[Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Francis Fukuyama: The sober compromise
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Francis Fukuyama: The sober compromise
The Times Literary Supplement, 96.5.10
http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2086513&window_type=print
AFTER LIBERALISM. Immanuel Wallerstein. 277pp. New York: New Press.
Paperback, $14.95. - 1 56584 304 5.
ENLIGHTENMENT'S WAKE. John Gray.
Politics and culture at the close of the modern age. 203pp. Routledge.
£19.99.- 0 415 12475 1.
LIBERALISM AND COMMUNITY. Steven Kautz. 232pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press; distributed in the UK by Plymbridge. £23.50.- 0 8014
2979 X
Seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when serious systematic
challenges to liberal democracy are few and far between, there has
been a flood of writing on the death of liberalism as a political
system. No one, for some reason, feels good about the post-Cold War
world, and many are ready to proclaim a transition into something much
worse than the world we knew before 1989. That this is the case is
puzzling, and why it is so may teach us something about the
present-day discontents with liberal societies.
Immanuel Wallerstein rose to academic prominence by projecting the
dependencia theory of the 1960s back in time to what he called "the
long sixteenth century", creating in the process the academic
sub-discipline of "world systems theory" that has lived on in academic
history departments long after anyone in Latin America took
dependencia theory seriously. Unlike most of Wallerstein's previous
works, After Liberalism is an exercise in futurology. It is based,
none the less, on his broader theories concerning the capitalist
"world system" which developed about 400 years ago, a piece of
meta-historical theorizing on a very grand scale.
Wallerstein pulls off the remarkable feat of arguing that the collapse
of Communism in 198991 was actually the collapse of liberalism. He
does this by asserting that the three major ideologies of the era
following the French Revolution conservatism, liberalism and socialism
were in fact not distinct doctrines, but rather variants of the same
basic theme. Leninism was not the opposite of Wilsonianism, but its
avatar, a form of liberal-socialism that bought off the "dangerous
classes" by promising their inclusion at the table of technological
modernization. The collapse of existing Communist regimes after 1989
was, in fact, a huge defeat for liberalism, because it ended the
illusion that liberalism could exist in anything but a nakedly
exploitative form.
Wallerstein places the coming decades in the context of several
historical cycles which nest inside one another, like a Russian
matryoshka doll. The shortest is the Kondratieff cycle, whose "A"
phase is characterized by a burst of productivity in the capitalist
"core" regions, leading to the hegemony of one or another core
capitalist power; the "B" phase, following after a generation or so,
is one of hegemonic decline, as the technologies fuelling the "A"
phase diffuse to other power centres. These Kondratieff cycles are
contained within a larger cycle of liberal ideological hegemony, which
according to Wallerstein extended over the two centuries from 1789 to
1989. And the final cycle is that of the capitalist world-system as a
whole, which began in the "long sixteenth century" and will end,
eventually, some time in the second half of the twenty-first century.
Encapsulating futurology in this kind of meta-historical theorizing
makes it virtually invulnerable to refutation on the basis of
empirical evidence. For example, Wallerstein makes a great deal of the
fact that the early post-war period of American hegemony ended in the
1970s, with the catching up of Japan and Germany and the various
economic crises of that decade. However, economic growth resumed in
the United States and many other parts of the world particularly Asia
outside Japan by the late 1980s, and in the 1990s, the United States
has steadily increased its lead over Japan and Europe, primarily as a
result of its mastery of information-related technologies. This
presents no problem to Wallerstein's view we may either be in an
extended "B" phase of decline or at the beginning of a new "A" phase
powered by new technological innovations that could extend the period
of world economic growth well into the middle of the twenty-first
century. Wallerstein is sure, however, that the capitalist
world-system will collapse from its own internal contradictions when
this possible new "A" phase exhausts itself in the second half of the
next century long after Wallerstein and anyone who is likely to have
read his books will have disappeared from view.
