"The End of History" and Academic Hegelianism: Fukuyama Taken Seriously

• In Event: Thinking with Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Hegel

Abstract

Fukuyama has not faded away. The crumbling of the post-89 order has if anything made him a more central point of reference. He is often casually dismissed, for at least one good reason: FF is cavalier with his Hegelian sources. I compare his project to Robert Pippin’s more scholarly neo-Hegelianism; the two are surprisingly similar.

Hegel did not believe in an end to history in FF’s sense. It was for him a philosophical consummation, not a political end-state. Yet the one implies a version of the other. Pippin attributes to the historical Hegel an end of history doctrine flatter than FF’s: modern institutions realize freedom so completely that art becomes superfluous. Both Pippin and FF move beyond the historical Hegel in response to Nietzsche.

Per Perry Anderson (his most incisive critic), FF synthesizes a history, a politics and a psychology. Versions of all three are in Pippin. History: for both, the taming of scarcity by a first wave of modernity is a presupposition of Hegelian autonomy. Politics: Pippin is attached to a “bourgeois ideal” of freedom which, like FF, he thinks best achieved in Scandinavia. Psychology: FF marries Hegel’s master/slave dialectic to a Platonic psychology stripped of eros. Pippin more adequately interprets Hegel as insisting that self-consciousness, reason and freedom are one (S. Rödl’s slogan). Using Hegel to interpret the political psychology implicit in modernist art, however, Pippin discovers the same Platonic/Nietzschean problems that vex FF: notably the ambiguous role of thymos in the establishment and maintenance of a bourgeois order.

Author

• James Tussing, University of Notre Dame