The End of History

More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the 'end point of mankind's ideological evolution' and the 'final form of human government,' and as such constituted the 'end of history.'

We have become so accustomed by now to expect that the future will contain bad news with respect to the health and security of decent, liberal, democratic political practices that we have problems recognizing good news when it comes.

Modern natural science is a useful starting point because it is the only important social activity that by common consensus is both cumulative and directional, even if its ultimate impact on human happiness is ambiguous.

The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige.

By Hegel's account, the desire to be recognized as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to the death for prestige.

But they also have a thymotic pride in their own self-worth, and this leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognizing their autonomy as free individuals.

The desire for recognition that led to the original bloody battle for prestige between two individual combatants leads logically to imperialism and world empire.

The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a 'last man' who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation.

The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of us into deep historical pessimists.

Four years of indescribably horrible trench warfare, in which tens of thousands died in a single day over a few yards of devastated territory, was, in the words of Paul Fussell, 'a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth.'

Hitler and Stalin put both modern technology and modern political organization in the service of evil.

The suicidal self-destructiveness of the European state system in two world wars gave lie to the notion of superior Western rationality.

Societies of which permanent criticism is an integral feature are the only livable ones, but they are also the most fragile.

The Soviet leadership almost seems to have made the Soviet Union closer to the spirit of the pluralist model of American political science than is the United States.

If the early twentieth century's major political innovation was the invention of the strong states of totalitarian Germany or Russia, then the past few decades have revealed a tremendous weakness at their core.

There is no such thing as a dictator who rules purely 'by force,' as is commonly said, for instance, of Hitler.

As Socrates explains in Plato's Republic, even among a band of robbers there must be some principle of justice that permits them to divide their spoils.

In illegitimate regimes, on the other hand, failure frequently precipitates an overturning of the regime itself.

The last Francoist Cortes did a remarkable thing: it overwhelmingly passed a law in November 1976 that in effect constituted its own suicide by stipulating that the next Cortes be democratically elected.

Such an effort at social engineering was both monumental in its ambition and, in retrospect, monumentally foolish in its ultimate aim.

It is difficult to kill people in the name of throne and altar if the king himself seeks to be no more than the titular monarch of a democratic country.

This then was the ultimate goal of totalitarianism: not simply to deprive the new Soviet man of his freedom, but to make him fear freedom in favor of security, and to affirm the goodness of his chains even in the absence of coercion.

The year 1989—the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution—marked the decisive collapse of communism as a factor in world history.

This occurred partly as a result of the plotters' incompetence and lack of resolve, but also because of a remarkable outpouring of support, led by Boris Yeltsin, for democratic institutions on the part of the allegedly passive and authority-craving Soviet people.

Any number of Soviet young people, despairing of the deteriorating quality of life in the USSR, will tell you that their only desire is to live in a 'normal' country.

Like the Eastern Europeans before them, they proved not inert and atomized, but spontaneously ready to defend their dignity and rights.

The dismantling of a system of terror so deadly to its practitioners therefore became almost mandatory once Stalin's death made it possible for the top leadership to do so.

But playing this card almost inevitably unleashes new forces and attitudes in society that then escape the control of the manipulator.

Communists now find themselves in the unenviable position of defending an old and reactionary social order whose time has long since passed, like the monarchists who managed to survive into the twentieth century.

For while totalitarianism managed to destroy the visible institutions of pre-revolutionary Russian and Chinese society, it was utterly ineffective in its aspirations to create a new man of either the Soviet or Maoist variety.

Some have compared legitimacy to a kind of cash reserve. All governments, democratic and authoritarian, have their ups and downs; but only legitimate governments have this reserve to draw on in times of crisis.

The conservatives opposed to reform in the Soviet Union are as likely to place an Orthodox icon on their wall as a picture of Lenin.

As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty.

It is also possible for a country to be democratic without being liberal, that is, without protecting the rights of individuals and minorities.

