From Hegel to Hagel; An Interview With Francis Fukuyama

By Nicholas Desai | Thursday, October 5, 2006

Francis Fukuyama is of a different order than that of most public intellectuals and is therefore confusing. The rigor of his political thought is not his unique feature, though it is certainly well-regarded by conservatives as well as liberals; nor is he our most famous intellectual: When Foreign Policy took a survey a year ago to determine the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, Fukuyama came in twenty-first, losing to Salman Rushdie and Camille Paglia, among others. Rather, Fukuyama’s thought shimmers singularly and effortlessly across the pages of the lofty journals, through the realm of public policy, and finally into the conversations of middlebrow America.

His accessibility, however, has a catch. He is, you might say, the Robert Frost of public intellectuals: Everyone finds their own version, sometimes a wrong version. The Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is often taken as a straightforward bracer commending you for doing your own thing. But a close reading of the poem unveils an ironic meditation on self-deception. I interviewed Fukuyama when he visited Dartmouth in late September, a conversation that confirmed his intellectual seriousness, his critical acumen, but also his elusiveness.

The 1992 work that staked Fukuyama’s claim on the national imagination, The End of History and the Last Man, took philosophical account of the collapse of Soviet communism. Because the West won the Cold War, Fukuyama argued, “History has ended.” This has seemed excessively optimistic if not laughable—according, at least, to the press and casual yakking. As early as the ‘90s, looking at the carnage in the Balkans, The Nation ran a cover story proclaiming “The End of Fukuyama.” He did not, in fact, end. But Fukuyama is one of the few intellectuals whom people seem to feel more comfortable correcting or scorning than praising or simply discussing.

And so, like Frost’s, Fukuyama’s thesis was far more complex than the précis. Knowing that he is an historicist heavily influenced by Hegel and Marx, better readers appreciate that Fukuyama meant “History” as something more profound than the sequence of events. The end of History suggested that modern political regimes will in the long term tend toward liberal democracy—not that nothing important will ever happen again or that all our ambitions have been fulfilled (quite the opposite, in that last regard).

Many of Fukuyama’s books in the 1990s engaged the ideas of civil society, bioethics, and nation-building, but his next true foray into the crossroads of philosophy and foreign policy came when he broke with neoconservatism. The fissures appeared before the Iraq War. “[Paul Wolfowitz] commissioned a study that I participated in in the six months prior to the Iraq War and we finally briefed it in January of 2003. The message in that—it was a long term strategy for the war on terrorism—the message was a little bit esoteric, so it wasn’t saying ‘Oh, don’t do this—It’s a big mistake’—it was more in a sense a whole series of cautions about whether this was the right way to fight what’s basically in my view a political struggle.” Since Wolfowitz had gone to the Pentagon, he and Fukuyama hadn’t maintained very close contact. “I’m not sure how much he absorbed of that [briefing] because it was one of those things where he stopped in the meeting and listened for a while and then didn’t even have time to listen to the other briefings in that panel because he was just so busy with other things. I mean, this was two months before the beginning of the war!” The fleets, he noted, were massing outside of the Persian Gulf. “At that point, even if he got the idea—or if anybody got the idea—that the war was a mistake I think it was too late to turn it off...”

The true split came when, to his amazement, an audience at the American Enterprise Institute thunderously applauded Charles Krauthammer in 2004 for delivering an optimistic speech on American nation-building. Fukuyama and Krauthammer then engaged in a heated debate in the pages of The National Interest and The New York Times. In his latest book, America at the Crossroads, Fukuyama criticizes what neoconservatism became in the late nineties—that is to say, an ideology that placed too much trust in social engineering abroad.

The split, though, is not entirely as advertised: it is not that a true believer turned apostate. “One of the things that people have charged is that I am one of the architects of the Iraq War, and that I changed my mind only after things went badly, and I’m now trying to redeem myself. And that’s just not right. I signed a couple of letters from the Project for a New American Century, but I decided well before the war began that it was a mistake, and that record is there publicly—and what I was telling everyone in private, and so forth. And I’m not particularly apologetic for once having been fairly hawkish, because I think as a matter of principle, if you could get rid of Saddam Hussein using American power, that was fine with me. My objections to the war really had to do with all of the prudential calculations about whether you could do it for an acceptable cost, whether the blowback could be more than we can handle, and that’s really what required thinking about for a while in the year and a half leading up to the war. As to the idea that somehow The End of History was the basis of the Bush Doctrine—that’s just based on a misreading of The End of History and what I’ve been saying about democracy.”

“By the way,” he adds, “my project is not to reclaim neoconservatism; I think it’s too late for that. I think that basically The Weekly Standard and Bill Kristol own it, for better or for worse…. The point I was just making was that if you started with some of the premises from which neoconservatives began, you didn’t have to get to the Iraq War.” Did he feel disappointment at having dissolved friendships? “I would I say, I was never a friend particularly—I met, I knew Krauthammer but I never considered him a particular friend. Bill Kristol was a friend because we were both in graduate school together. I inherited his apartment in Cambridge and we’ve done a lot of things.” Fukuyama insists that he does not select his friends on an intellectual basis, and, anyway, there were rifts in the original neoconservatism of the 1970s, between Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Bell. “You can overstate how much solidarity there was right from the beginning.”

