freedom and equal political rights, embodying values such as tolerance, progress and liberty of the individual; the latter consequently possesses the right to engage in free economic activity and own private property without state interference. 1
This defence rests centrally on the proposition that, despite these shortcomings, liberal democracy is in the end worth saving because it – and only it – is the political system that enables the masses to protect their interests via government, and thus accurately reflects any/all desires expressed by ‘those below’. Just as identity politics is regarded by Fukuyama as a leftist cultural ‘deviation’ from authentic classical liberalism, so he is equally adamant that neoliberalism is a right-wing economic and political deviation from the same core doctrine. Each ‘anomaly’ is seen by him as an alien departure from true liberal values, and as such is to be condemned. Discontent stems not from liberalism itself, therefore, but rather only from the way in which ‘sound liberal ideas’ have been misapplied in ways unconnected with the doctrine itself. 2 From this is drawn the conclusion that, as liberalism is essentially benign and still relevant, the object ‘is not to abandon liberalism as such, but to moderate it’.
This review essay consists of four sections, the first of which looks at what Fukuyama understands by classical liberalism, while the second and third examine how Fukuyama characterizes both neoliberalism and identity politics. His interpretation of liberal ideology about class, the industrial reserve, economic growth and agrarian reform is considered in the fourth section.
Floreat Classical Liberalism?
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent disintegration of actually existing socialism in the USSR and elsewhere, many academic commentators euphorically proclaimed that, as the Cold War had ended in the victory of capitalist democracy, the world would as a result become more peaceful. 3 Fukuyama was in the vanguard of those making this argument. Having announced in a 1989 essay to much public fanfare (and media acclaim) that history had come to an end, due to the defeat of communism by liberalism, democracy and capitalism, he concluded that henceforth the absence of conflict between the socialist East and the capitalist West meant that there would be no more history to discuss. Such a view was then enshrined in a 1990s book, advancing the same triumphalist argument that, because the demise of the Soviet Union in his view consecrated the worldwide victory of liberal democracy, history-as-process had itself come to an end. 4 Events since then have, somewhat predictably, underlined the extent to which this prognosis was not merely over-optimistic, but much rather hugely mistaken.
Where Fukuyama is concerned, it is impossible not to admire his chutzpah. 5 His initial position was unambiguous: capitalism had won, and peace and happiness would now descend upon a world made safe for benign rule by capital, signalling that henceforth life across the globe would be a conflict-free one marked by sweetness and light. Having been spectacularly wrong-footed by all that has happened since, in almost everything written subsequently Fukuyama has attempted – unsuccessfully – to defend this original 1989 view while asserting the worth and desirability of liberal democracy. 6 Announcing (p. xi) that ‘I do not intend this book to be a history of liberal thought’, Fukuyama signals a wish to avoid engaging with internal contradictions, which leaves his analysis open to unfavourable comparison with other theoretical approaches to the same political ideology. Hence the privileging by him of individualism as an epistemologically core element of classical liberalism, to the extent of acting as its cheerleader, is not a view shared by earlier writers on the subject who, although sympathetic to the political aims of doctrine, were nevertheless far more aware of its insurmountable political contradictions and deficiencies. 7
Lacking any sense of contradiction, the case made by Fukuyama is littered with instances of unacknowledged or unresolved conflict, an aporia which requires, as evidence of irreconcilability mounts up, the adoption of two contrasting arguments. On the one hand, there are ever-more strident assertions on the lines that ‘the basic doctrine is correct’ (pp. xii, 12, 24, 31, 45, 76, 98, 150), while on the other, more and more issues are decanted into a residual category labelled ‘anomaly’, ‘shortcomings’, ‘extreme’/’untoward’ departures and/or ‘deviations’ from the liberal norm. This is compounded by a somewhat partial historical trajectory presented in support of the case being made. In the end the case on behalf of liberal doctrine amounts to nothing more than the hope that people should try to be nice to one another, a platitude which fails to indicate why in certain situations this is not possible.
Even in terms of the definition as envisaged by Fukuyama, the core elements informing classical liberalism admit of no contradiction, despite the obvious presence of the latter, not least because of a failure to see the systemic link between apparently disparate components/issues/processes. As a political doctrine, classical liberalism boils down to the autonomy of the individual to do more or less what she or he likes, both culturally (religious belief, practicing traditional customs) and economically (market transactions, property ownership), regardless of what the state might want to do in terms of policy. Thus a government in a Third World nation with a popular mandate to carry out an agrarian reform programme that entails land expropriation and its redistribution in different tenure forms (cooperatives, collective farms) would in effect constitute a negation of the very autonomy enjoyed by those whose existing property rights were affected.
