Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis
Fukuyama review – a defence of liberalism… from a former neocon
In this slim, elegant book, the author of The End of
History outlines with crystalline precision why the liberal spirit, for all its
qualities, cannot grow complacent
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Andrew
Anthony
Tue 8 Mar
2022 07.00 GMT
I read this
book, which is a thoughtful critique but ultimately a stalwart defence of
liberalism, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, and it felt urgent and
timely. Vladimir Putin, as Francis Fukuyama reminds us, has declared liberal
democracy “obsolete”. His is not an uncommon opinion, even in liberal
democracies. Thirty years ago, following the inglorious collapse of the Soviet Union
and the Warsaw Pact, Fukuyama gained international recognition for his book
entitled The End of History and the Last Man. It argued that liberal democracy
was essentially “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”.
As events
such as 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq wars and the 2008 financial crisis took their
toll on liberalism’s self-confidence, Fukuyama’s work was denounced as the
height of Hegelian hubris. He was seen as a naive believer in the inevitability
of a western-defined idea of progress, and as someone who was blind to liberal
democracy’s failings.
In some
respects, the criticisms were unfair, or at least aimed at arguments he never
made. But there seems little doubt that Fukuyama has had to eat rather a lot of
humble pie. As he writes: “It’s clear liberalism has been in retreat in recent
years.”
In that
time, Fukuyama has backed away from the American neoconservative agenda that he
had initially supported, and has watched as authoritarian leaders such as
Putin, China’s Xi and Turkey’s Erdoğan laid claim to the world stage. He cites
sobering statistics that political rights and civil liberties have been falling
for the past 15 years around the world, having risen for the previous three and
a half decades.
On top of
all that, rightwing populists and leftwing progressives have made significant
inroads into western politics. Following Donald Trump’s attack on democracy,
and Britain’s rejection of European-style liberalism, the US and UK still
adhere to liberal democracy, but it’s not exactly a political and economic
system in which its beneficiaries feel much pride.
At times the former adviser to the Reagan
administration can sound like a Scandinavian social democrat. Almost
The first
difficulty when it comes to rousing the liberal spirit is that liberalism is
famously difficult to define. It has become one of those words that mean
different things to different political groupings. A vital strength of this
slim, elegant book is that it is crystalline in its definitions, even while
acknowledging the complexities of practice. Although liberalism is under attack
from both left and right, it is from the left that the more serious
intellectual challenge comes. Fukuyama recognises this fact and attempts to
address the left’s criticism. Essentially a system that is founded on the
principle of equality of individual rights, law and freedom has evolved rather
conspicuous inequalities in each of those realms.
The most
glaring are the economic inequalities that have grown in the west, particularly
in the US and UK, over the past 40 years. Fukuyama attributes these to
“neoliberalism”, the belief in unfettered markets as the means of delivering
the goal of consumer welfare. But, Fukuyama contends, this is a distortion of
liberalism, which has a much larger social remit than simply economic
efficiency. It’s not just a question of regulating and limiting big business –
although Fukuyama argues for both – but of appreciating the social capital that
attains from redistribution and narrowing of inequalities. At times the former
adviser to the Reagan administration can sound like a Scandinavian social
democrat. Almost.
Nonetheless
the postmodern left maintain that inequalities and injustice are not a
malfunction of liberalism but instead a manifestation of structural power built
in at a foundational level. His exegesis of critical theory from Marcuse
through to Foucault, and how it has been widely adopted as a tool of
sociopolitical analysis, is a brilliantly acute summary of the way some aspects
of liberal thought have consumed themselves. The pursuit of individual autonomy
or “self-actualisation”, for example, has become mired in an identity politics
that subsumes the individual into rigidly defined groupings based on ethnicity,
gender or sexuality. In a way, argues Fukuyama, this is a necessary step to
address structural inequalities and counteract the misplaced notion that the
individual is the only unit of social importance.
Taken to
its extreme, however, this kind of analysis offers no liberation, but the
revelation of ever deeper layers of oppression, in which individual thought is
an illusion, and all intellectual interaction is subject to the power dynamics
of group hierarchies. Everything, by way of this understanding, including
empirical science, becomes a social construct designed to benefit the powerful.
As Fukuyama
notes, it’s a form of conspiratorial thinking that has been duly adopted by the
right, who saw measures enacted during the pandemic – mask wearing, vaccination
and social-distancing – as signs of a hidden power elite. Although he outlines
some familiar complaints about social media monopolies and their baleful effect
on political discourse, the overall sense you gain from this book is that
liberalism is in crisis because of the complacency that set in with its
successes. Liberal democracy has delivered on many fronts, but with each step
forward it left many constituencies behind.
Its
opponents like to speak of the “Tina” – there is no alternative – way of
thinking as a liberal democratic shibboleth that must be exposed. And so it
must. There are alternatives – as the likes of Putin, Xi and their imitators
conspicuously demonstrate. They’re just not good ones. However, liberalism
cannot afford to rely on the flaws of its antagonists. It needs to refresh,
re-evaluate and rethink. This book does not supply all, or enough, of the
answers. But it’s a good place to start with asking the essential questions.
Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis
Fukuyama is published by Profile (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer
order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Liberalism and Its Discontents — Francis Fukuyama
on fixing democracy
The political philosopher takes on critics on both left
and right to offer a to-do list for the liberal centre
Edmund
Fawcett MARCH 15 2022
https://www.ft.com/content/1c4afa51-ab6b-482f-87ed-46cbefb1a9e6
If
self-analysis could cure anxiety, liberal democracy would be in rude health.