In the beginning, Fukuyama’s grandparents came to America to escape conscription during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and he was raised by his mother and liberal, Lutheran father in New York. Today, the conservative, secular Fukuyama is a professor at the Nitze School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. The man himself tends to resemble his writing, that is to say, he decorates a bone-dry demeanor with a few apposite instances of wit. “A somewhat short, serious-faced wonk with a starchy bearing” is what you might take away if you encountered him only briefly; however, the professor does grin, especially when he recalls the old days, when he was a student and his ideas were just embryos.

Fukuyama lets slip a chuckle, for example, when I ask about Allan Bloom, the professor who later wrote The Closing of the American Mind, the bestseller that brought him cash and renown in the 1980s. For several years, Bloom served as a faculty member in residence at the Telluride House, a kind of co-op found across the street from Cornell’s chapter of Deke. Several other notable brains, including Michael Foucault and Richard Feynman, held this position at later times. The house, which survives to this day, is one part of the Telluride Association, an organization founded in 1910 by Lucien Nunn, who also created the loopy Deep Springs College. Cornell’s A-number 1 whiz-kids may live here at no charge, provided that they are admitted. In addition to free room and board, residents may avail themselves to special lectures and grants to study abroad. Bloom was by all accounts an endearing oddball: an impeccably dressed dandy (he once became so involved in an intellectual discussion with Saul Bellow that he dropped his cigarette ash on his Hermes scarf, which caught on fire, causing him to jump around, slapping his chest and yelping “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!”), a spell-binding teacher (who often lead informal Socratic dialogues with Telluriders late into the night), and a sometimes ruthless assessor of student habits (he would often pull people aside to ask them what they thought of other people and how they lived their lives).

Fukuyama elected to live at Telluride, inspired partly by his involvement in a summer program conducted by the Telluride Association. At that time, many Telluriders considered Bloom an almost overbearing presence in the house, a presence felt all the more because of his tendency to pick favorites. Fukuyama remembered this as a capricious process, in which favor did not necessarily follow achievement in the classroom. Fukuyama, however, found himself in the youngish professor’s good graces.

Bloom was a student of the scholar Leo Strauss, whom some of the far left consider the fascist architect of the Iraq War. “I studied political theory when I was an undergraduate at Cornell and then as a graduate student, but I wouldn’t consider myself a political theorist,” Fukuyama explained, “A lot of what I do amounts to social science which a lot of Straussians don’t like very much. Strauss himself criticized that. If you relax the idea that it’s actually a science…it’s more of an idea. I worked for ten years at the Rand Corporation, which was all recently-applied public policy research. But I actually think that that’s helpful because I think the problem with a lot of intellectuals is that they don’t actually have to confront the real world ever, so they can advocate all kinds of things that are just completely unrealistic, and they don’t really understand what the real choices are that face policymakers…. You never really understand how dysfunctional government is until you’ve actually been in it.”

Straussians tend not to manufacture theories as other philosophers do; instead, they are obsessed with close reading, particularly with an eye to discovering “esoteric” meanings in texts. A particular favorite of Strauss and his students was a Russian philosopher named Alexandre Kojève. Fukyama explained that “Strauss had a long dialogue with Kojève over a series of letters that they exchanged, and I think most students of Strauss have read that exchange, and therefore went on to read Kojève himself.” Kojève considered himself an orthodox Marxist, but he later made odd statements to effect that America had achieved pure communism in the 1950s. More importantly to Straussians, he delivered a series of lectures interpreting Hegel, which were not available in English until Allan Bloom translated them in 1968. Fukuyama doubts that he would have become interested in Hegelian historicism—which informed his “end of History” argument”—if Bloom had not introduced him to these lectures by Kojève.

The connections he got through the Telluride Association would lead him to embark on graduate study with Harvey Mansfield, another Straussian, at Harvard. When searching for an apartment in Cambridge, he contacted Bill Kristol, another student of Mansfield, who was vacating his apartment. Kristol, the son of neoconservative pioneer Irving Kristol, later went on to found The Weekly Standard and the Project for a New American Century. Bill Kristol, by the way, had also roomed with Allan Keyes, another of Bloom’s favorites who later became a conservative politician. If there is a conspiracy to be found here, it seems to be mostly concerned with cheap housing for graduate students.