I Am a Nice Shark. . .
Ironically, championing the classical principles of liberalism in this fashion cannot but end up on the same epistemological terrain as neoliberalism, protests to the contrary notwithstanding. Predictably, Fukuyama (p. 150) concludes by reasserting the primacy of individual rights, opposed by him to cultural rights (=postmodernism), not the collective rights based on class. Endorsing the autonomy of the choice-making individual engaged in market transactions because in his view it cannot be changed leads Fukuyama directly into the embrace of neoliberalism, which similarly justifies flexibility (=restructuring + cheap labour-power + industrial reserve army) and labour mobility (open-door immigration, yet more labour market competition) on the grounds that it is impossible to ‘buck the market’. His dilemma is clear and involves legerdemain akin to trying to explain the lifecycle of a shark without reference to the sharpness of its teeth, its feeding habits or the impact of its predatory nature on other creatures in the sea. The latter aspects are instead presented merely as ‘anomalies’, deviations from the true norm which, it is claimed, constitutes the essence of being-a-shark. 8
Where economic ideology is concerned, therefore, Fukuyama (pp. 17, 19) accepts that deregulation and privatization informing the laissez-faire policies adopted throughout Western capitalist nations from the 1980s onwards meant that ‘one of the critical domains in which liberal ideas were taken to extremes lay in economic thought, where liberalism evolved into what has been labelled “neoliberalism”’. Despite the latter combining principles that are central to classical liberalism – the right to economic autonomy, limits placed on government – in his opinion (p. ix) the doctrine itself is unjustly blamed for ‘the inequalities of capitalism’. Such a contention – decoupling classical liberalism and its neoliberal variant – is counterposed by him to the opposite view: namely, that neoliberalism is neither an ‘anomaly’, an ‘excrescence’, nor a negation of doctrine itself, but much rather its authentic systemic realization, the economic actualization of the dynamic that is classical liberalism. 9 Against this, Fukuyama simply asserts – unpersuasively – that such critiques ‘fail to hit the target, and amount to a charge of guilt by association’. That neoliberalism has fuelled the rise not just of oligarchs and tax havens but also of populism is for him (p. 29) a deviation from what he presents as the classical liberalism. 10 All these negative processes or phenomena are seen as unconnected with what for him is the virtuous core of liberal doctrine.
Whether he likes it or not, what Fukuyama sanctifies as classical liberalism, a doctrine he wishes to recuperate, is based on the very principles that also underwrite laissez-faire ideology which – in the form of neoliberal economic theory – he insists is an ‘anomaly’, a ‘deviation’ from the essence of this same political doctrine. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he has difficulty in preventing his inner neocon from poking through the liberal carapace, the resulting paean to the virtues of neoliberalism in effect undermining the attempt to decouple it from classical liberalism. That Fukuyama still adheres to the view that neoliberalism is economically positive is evident from numerous examples, among them the following claims: ‘[t]he Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal revolution was grounded in, and solved, some real problems’ (pp. 20–21); ‘[i]n the United States and other developed countries, deregulation and privatization had beneficial effects’ (p. 22); UK nationalized industries ‘were more efficiently run by private operators’ (p. 22); the ‘basic doctrine [of neoliberalism] is correct’ (p. 24); although there were ‘problems with neoliberal policies . . . this does not make it wrong’ (p. 31); and ‘[t]he problem with neoliberalism in economics was. . . not that it began from false premises [since] its premises were often correct’ (p. 45). 11
Both the fact and the closeness of a link between classical liberal doctrine and its neoliberal variant also emerge from a source not considered by Fukuyama: the French liberal school associated with the ideas of Turgot, Saint-Simon and Dunoyer. 12 Formulated between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, their liberal political economy aimed laissez-faire theory at a landowning class which controlled both trade and labour by means of feudal legislation and monopoly over State power. It was to oppose this that the freedom of the population to sell their commodities – goods and labour-power alike – was endorsed. However, their struggle was confined to one against feudalism, so as to promote capitalism: it has underwritten laissez-faire economic theory ever since and is based on the view that capitalism is a positive good, an end in and of itself. 13
Much like Fukuyama himself, this branch of French liberal political economy maintained that in a ‘pure’ industrial capitalism a harmony of interests would prevail between capital and labour. Its object was the attainment of ‘pure’ industrial capitalism, to be realized by a peaceful transition to a laissez-faire economic system, in which producer and free labour compete in perfect market conditions. Once industrial capitalism in its most ‘pure’ systemic form – laissez-faire, in other words – is established, struggle ceases because the State, the principal locus of conflict and exploitation, is no longer under the control of feudal landowners. Significantly, this element of freedom was not confined to workers of a particular nationality, since the right of free sale of labour-power extended also to foreigners coming to or residing in the nation concerned. Established thereby was the principle underwriting the formation and operation – on a global scale, eventually – of the industrial reserve.