Books have poured out lately on liberalism’s failings and how democracies break
down. Among the diagnosticians, none is more eminent or experienced than
Francis Fukuyama. None in recent decades has proved a better gauge of
liberalism’s see-saw morale. Since the 1990s, in what looked like victory for
liberal democracy, he has prodded and probed, ready to alter his mind as moods
or circumstances changed.
He made a
world name for himself when a journal article “The End of History?” (1989) came
out as a book of like title, though missing the question mark. With great
brilliance, the young scholar and government adviser argued that the collapse
of Soviet communism had left democratic liberalism as the one remaining outlook
with durable appeal. Others — authoritarianism, state capitalism, theocracy,
strongman populism — each had incurable failings.
Fukuyama’s
sunny early judgments of liberalism’s local health and global appeal have since
darkened. He has not lost faith. Liberalism remains sound, attractive even next
to looming rivals (as he eloquently argued recently in this paper). Yet that
favourable diagnosis comes with big “ifs”. As embodied in the liberal
democracies of what, since Russia’s assault on Ukraine, people are again
calling the west, liberalism has grievous troubles, he thinks, not least from
opponents within.
Fukuyama
offers to show what liberalism is, why it matters and how far its “discontents”
are due to overzealous defenders and misguided critics. The approach is more
intellectual than geopolitical or governmental. How to repair liberal
institutions has long preoccupied him but gets little attention. Liberalism and
Its Discontents looks in, not out, and was finished before the war in Ukraine.
Shadowed by international crisis, these 154 lucid pages can still be read with
profit. An assumption runs off-screen throughout: if the liberal democracies
cannot fix themselves and deliver better on their promises, authoritarians who
scorn liberalism and its works may yet prevail.
A brisk
first chapter sketches “classical liberalism”, Fukuyama’s favoured kind. He
takes it as a means of “peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic
societies”. Its core ideas are toleration, rooted in respect for personal
autonomy and guaranteed by limited, lawful government. Further elements are
private property and free markets, which best ensure wide prosperity. Whether
those several elements have to stand together, or simply happen to, is left
open. As early champions of “classical liberalism”, Fukuyama invokes, without
undue detail, a mixed canon of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, the drafters
of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) and Kant.
Fukuyama
rightly reminds us that liberalism and democracy are distinct. There is
illiberal democracy (Hungary under Viktor Orban, for example, or India as
Narendra Modi would like it) as well as undemocratic liberalism (Bismarckian
Germany, Singapore and Hong Kong now). Democracy is taken procedurally as a say
for all in how those exercising state power are chosen and removed.
With
definitions and abstractions out of the way, Fukuyama turns to his primary
target: two kinds of intellectual undermining classic liberalism: free-market
economists on the right and sociocultural critics on the left. Both overvalue
“the sovereign self”. The first have twisted autonomy by vesting it in the
market, the second by entrusting it to identity groups.
Dogmatic
neoliberals, he complains, made a “religion” of free markets. Once revered
names fill the dock: Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Becker, Stigler. Despite passing
benefits, their ideas in practice hastened financial collapse, slow growth and
austerity without offering correctives to the local harms of globalisation.
Culprits on
the left include anti-liberal thinkers from the 1960s onwards who preferred
identity politics to toleration: Herbert Marcuse (tolerance is repressive),
Carole Pateman (liberalism protects male autonomy) and Charles Mills (a
godfather of critical race theory). Far from serving diversity, identity
politics puts personal autonomy at the mercy of the group. Two famed French
subversives, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, are blamed for speeding on a
“cognitive crisis” of distrust in scientific authority and attested fact, which
now grips the “nationalist-populist right” with its anti-vaccination delusions
and conspiracy theories.
As for
where now, Fukuyama sees little alternative but the liberal centre. Cries for
more (and stricter) community from anti-liberal Catholics such as Patrick
Deneen, Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari are heard but rejected. The
progressive left, he thinks, promises decline into bigger government, controls
and deficits.
In bald
summary, Fukuyama’s bravura prosecution sounds harsher than it reads. He is
stringent but never parodic or snide. His call to order ends with a short,
positive to-do list for shoring up the liberal centre: effective, “impersonal”
government; devolution or subsidiarity; antitrust, especially for big media;
less quarter for group demands; a “liberal” patriotism against the wrong sort
of nationalists. Humane as ever, he adds two practical virtues: intellectual
moderation and a feel for the achievable.
It is hard
to think of a better case for liberal centrism with a conservative tinge than
Liberalism and Its Discontents. Or, to be exact, a better case against liberal
centrism’s more vocal critics. An obvious question is, will the critics and
their admirers listen?
Free-marketeers
may reasonably ask how strong, trusted governments will pay for a tempered,
softer capitalism in the west as the rougher kind of capitalism creatively
buccaneers across the rest of the world. Present-day liberalism’s critics to
the left may reasonably ask why, despite successes after 1945, tempered
capitalism seems unable to reduce or reverse enduring social inequities in
work, health and wealth.
Fukuyama’s
journey through liberalism began as the cold war ended when the west lost an
ideological unifier with the death of Soviet communism. A natural thought is
that Russia under Putin now gives fractious liberals a defining Other against
which to rally. For Fukuyama, that would be false comfort. “The travails of liberalism,”
he wrote in the FT recently, “will not end even if Putin loses.” Nor will they
end when the culture wars Fukuyama charts so well die down. Liberalism’s
travails are more social and structural than intellectual. Mitigation, let
alone cure, will take more than self-analysis. Liberals have reason to worry.
Liberalism
and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama, Profile £16.99/Farrar Straus and
Giroux $26, 178 pages
Edmund
Fawcett is author of ‘Liberalism’ (2018) and ‘Conservatism’ (2020)
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