In the midst of this grand theorizing, Wallerstein manages to blow up
events from his personal life into matters of world-historical
importance. He notes, at one point, how bracing it was to have been
among the student radicals who took over Columbia University in 1968.
Virtually every chapter in this highly repetitive book refers to the
"world revolution of 1968", whose significance the author puts on a
par with the revolutions of 1848 indeed, they are of greater
significance, since they revealed the bankruptcy of "liberal
socialism" (ie, Communism) and led directly to the events of 1989.
Wallerstein points to several real problems in the contemporary world:
the ecological sustainability of economic growth, the severe strains
that migration from the Third World will put on industrialized
societies, and the threat to stability posed by "antisystematic"
states on the periphery like Iran or Iraq, states that may be armed
with nuclear weapons. Like many other observers, he worries about the
tribalisms of a newly unstable post-Cold War world. But he wraps these
real concerns in a neo-Marxist package that suggests that they are
only the result of the 500-year-old "capitalist world system", and
that there is another system out there that can produce wealth without
exploitation, without inequality, without authority, without racial
and ethnic animosity, without environmental damage. For him, no wealth
can be created in the capitalist world-system without the exploitation
of other human beings, as if Asia's phenomenal rise over the past two
generations could only have come at the expense of Africa, or as if
the $100 billion or so of new value created by the American software
industry since 1990 was wrung from the sweat of poor inner-city
blacks.
John Gray, like Immanuel Wallerstein, declares that liberalism has
exhausted itself and that the historical period of liberal hegemony
ended with the end of the Cold War. His intellectual journey to this
point starts from the Right rather than the Left, and raises much more
serious issues than does Wallerstein's. But in the end, it is no more
plausible than the various Kondratieff cycles of world-systems theory.
Gray's argument is a familiar one, which was made much earlier by
conservatives like Burke and de Maistre. The liberal Enlightenment
project was based on the hope that religion, traditions, culture all
of the organic glue of pre-liberal societies could be replaced by a
political order based on universal reason, and that social order could
emerge out of the interactions of rational, self-interested
individuals. This hasn't worked: Neo-liberalism itself can now be seen
as a self-undermining political project. Its political success
depended upon cultural traditions, and constellations of interests,
that neo-liberal policy was bound to dissipate. In adopting the
neo-liberal programme of a permanent institutional revolution as their
own, contemporary conservatives not only have abandoned any claim to
be guardians of continuity in national life; they have at the same
time linked their fortunes to a political project which all the
evidence suggests is self-defeating.
Gray begins with the reasonable premiss that societies are not simply
based on a formal, mechanical social contract, but have cultural
underpinnings; both self-government and markets will not work properly
if self-interest is not leavened with virtue, or if rights are not
balanced by duties. Liberal politics has the tendency, however, to
slide ineluctably from tolerant pluralism to a militantly agnostic
relativism. The best chapter in Enlightenment's Wake argues that
toleration of cultural difference is not the same thing as the
assertion of the inherent equality of all cultures. This is, indeed,
the downfall of current multiculturalist policies in Britain and the
United States, which end up being hostile to the dominant national
cultural identity. Instead of learning about George Washington,
American children are taught about Indian women peace activists in
Guatemala or other such stories intended to advance the ideological
agenda of particular groups. And now, according to Gray, Western
liberalism is spreading this nihilistic doctrine throughout the globe
through its claims to universalism.
Gray's real hostility, however, is reserved for the capitalist
economy. From being a strong supporter of Thatcherism in the early
1980s, he now argues that the free market is the enemy of any form of
settled community and is responsible for the decline of institutions
across the board. "Shock therapy" and radical economic liberalization
have undone the nations of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
which are, as a result, turning towards nationalism rather than
democracy. But the consequences of free markets are equally
devastating for long-time democracies as well, and nowhere more so
than in the United States, where both marketization and social decay
are the most advanced of any industrialized nation. Globalization,
GATT and the extension of the market to the remotest corners of the
world are projects "as radically hubristic" as Soviet Communism, and
even more threatening to the authentic cultural life lived by
non-Western societies.