A Progressive Left?
Identity politics is viewed by Fukuyama as the second of the two main threats faced by classical liberalism, one that is cultural in nature and comes from the left of the political spectrum. The danger as he sees it (p. 17) concerns the erosion by ‘left-wing progressive movements’ of ‘tolerance’ for ‘other life-style choices and values’, which not only offends against a principle (autonomy) that is at the heart of classical liberalism but also fuels the backlash from the populist right that similarly constitutes a menace to the doctrine. According to Fukuyama (pp. 85, 95), therefore, when combined with deconstruction, ‘[t]he critical theories attached to identity politics in the United States [that extend] from structuralism through post-structuralism [to] postmodernism’ were as a result ‘carried to unsupportable extremes’. Among those indicted (pp. 88, 89) for this ‘leftist’ postmodern deviation are Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. Decoupling liberalism and identity politics, Fukuyama (p. 2) emphasizes that, contrary to the ‘extreme’ views held by these exponents of postmodernism, ‘liberalism differed sharply from nationalist or religiously based doctrines that explicitly limited rights to certain races, ethnicities, genders, confessions, castes or status groups’. A consequence of endorsing identity politics, complains Fukuyama, is that ‘many of the arguments pioneered by the progressive left have drifted over to the populist right’.
However, criticism both of postmodern identity politics and of ‘religiously based doctrines’ does not prevent him from endorsing the same core elements – patriotism, cultural tradition, religious belief – belonging to their discourses. 14 Conceding both that ‘[i]dentity politics makes liberalism difficult to implement’ (p. 65), and that ‘[n]ational identity represent obvious dangers’, Fukuyama (pp. 129, 135) laments the ‘frequent inability’ on the part of liberal societies ‘to present a positive vision of national identity to their citizens’. In keeping with his contradictory views about neoliberalism, his conclusion (p. 98) is ‘not that identity politics is wrong, but that we must return to a liberal interpretation of its aims’. Where identity politics is concerned, Fukuyama seems to understand neither its origin, its positioning on the left/right ideological spectrum, nor the nature of the dynamic governing its reproduction.
Disregarding the way the meaning of non-class identity is formulated, reproduced, why and by whom, identity politics is reduced by Fukuyama (p. 65) to innate psychologistic aspects, an approach which overlooks the central role of capital in fostering ethnic/national differences among its workers, a long-established divide-and-rule tactic used by employers in the class struggle. Ignored thereby is the complicity of liberalism in this process: insofar as capitalism is in ideological terms sponsored and validated by liberalism, the latter cannot be regarded as external to such a practice. This involvement in the capitalist project underlines the participation of classical liberalism in the rise and consolidation of identity politics, suggesting the latter is not quite the excrescence or ‘anomaly’ he would have us believe.
