Between Meme and Man

Francis Fukuyama was always more meme than man. This was the price of his fame, which he achieved instantly when his essay ‘The End of History?’ appeared in the summer of 1989, shortly before East European communism came undone. The meme both defined an epoch and led millions to misunderstand it, coming to stand for that strangely static time at the end of the twentieth century which has been described as ‘an era that wasn’t an era’. The past had become a distant memory, and the present that replaced it did not appear to have future.

Now, more than three decades on, Fukuyama has written a memoir taking stock of his contribution to the world of ideas. In the Realm of the Last Man is not a conventional entry in the genre. Chapters about his interest in photography and power tools do not quite compensate for the absence of any detail on the author’s emotionial life or personal relationships. But then, Fukuyama has always said that history’s afterparty would be boring. It is only natural that his own life story should bear this out.

Fukuyama’s memoir is nonetheless illuminating on his intellectual trajectory. It dramatises his hopes to rehabilitate the philosophy of history and the quest for its ultimate meaning in the idealist tradition of Hegel: locating the fulfilment of its universal mission in the US victory over Communism. Born in California in 1952, the offspring of Japanese immigrants interned during World War II, Fukuyama was in many ways an unlikely apologist for American primacy and neoliberal globalism. But as a child he revolted against the ‘diehard’ liberalism of his father, a professor and theologian who worked for African-American civil rights. After growing up in New York, Fukuyama enrolled at Cornell University to read classics. By the time he started graduate school, he found that the place had become a hotbed of ‘postmodernism’ and decided to flee. His next stop was the Harvard government department, where he went to study political thought but ended up working on international security, especially Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East.

The book isn’t always on firm ground when it comes to the philosophical detail. Its elementary mistake about which French thinker announced the end of ‘master-narratives’ — Fukuyama claims it was Michel Foucault when it was Jean-François Lyotard — sets us up for a series of painfully superficiality summaries of his intellectual influences. Fukuyama recalls his devotion to Leo Strauss and his early interactions with one of his most prominent and charismatic disciples, Allan Bloom. This led him to the work of Alexandre Kojève, the French Eurocrat and leftist who had gone back to Hegel in the 1930s and himself foreseen an end of history in his time.

Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, the book-length elaboration of his essay, was largely an update of Kojève, adding a neoconservative inflection after the 1980s campaign to bring the Soviet Union down and usher the world into American geopolitical primacy and economic neoliberalism. In the memoir, he describes its achievement as yoking Hegel’s vision to a Straussian conception of the permanence of human nature, especially our thymos: the term Plato uses in The Republic — which Fukuyama reports he first read with Bloom as a freshmen — for ‘spritedness’. Fukuyama saw this as the root of the Hegelian struggle for recognition and, in his later work, of our need for social respect.

Much of Fukuyama’s new book is a complaint about how these fundamental ideas were misinterpreted. He alleges a half dozen times, by my count, that those who invoked him never read the final passages of his piece, nor the last chapters of his book, which described the dark side of the end of history: the tensions and passions that could flare up as a result of social stasis.

Fukuyama praises himself for parting ways with his kindred thinkers over the Iraq war. Even if he signed a letter or two in favor of the invasion, he tells us, it was not because of any ardent conviction but rather to avoid burning bridges in his millieu. In the years since, he has followed a similar political trajectory to many other neoconservatives who hopped on the Never Trump bandwagon while railing against progressive ‘wokeness’. Yet he has also taken some heretical positions on the American right, on the limits of antistatism in general and economic libertarianism in particular, which seem to flow from his Straussian priors. His work after The End of History and the Last Man was more historical, in the style of classic social theory. He defends the ‘casual empiricism’ of Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber against the factological number-crunching that is now in fashion, particularly in the economics profession. Yet his memoir ultimately reveals a thinker who can only toggle between celebrating his own foresight about the ‘end of history’ and lamenting that Trump has now changed everything: expressing a blind self-confidence that lapses easily into confusion.

It now seems clearer than ever that American primacy and neoliberal globalisation were a false dawn. By announcing the arrival of the universal freedom and equality that Hegel foresaw, Fukuyama became more of a sloganeer than a social scientist, creating a meme which came to represent him. Misprision is, of course, the fate of memes, and Fukuyama’s argument was always ripe for appropriation and distortion. Its effect was to warp popular understanding of both our present moment and the forms of emancipation that might one day take its place.