Gary Rosen fingers a critical turn in Francis Fukuyama’s thought: against Fukyama’s previously neo-Hegelian idea of an inevitable global unfolding of human liberty on the American model:
What’s missing from this, as a reader of the old Fukuyama would know, is the Hegelian twist that gave his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man its peculiar intensity and breadth. Liberal democracy, in that telling, was not only about the desire for pleasure and physical well-being but also about a second, more elevated drive: the individual’s "struggle for recognition," the spirited – and often political – assertion of personal dignity and worth. About this deeply felt human need, Fukuyama is now silent. Yet in today’s Middle East, nothing is so striking as the dearth of channels for its expression.
Sure. And I tend to agree that democracy in the Middle East would help drain the swamp that gives us hordes of mosquito-type terrorists. But a key premise of conservatism, it seems to me, is that history has no direction, that it can go any which way, and has. That’s why Fukuyama’s last book, which was as much Nietzschean as Hegelian, was in places most unconservative. What true-believing neocons had was a true secular belief – in the principles of America, and their inevitable triumph in every part of the world. Perhaps that belief is still worth having, if only to cheer ourselves up. But it surely must now be a deeply chastened belief; and the process of chastening is not a capitulation to the isolationist left. Far from it. It is a belated recognition of the deeper wisdom of the skeptical, culture-focused Right. I think that’s what Frank is aiming for: not an abandonment of America’s ideals and involvement with the world; but a far more prudent, chastened and subtle engagement.
The Dish 