Fukuyama also misjudges the location of identity politics on the ideological spectrum, and like others adheres to the mistaken view that postmodernism is a leftist theory. Observing the support by some ‘leftists’ for the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the Catholic legal theorist who justified the seizure of power by the Nazis, Fukuyama (p. 82) misinterprets this as evidence that the left has turned rightwards, whereas postmodernism was never leftist in the first place. Contrary to what he imagines, therefore, it was because they were not leftist that exponents of postmodern theory supported a rightist thinker: the reason that some postmodernists endorse Schmitt is precisely because they, too, are part of the populist right. 15
As problematic are the origins of identity politics as seen by Fukuyama: affixed by him to the 1960s United States, when ‘it got its start on the left’ (pp. 65–66) and attributed by him to Rawlsian ‘justification for the liberation of the inner self’ (pp. 47, 58, 62). This is incorrect. Within the United States itself, it was prefigured not only by the Ku Klux Klan (as Fukuyama accepts) but also by the plethora of hyphenated selfhoods (Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc.) that constitute the ‘melting-pot’ approach to assimilation. Outside the United States, earlier forms of identity politics have much deeper roots, going back at least to the Romantic reaction against the 1789 Revolution in France, and the privileging of culture, nationalism and tradition over notions of modernity/progress/development emerging from political economy. Many of the elements comprising the discourse of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism – among them the cultural turn, peasant essentialism, subaltern studies, everyday forms of resistance, multitudes and proletarian multiverse – emerged from within development studies as a reaction against Marxist interpretations of economic growth in Third World countries. All of which suggests that, pace Fukuyama, identity politics is not merely not leftist but much rather anti-leftist.
Political Corrections, Problematic History
As noted above, the challenge Fukuyama makes against the case that liberalism and neoliberalism are inextricably linked – namely, that the latter is the inevitable result of the former – rests centrally on the claim that over the late 19th and 20th centuries, working-class incomes rose while inequality declined, historical developments achieved only because ‘advanced liberal societies’ enacted social protections and labour rights. His twofold contention is, first, such progress demonstrates that capitalism and liberalism have in the past ensured ‘political corrections’ to any inequalities wrought by market economies; and second, ‘[t]here is no reason to think that such corrections cannot occur within a broadly liberal political framework in the future’. 16 In effect, Fukuyama ignores a whole range of objections to this weak defence of liberalism as a timelessly progressive doctrine.
To begin with, improvements in the position of the working class were a result not of liberalism but rather of class struggle conducted in opposition to capital and its state by organized labour, struggle which the liberal democratic state both opposed and outlawed. The argument that liberalism depends on democracy to regulate the market ignores the way in which the ‘democratic process’ actually functions: that is, how ‘state capture’ leads to policy and legislation which are frequently geared to the interests not of the working class but rather of those who are powerful and wealthy. 17 Similarly overlooked, therefore, is the Panglossian view that, when it is combined with democracy, liberalism can put in place ‘political corrections’ to offset the onward march of neoliberalism. This is a chimera, as is his conclusion that ‘a broadly liberal framework’ will in future effect such ‘corrections’.
Because he has no notion of class, let alone of its formation, reproduction and the fact of together with the reasons for the kind of struggles this generates, Fukuyama lacks also any notion of contradiction licencing a zero-sum process. Hence the realization of ‘autonomy’ by one individual or class is usually effected at the expense of the ‘autonomy’ enjoyed or desired by another. It is precisely because he has no sense of contradiction that Fukuyama is able to regard an all-embracing concept of ‘autonomy’ as a core element of liberal doctrine. Missing from his approach is the crucial process of struggle, its causes and effects, involving not just capital and labour but also that occurring within the ranks of each. The latter takes the dual form: market competition between producers, and that between workers and migrants of different nationalities/ethnicities, a rivalry for jobs played upon by employers.
Not denied is the fact that neoliberals support ‘open immigration’, and that restructuring whereby permanent/well-paid labour in metropolitan capitalist nations is displaced by cheaper foreign workers, as a consequence of either outsourcing the jobs themselves or insourcing migrant labour. Fukuyama admits (pp. 24–25, 37) that immigration results in job losses among those already in work, but nevertheless persists in his view that such restructuring is positive, in that it ‘would lead to greater efficiency’ and could be remedied simply by job retraining and welfare. 18 Ignored thereby is that in contexts where employers are able to draw on an industrial reserve army that is global in scope, as is now the case, intensified labour market competition is a zero-sum process: it means that liberal ‘autonomy’ is either that of the local worker (who retains his or her employment) or that of the immigrant (who supplants the local), but not both. 19 In these circumstances, plebeian concern about actual/potential job losses due to enhanced labour market competition quickly translates into political support for a populism undertaking to prohibit its source, ‘open immigration’. 20
In spite of the claim (p. xii) that the ‘durability [of liberalism] reflects the fact that it has practical, moral, and economic justifications that appeal to many people’, it is clear that a valid role for liberalism as sponsor of ‘economic growth and modernization’ (pp. 10–11) applies only to the beginning of the accumulation process. Initially, therefore, the doctrine was mobilized in a progressive manner: the political struggle for accumulation, which entailed opposing feudal monopolies that posed obstacles to further development. Once capitalism had established itself as a system, however, the ideological target of liberalism changed: instead, the aim was now to resist a socialist transition, by preventing or frustrating political organization designed to transcend bourgeois democracy. In short, liberalism was no longer progressive, being interested in nothing but the survival of capitalism and its form of private property. So promotion of economic growth and modernization is historically specific, not an intrinsic aspect of liberal doctrine.