Gray begins with a series of reasonable premisses, for example, that
contracts and rational self-interest cannot fully replace cultural
norms and moral reciprocity in liberal societies. But he jumps from
criticism of Western rationalism on the grounds that it cannot defend
itself from relativism, to a weird Heideggerian embrace of that
relativism. The liberal, rationalist tradition springing from the
Enlightenment is not a noble experiment that sadly failed, but was
wrong from the start. On the book's last page, he wagers that "another
mode of thinking found in some varieties of poetry and mysticism, for
example, can assert against the domination of the forms of thought
[ie, rationalism] privileged by both science and philosophy in Western
cultures". What is important is to have a culture any culture, it
seems, as long as it is authentic and not tainted by Western
rationalism and self-doubt. These cultures are not the "kinder,
gentler" voluntary communities posited by communitarians; in many
cases, they are the ascriptive national and ethnic identities into
which many of the world's peoples divide themselves. In relation to
them, the liberal West is deservedly in decline; what Westerners need
to recognize is the "need to share the earth with radically different
cultures".
Like many contemporary critics of liberalism, Gray takes aim not at
the actual liberal theory underlying contemporary societies, but a
caricature of that theory, based in equal parts on John Rawls and
modern neoclassical economics. By his account, liberal societies are
built from isolated, atomized individuals who choose to enter civil
society out of rational calculation, either to obtain justice or to
advance their material well-being. If Gray had looked beyond Rawls and
come to terms with the classical liberal philosophical tradition,
including Locke, the American Founders, Adam Smith and Tocqueville, he
would have had to acknowledge its awareness of modernity's necessary
cultural underpinnings.
Steven Kautz's Liberalism and Community is a useful antidote to this
sterile post-Rawlsian debate. Kautz is fully aware of the "empty hole"
at the heart of liberal societies: the fact that they encompass no
overarching view of the human good, and therefore will never
completely satisfy human ends. Liberalism came into being out of a
sober recognition that there could be no ultimate agreement on human
ends, and particularly no agreement on the nature of distributive
justice. This is the fundamental problem at the heart of Rawls's
Theory of Justice, since it assumes an egalitarian vision of
distributive justice arising out of the "original position", without
recognizing that liberal societies are in fact compromises between the
few who are proponents of liberty and the many who are proponents of
democracy. Classical liberalism was never about happiness, but rather
about lowering the aim of politics to achieve peace and prosperity.
The latter were the conditions for the pursuit of happiness, an
endeavour that would have to take place outside the realm of politics.
It is a fantasy to think that pre-liberal societies with strong
cultures were some kind of moral paradise. Liberalism got its start in
Wallerstein's "long sixteenth century", after all, because various
sects of Protestants and Catholics spent the better part of that
period slaughtering each other over questions related to final ends.
Today, ethnicity has replaced religion as the chief cement of moral
community in many parts of the world. The non-urbanized Serbs of
Bosnia and Croatia today constitute a rather authentic cultural
community, unparalysed by the atomizing acid of Western
rational-self-doubt, and it's not a very pretty picture.
There is indeed a great deal to be unhappy about in contemporary
liberal societies. As Gray does not tire of reminding us, family life
has all but broken down in many parts of America; streets are not
safe, and American society keeps 1 per cent of its adult population
behind bars. The problem that many recent "communitarian" thinkers,
including Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Jean Betthke Elsthain and
others, have been struggling with, is how to protect group life and
the moral and social capital it entails, in the context of a broadly
liberal society. Gray dismisses this school as "barely intelligible in
any other context than that of their native America", but he needs to
pay more attention.
Gray doesn't take voluntary community seriously as an alternative to
atomistic individualism. It is true that many of the real-world groups
into which societies organize themselves are based on ascriptive
factors like race, ethnicity, religious heritage and the like. This
does not mean, however, that all forms of group life have to be based
on irrational loyalties and non-voluntary attachments. The vast
majority of the social groups making up the civil societies of
contemporary developed democracies are voluntary, and many indeed find
their origins in the capitalist market-place.