Even non-democrats will have to speak the language of democracy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard.

The more one knows about a particular country, the more one is aware of the 'maelstrom of external contingency' that differentiated that country from its neighbors, and the seemingly fortuitous circumstances that led to a democratic outcome.

But to cite the failure of liberal democracy in any given country, or even in an entire region of the world, as evidence of democracy's overall weakness, reveals a striking narrowness of view.

He stands proudly on the pyramid of the world-process; and while he lays the final stone of his knowledge, he seems to cry aloud to listening Nature: 'We are at the top, we are at the top; we are the completion of Nature!'

The particular events of history can become meaningful only with respect to some larger end or goal, the achievement of which necessarily brings the historical process to a close.

It was precisely man's competitiveness and vanity, his desire to dominate and rule, which was the wellspring of social creativity, ensuring the realization of potentials 'unborn in an Arcadian shepherd's life.'

History proceeds through a continual process of conflict, wherein systems of thought as well as political systems collide and fall apart from their own internal contradictions.

One might describe history as a dialogue between societies, in which those with grave internal contradictions fail and are succeeded by others that manage to overcome those contradictions.

Hegel, by contrast, did not deny that man had a natural side arising from needs of the body like food or sleep, but believed that in his most essential characteristics man was undetermined and therefore free to create his own nature.

For it is human nature to have no fixed nature, not to be but to become something other than it once was.

At the center of Kojève's teaching was the startling assertion that Hegel had been essentially right, and that world history, for all the twists and turns it had taken in subsequent years, had effectively ended in the year 1806.

In and by this battle the vanguard of humanity virtually attained the limit and the aim, that is, the end, of Man's historical evolution.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

For a naive optimist whose expectations are belied appears foolish, while a pessimist proven wrong maintains an aura of profundity and seriousness.

Zulu spears were no match for British rifles, no matter how brave individual warriors were: mastery of science was the reason why Europe could conquer most of what is now the Third World.

Any state that hopes to maintain its political autonomy is forced to adopt the technology of its enemies and rivals.

The persistence of war and military competition among nations is thus, paradoxically, a great unifier of nations.

The latter may in certain respects be more humanly satisfying to live in, but since they are not organized according to the rational principles of economic efficiency, they tend to lose out to those that are.

Attempts by communist regimes to abolish the division of labor and to end the slavery of specialization have only led to a tyranny more monstrous than that of the Manchester workshops condemned by Marx.

A modern-day, would-be Franco would lack the social basis on which to recruit any army.

Science has been lost; latter-day Visigoths and Vandals ride around in the outback on Harley-Davidsons and dune buggies, trying to steal gasoline and bullets from one another because the production technology has been lost.

Modern economies, for all of their enormous efficiency and innovation, create a new need for every want they satisfy.

Rather than freeing man from the cycle of new wants, most people would become reacquainted with the life of a poor peasant tied to the land in an unending cycle of back-breaking labor.

A healthy environment is a luxury best afforded by those with wealth and economic dynamism; the worst environmental offenders, whether in the disposal of toxic wastes or deforestation of tropical rain forests, are developing countries.

And, as Machiavelli taught at the beginning of the modern era, the good states will have to take their cue from the bad ones if they are to survive and remain states at all.

These examples from the communist world suggested at one time that the progressive unfolding of modern natural science could just as well lead us to Max Weber's nightmare of a rational and bureaucratized tyranny.

Industrialization, we now know, is not a one-shot affair whereby countries are suddenly propelled into economic modernity, but rather a continuously evolving process without a clear end point, where today's modernity quickly becomes tomorrow's antiquity.

One might say in fact that it was in the highly complex and dynamic 'post-industrial' economic world that Marxism-Leninism as an economic system met its Waterloo.

Stalin once put the noted aircraft designer Tupolev in the Gulag, where he designed one of his best airplanes.

As Mao feared, the technological intelligentsia became the principal bearer of "bourgeois liberalism," and played a key role in the subsequent economic reform process.