Another of Fukuyama’s mentors, who stands in contrast to the recondite Bloom, was Paul Wolfowitz, ten years Fukuyama’s senior. Wolfowitz never taught Fukuyama in the classroom but encountered him through the Telluride Association, because “you continue to stay involved in the organization once you graduate,” as Fukuyama put it to me. “The first internship I ever had was when he was at the arms control agency, and I worked for him there when I was still in graduate school…” Recalling his 2003 briefing at the Pentagon, I ask whether it was tense challenging his one-time mentor. At this he simpers before changing the subject. When Wolfowitz became the head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department in the first Reagan administration, he invited Fukuyama to work for him there as his first post-graduate school job. For the time, at least, grand theorizing would defer to applied research.

In October 1988, Fukuyama was invited to visit Moscow with ten other American international relations specialists to meet their “young scholar” counterparts in Soviet academia, something that could not have occurred before the Gorbachev reforms. “Our hosts were not always able to provide a lot of food,” remembers Michael Mastanduno, a Dartmouth government professor, “—this was after all, the Soviet Union, and restaurants seemed always closed for the purpose of taking ‘inventory’—but always were eager to engage us in long conversations into the night over their favorite Russian drink.” These vodka-fueled symposia inevitably addressed the question of whether the Cold War was finally ending. “All of us, Americans and Russians,” said Mastanduno, “of course had our views on that, but Fukuyama struck me as among the most impressive—he was not only confident the Cold War was ending peacefully, but was spinning out a grander theory on the global triumph of Western values, essentially trying out some of the ideas that found their way into his ‘end of History’ argument.” It was in the summer of 1989 that the original article “The End of History?” was printed in The National Interest. Soon after came the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe. And before Fukuyama could publish his book based on the article, the Kremlin lowered its red flag for the last time. This congruence marked his entrance into the dicey world of intellectual celebrity.

I asked him whether he could name another intellectual with a métier like his. I suggested George Kennan, and he laughed. “George Kennan had a much more distinguished public career. There are a lot of people in American public life who move fairly easily between private life and public life…. I don’t like pointing to specific individuals because I don’t think I deserve the comparison, but if you look at someone like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he started out as a professor, he served in the Johnson administration on the domestic side and then came back as ambassador to India under Nixon, and finally was elected to U.S. senate but continued to write books and have a lot of impact on a lot of public policy issues.”

Yet even Moynihan never provided a concept with the resilience and broad appeal of “the end of History.” I referred him to a recent statement by the U.K. spokesman for the Sunni radical group, Hizb ut-Tahrir: “[Francis] Fukuyama says we have reached the end of History because there’s a lack of a viable alternative ideology to capitalism and Western civilization. We view our work as a direct challenge to that statement: we have to prove him wrong.” This is a rather sophisticated argument from a fundamentalist theocrat, if I may condescend. But, confident in the direction of History, Fukuyama was less impressed.

“Well, he’s not the only one. The other person that’s said that several times recently in Hugo Chavez. Chavez had this bee in his bonnet about the end of History even before he became president of Venezuela and said, ‘It’s not the end of History! What lies beyond the end of History is—Chavismo!’ So, they’re welcome to try. I still do not see that any of these alternatives are really valuable, but there were are people that are trying to construct them. Chavez can get away with it because he’s got high oil prices and doesn’t have to follow the normal laws of economics, and I think that experiment will last as long as oil prices remain high. These Islamists are very passionate, but it seems to me that they’ve made a mess of every country that they’ve actually come to power in. Whether this is really an appealing alternative—I think in the long run I’m really doubtful. But it’s true that there are people that are trying to show that the end of History is wrong.”

These “people,” though, are not simply pedants with tenure but sometimes leaders of militant groups or commanders of armies. “I was told actually that when the original piece came up [‘The End of History?’ in The National Interest], that the Cuban Communist Party had a special meeting to deal with this ‘ideological threat’ to communism,” he added coolly.

As for the future, Fukuyama is, as usual, mostly optimistic. “There are a lot of people potentially that could attach themselves to this centrist position that is kind of necessary to restore a kind of consensus on American foreign policy,” he says, “Politically, I’ve liked most of the positions that Chuck Hagel has taken, but he has zero future in the Republic Party, so I wouldn’t bet too much on that particular horse.” His theory, too, has endured some tweaking. Today, he retains his historicism, though it is increasingly materialist, as opposed to ideas-rooted. Does this make him a bona fide historical materialist? Not entirely. “[Liberal democracy] is not something that emerges immediately and in all places and in all times—I think that it is something that is the result of a mind struggle. And it’s also dependant on culture and level of development and a lot of other that factors that come out of the material world as well.”

Fukuyama will likely remain topic of interest for a general audience, if only because he is hard to pin down. An egregious example: a little under two months ago in The Scotsman, George Kerevan wrote: “You cannot understand the influence of Francis Fukuyama unless you comprehend that intellectuals in America have the same cultural status that boy bands, footballers or superstar models have in the UK.” Though this kind of cultural reportage makes one suddenly doubt everything that has ever been written about any other country—and perhaps, given the degree of error, to wonder what ultimate good it did us and the British to share a language—one sympathizes slightly in this case.

From Hegel to Hagel; An Interview With Francis Fukuyama

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