No one would deny that contemporary globalization poses a threat to
the rootedness on which community life depends. But capitalism has
been churning social relations for many generations now, and not only
has it found a way of co-existing quite happily with community life,
but the market was and continues to be responsible for a great deal of
the socialization that is required to turn isolated individuals into
members of organic communities. It was the capitalist market that
disciplined peasants to the rhythms of industrial life, that created
demands for universal education, that structured the professions and
trade unions, and ultimately turned passive political objects into
citizens on a grand scale. Many of today's most effective corporations
are not those that dissolve the bonds of moral community, but those
that build on man's natural sociability.
Recognition that modern societies have necessary cultural
underpinnings does not mean that we have to abandon reason or our
powers of discrimination between healthy and pathological forms of
attachment. Take the example of national identity. Gray argues, quite
correctly, that nations are more than the sum of their political
institutions; they also have shared cultures: "In the British case,
vague but still powerful notions of fair play and give-and-take, of
the necessity of compromise and of not imposing private convictions on
others, are elements in what is left of the common culture, and they
are essential if a liberal civil society is to survive in Britain."
Yet one of the appealing features of British culture is that it has
been relatively open to outsiders, and not inevitably based on blood
or ethnicity. Certainly it is a virtue of French nationality that
Leopold Senghor could be admitted to the Academie Francaise, an event
scarcely conceivable in a more racialist culture like that of Germany.
There is, then, a hierarchy of cultural forms dictated by rules of
reason; Gray would presumably not be happy if British culture were
replaced by a Pakistani or Jamaican sense of national identity, simply
for the sake of having a strong culture.
While Kautz's defence of the classical liberal tradition is welcome
and refreshing, he needs to think carefully where exactly the
boundaries between rational and irrational community are to be drawn
in contemporary societies. For while classical liberalism is far more
open to cultural considerations than its detractors suggest, there are
a whole series of urgent questions where it provides relatively little
guidance. How to define citizenship, the concessions that can be made
to linguistic minorities in multi-ethnic societies, the elements of
national culture that can be properly taught in schools, what forms of
family life the law ought to legitimate these are the questions for
which classical liberalism either has no answers, or where the answers
are unsatisfactory. Take, for example, the family. Classical liberal
theorists took family life for granted, because its forms were
embedded in the cultures in which they lived; they could scarcely have
imagined its breaking down to the extent it has in contemporary
America. It is not surprising then that communitarians like Mary Ann
Glendon or Jean Elshtain have had to look beyond liberalism in order
to justify the family.
At one point, John Gray takes a swipe at Leo Strauss, relegating him
to one of those strands of thought understandable only in a
provincially American context. Leaving aside the fact that Strauss's
intellectual roots lay with Continental thinkers like Hermann Cohen
and Edmund Husserl, and that his writings were never kindly received
in the empiricist, Anglo-Saxon world where he eventually made his
physical home, his primary preoccupation should be familiar to Gray.
For Strauss, the central issue of our time was the so-called "crisis
of modernity", the fact that Nietzsche and Heidegger had knocked the
intellectual underpinnings away from Enlightenment rationalism. This
concern with liberalism's intellectual nakedness is what drew him to
that other great Continental European thinker of the mid-century,
Alexandre Koj ve. Allan Bloom, Strauss's student, understood long
before Gray the tendency of liberal tolerance to degenerate into
relativism. Over the course of their lifetimes, these thinkers brought
their considerable talents to bear trying to wrestle with this problem
because it seemed to them critical to defend, on a philosophical
level, the rational, decent, tolerant way of life created in Western
societies. John Gray, dimly perceiving this same problem, has simply
surrendered pre-emptively at the first sound of gunfire.
Francis Fukuyama's most recent book is Trust, 1995.
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