Indeed, it is safe to say that were it not for the Third World, Marxism would have died a much quicker death in this century.

The developed North had locked up the world market for sophisticated manufactured goods like automobiles and airplanes, leaving the Third World to be, in effect, global "hewers of wood and drawers of water."

This is perhaps the reason why one high Singaporean official remarked that the three abominations his country would not tolerate were 'hippies, long-haired boys, and critics of multinational corporations.'

The crown was the supreme economic patron, and all commercial and productive activities depended on special licenses, grants of monopoly, and trade privileges.

Everyone will try to scare you with the specter of an economic collapse. But all of this is a lie. There is nothing more elastic than the economy.

As in 1917 or 1949, one would have to anticipate the need to seize power and use the coercive machinery of the state to break the old social order, and to create new, centralized economic institutions.

This is the ultimate victory of the VCR.

Laureano Lopez Rodo, was reported to have said that Spain would be ready for democracy when per capita income reached $2000.

But this is easily explained by oil: income from petroleum has permitted states like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and the UAE to acquire the trappings of modernity—automobiles, VCRs, Mirage fighter-bombers, and the like—without having had their societies go through the social transformations that come when such wealth is generated by the labor of their populations.

If they do not believe in the legitimacy of the adjudicator, if there is no trust in the system, there will be no active and enthusiastic cooperation of the sort required to make the system as a whole function smoothly.

Long-standing dictatorships are capable of producing grotesque personalistic excesses like former Romanian ruler Nicolae Ceaucescu's 40,000-watt chandelier, built at a time when the state was declaring regular electricity blackouts.

Urban professionals in developed countries, on the other hand, can be recruited to a lot of nutty causes like liquid diets and marathon running, but they tend not to volunteer for private armies or death squads simply because someone in a uniform tells them to do so.

Black slavery constituted the major exception to the generalization that Americans were 'born equal,' and American democracy could not in fact settle the question of slavery through democratic means.

The question of national sovereignty is inherently uncompromisable: it either belongs to one people or another—Armenians or Azerbaijanis, Lithuanians or Russians.

In other words, if democracy arises in the Soviet Union only because ambitious figures like Gorbachev and Yeltsin need a demagogic stick with which to beat the established party apparatus, it follows that the victory of one or the other would lead to a rescinding of democratic gains.

Indeed, to think that education leads naturally to democratic values reflects considerable presumption on the part of democratic man.

Market-oriented authoritarians, on the other hand, have the best of both worlds: they are able to enforce a relatively high degree of social discipline on their populations, while permitting a sufficient degree of freedom to encourage innovation.

Those that were not defeated by superior military technology were seduced by the glittering material world that modern natural science has created.

And as long as a stake is not driven through that vampire's heart, it will reconstitute itself—with all of its social, economic, and political concomitants—within the space of a few generations.

In both cases there is an underlying concern that 'rationalization' will domesticate genocide.

The existence of discontinuities does not make any less real the remarkable similarities in the experiences of people living through the process of modernization.

The irony is that communist societies came to acquire the ever-expanding horizon of wants generated by Western consumerist societies without acquiring the means of satisfying them.

The American Founding Fathers may have been angered over the attempts of the British Crown to tax them without representation in Parliament, but their decision to declare independence and fight Britain in order to establish a new democratic order can hardly be explained as a matter of economic efficiency.

A 'problem' does not become a 'contradiction' unless it is so serious that it not only cannot be solved within the system, but corrodes the legitimacy of the system itself such that the latter collapses under its own weight.

Without an underlying concept of human nature that posited a hierarchy of essential and non-essential human characteristics, it would be impossible to know whether an apparent social peace represented true satisfaction of human longings, rather than the work of a particularly efficient police apparatus, or merely the calm before a revolutionary storm.

The Universal Historian must be ready to discard entire peoples and times as essentially pre- or non-historical, because they do not bear on the central "plot" of his or her story.

