The end of history - or of liberalism?

National Review, Oct 27, 1989 by John Gray

The political and intellectual map is changing at a vertiginous pace; but for those who would find the prospect unbearably boring, take heart.- the end of history'is nowhere in sight.

IT IS A TRUISM that socialism is dead, and an irony that it survives most robustly as a doctrine not in Paris, where it has suffered a fate worse than falsification by becoming thoroughly unfashionable; nor in London, where the political hegemony and economic success of Thatcherite free-market conservatism have made it redundant, but in the universities of capitalist America, as the ideology of the Western academic nomenklatura. But socialism is most obviously, and most irreversibly, defunct as an ideology in the Communist bloc. There glasnost has surpassed the wildest hopes of Western anti-Communists in discrediting the institutions of central planning and brilliantly illuminating the intractable problems of the Soviet system.

But what does the collapse of socialism as a political faith portend for the future of political life and thought? In a provocative and well-received article, "The End of History" (National Interest, Summer 1989), Francis Fukuyama announces in a quietly apocalyptic voice that the failure of socialism means "an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism" and promises "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

The prophecy that human history is about to end and a new historical epoch about to begin is of course a recurrent one in the history of Western thought. It is probably an unintended irony that Fukuyama's article should stand as a contribution to the project of a secular theodicy first undertaken by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, but most notably and energetically pursued in the Marxian system of thought which Fukuyama correctly perceives to be now in a terminal decline. But it

is in any case difficult to understand the basis for Fukuyama's confidence about the historic role of liberal democracy in bringing history to a successful close. His confidence cannot be a reflection of the state of liberal political philosophy, since that is manifestly parlous. In my recent book, Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy London and New York, Routledge, August 1989), and particularly in its Postscript, After Liberalism," I have argued that despite its overwhelming dominance in Anglo-American philosophy, liberalism has never succeeded in showing that liberal democratic institutions are uniquely necessary to justice and the human good. In all its varieties-utilitarian, contractarian, or as a theory of rights-liberal political philosophy has failed to establish its fundamental thesis: that liberal democracy is the only form of human government that can be sanctioned by reason and morality. It therefore fails to give rational support to the religion of the contemporary intelligentsia, which combines the sentimental cult of humanity with a sectarian passion for political reform.

The consequent debacle of liberal political philosophy is not something we have any reason to lament. For liberals are committed to the heroic enterprise of denying a very obvious truth-the truth that there is a legitimate variety of forms of government under which human beings have flourished and may still hope to prosper. Who can doubt that human beings flourished under the feudal institutions of medieval Christendom? Or under the monarchical government of Elizabethan England? It is in virtue of its repression of this evident truth that liberal discourse has acquired its stridency and intolerance-indeed, its almost obsessional character. In seeking to construct a liberal ideology, liberal theorists are attempting what even they must sometimes see to be impossible. They are struggling to confer the imprimatur of universal authority on the local practices they have inherited. The absurdity of this project has, indeed, been tacitly recognized by one of this century's most subtle liberal thinkers, John Rawls,

when in his later work he revealed that he aims only to give a coherent philosophical statement of the character and premises of a particular historical tradition-the tradition of constitutional democracy.

If Fukuyama's confident expectation of the End cannot be explained by the state of liberal philosophy, from what does it derive? It is the expression, most likely, not of a political philosophy, but of a philosophy of history, one dominated by the notion that liberal democracy is history's telos, other modes of government being recognized only as progressions toward, or aberrations from, that end.

THE GRAIN OF TRUTH in this interpretation of history is that it is only through the development of civil society-a society in which most institutions, though protected by law, are independent of the state-that a

modern civilization can reproduce itself. Without those institutions-for example, private property and contractual liberty under the rule of law-modern societies undergo a descent into poverty and barbarism. Civil society is the matrix of the market economy, which both history and theory show to be the precondition of prosperity and liberty in the modern world. This is a truth that even the Soviet leadership may now be learning, after having waged for over seventy years an incessant war on all the eivil societies that have come within its sphere of domination. It is one that the Iranian fundamentalists are beginning to accept, however grudgingly, as they retreat from the position that a modern state can be governed exclusively