As problematic in terms of history is the partial account by Fukuyama (pp. 32–33) of the way agrarian societies were transformed in the post-1945 era and the heroic role allocated by him to the United States in promoting land reform programmes throughout the Third World. In Asia, therefore, where ‘under American tutelage’ large estates were broken up, ‘redistribution of property has been widely credited as a basis for their subsequent economic success, not to speak of their ability to turn into successful liberal democracies’. This conveys the impression that the United States has been at the forefront of progressive land reform programmes (Korea, Taiwan, Japan) that led to economic growth and democracy, a triumph also for capitalism and liberal doctrine. Not mentioned, however, are instances – Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973 – where the United States helped oust democratically elected governments with a mandate to carry out agrarian reforms, ushering in instead anti-democratic dictatorships pledged to defend large estates by preventing such programmes of land redistribution from being carried out.
Conclusion
Just as the mythological beings Scylla and Charybdis were transformed into frightful monsters that preyed on passing seafarers, so liberalism turns into neoliberalism while its form of agency turns into identity politics, licencing a slide into populism. The latter sort of transformation, however, is one that is challenged and denied by Fukuyama. Legitimizing a hitherto questionable phenomenon frequently entails deflecting criticism by arguing that a more benign alternative exists, and can be supported politically. A ‘solution’ is found internally, one that does not require the transcendence of the phenomenon in question.
Hence, the way Fukuyama seeks to justify the case for liberalism follows what is now an increasingly familiar pattern, both inside and outside academia. Examples of this procedure within the social sciences includes the defence of capitalism that contends it is an eternal (= non-transcendent) systemic form stretching from ancient society to the present. Pursuing the same objective with regard to liberalism, Fukuyama separates off what he claims is a core set of characteristics which currently are no longer adhered to, in effect splitting the concept between ‘authentic’/positive and ‘inauthentic’/negative variants, enabling claims that a return to the former is a solution to the problems inherent in the latter. In keeping with this are claims that as a ‘nice’ variant exists, consequently the solution to its ‘nasty’ variant (neoliberalism) is a return to this alternative version.
Similarly, in the case of populism its defenders claim that here, too, there are two variants, one ‘nasty’ (=authoritarian) and the other ‘nice’ (=progressive), and that the latter could – and should – be supported politically. Much the same kind of practice surfaces in the debates both about unfree labour and about the industrial reserve. By interpreting the latter as an issue to be addressed only or largely in terms of citizenship/assimilation, the focus of this approach remains on cultural ‘values’, not on the link between accumulation, enhanced labour market competition and the industrial reserve. Those who maintain that unfree production relations can and will be eradicated by market forces make an analogous claim. Such positions shy away from questioning the accumulation process itself, which as a result is left intact. Just as these sorts of argument try to salvage capitalism by decoupling it from any and every negative systemic development (anomaly, deviation), so too does that of Fukuyama, under the guise of recuperating an ‘authentic’ and ‘benign’ variant of liberal doctrine.
Fukuyama belongs to that category of academic which, no matter how wrong their prognoses turn out to be, nor how often such major errors of judgement are made, nevertheless manage to ascend virtually unhindered the career ladder in the Western university system (senior posts, honorary degrees, institutional recognition, publications, media attention). It is a large category, one that extends from senior components of the academic structure, like Hobsbawm and Giddens, to a disparate agglomeration of more junior members lower down in the same hierarchy who compose the cheerleaders, providing support for those at the top. Unsurprisingly, an entirely predictable effect of this link between those occupying different positions in the hierarchy is a multiplier effect generating and reproducing egregiously implausible arguments. Difficult to avoid is the baleful conclusion that the institutional prominence of those in this category is in some degree connected with the ideological acceptability of their views to capital and its political representatives in the state apparatus.
