postmodernism undermining the central tenets of the west
Kojève’s idea of “philosophical contemplation” at the end of History has, for some, led to the threat of
postmodernism undermining the central tenets of the west: enlightenment philosophy, equal rights,
representative democracy. Bloom warned of precisely this in his bestselling book The Closing of the
American Mind. Fukuyama echoed him in suggesting that “modern education stimulates a certain tendency
towards relativism, the doctrine that all horizons and value systems are relative to their time and place, and
that none are true, but reflect the prejudices or interests of those who advance them”.
Professor of history at Oxford Brookes, Roger Griffin’s book Modernity and Fascism is but one text that
explains how fascism might offer a “sense of a beginning” that will become ever more attractive in an
increasingly morally relativist west. One contemporary conservative thinker blames postmodernism for
many of the west’s social problems, and amusingly accuses the literature department at Yale for importing
nihilistic French poststructuralism. Similarly, one could trace the origins of this historical determinism from
Hegel’s University of Berlin, through Kojève’s Paris to the Classics Department of Cornell and the Political
Science Department of Chicago.
Fukuyama’s thesis also acts as an expedient case study on the reception of Hegelian historicism and the
notion of the end of History in the modern west. Fukuyama’s influence among the network of American
neoconservatives in academia and in the Bush and Reagan administrations has also been revealed. Yet
Fukuyama himself has stressed that his thesis had no foreign policy implications, and actively condemned
those neoconservatives who interpreted his thesis as an interventionist doctrine, notably in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the belief that one lives under the philosophically best possible system certainly
has policy implications. Robert Cooper, a former senior foreign policy advisor to Tony Blair and European
Union civil servant, told The Guardian in 2002: “I’m a fan. The world Fukuyama described is an accurate
description of the world we operate in.” The current French president, Emmanuel Macron, a self-confessed
Hegelian, has spoken at length on the notion of “grand political narratives” and retains a Kojève-esque faith
in the EU. Europhiles in Britain might bemoan the decision of voters to drag their country kicking and
screaming back into history.
Former Soviet Union president Mikhail
Gorbachev gives his book to Fukuyama during
a conference in Moscow (AFP/Getty)In the east, where more attention is paid to Strauss’s neoconservatism, a new end of History is appearing in
the managerial authoritarian states of China, Vietnam and Singapore. Fukuyama himself acknowledged the
possibility that a stable and prosperous China could offer “an alternative modernity”. Two other ends of
History, less optimistic and more nihilistic, also pose themselves. The first is the end of humanity through