Therefore, to speak of the 'origin' of self-consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for 'recognition.'

Indeed, we do not even have a corrimon vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts.

Man is a fundamentally other-directed and social animal, but his sociability leads him not into a peaceful civil society, but into a violent struggle to the death for pure prestige.

Bears typically do not stage hunger strikes on behalf of higher causes.

For by risking his life, man proves that he can act contrary to his most powerful and basic instinct, the instinct for self-preservation.

Only man is capable of engaging in a bloody battle for the sole purpose of demonstrating that he has contempt for his own life, that he is something more than a complicated machine.

Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself.

The third [makes men invade] for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.

Hegel, in other words, finds something morally praiseworthy in the pride of the aristocrat-warrior who is willing to risk his life, and something ignoble in the slavish consciousness that seeks self-preservation above all else.

Hobbes compares his state to the Leviathan because it is "King of all the children of pride."

It is rather that they saw the problem of politics as being in some sense the effort to persuade the would-be master to accept the life of the slave in a kind of classless society of slaves.

Lockean man did not need to be public-spirited, patriotic, or concerned for the welfare of those around him; rather, as Kant suggested, a liberal society could be made up of devils, provided they were rational.

It is the part of the personality which is the fundamental source of the emotions of pride, anger, and shame, and is not reducible to desire, on the one hand, or reason on the other.

But finally, overpowered by the desire, he opened his eyes wide, ran toward the corpses and said: 'Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.'

The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message: 'I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.'

The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity.

The seedy post-totalitarian states of the Brezhnev era tried to make everybody morally complicit not through terror but, ironically enough, by dangling before them the fruits of modern consumer culture.

The process of valuation and self-valuation pervades many aspects of day-to-day life that we commonly think of as economic: man is truly 'the beast with red cheeks.'

The anger that arises in job disputes seldom has to do with the absolute level of wages, but rather arises because management's wage offer does not adequately 'recognize' the dignity of the worker.

The day-laborer may eat better, but he is totally dependent on an employer to whom he is virtually invisible as a human being.

Such exchanges make sense only to the thymotic part of the soul.

The would-be coup makers of August 1991 deceived themselves that the Russian people would trade "their freedom for a piece of sausage."

For the tremendous hypocrisy those images revealed, on the part of a regime that was explicitly devoted to equality, deeply offended people's sense of justice and was sufficient to get them into the streets.

It is only thymotic man, the man of anger who is jealous of his own dignity and the dignity of his fellow citizens, the man who feels that his worth is constituted by something more than the complex set of desires that make up his physical existence—it is this man alone who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers.

He hints at the various points in the Republic, for instance when he compares the thymotic guardian to a ferocious watchdog who can bite his master as well as a stranger if not properly trained.

The bourgeois was an entirely deliberate creation of early modern thought, an effort at social engineering that sought to create social peace by changing human nature itself.

In one society after another, Hobbes's deal has been offered to the old class of aristocrats: namely, that they trade in their thymotic pride for the prospect of a peaceful life of unlimited material acquisition.

An American politician could harbor ambitions to be a Caesar or a Napoleon, but the system would allow him or her to be no more than a Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan—hemmed in by powerful institutional constraints and political forces on all sides.

For Nietzsche, the very essence of man was neither his desire nor his reason, but his thymos: man was above all a valuing creature, the 'beast with red cheeks' who found life in his ability to pronounce the words 'good' and 'evil.'

Megalothymia—the desire to be recognized as superior—lives on under a variety of guises in day-to-day life, and, as we shall see in Part Five, much of what we find satisfying in our lives would not be possible without it.

The master's worth is therefore recognized by someone not quite human.

The slave's consciousness is therefore higher than the consciousness of the master,

The slave does not begin by challenging the master, but rather goes through a long and painful process of self-education as he teaches himself to overcome his fear of death and claim his rightful freedom.

The homeliest and most awkward orphan can have a more beautiful soul in the eyes of God than the most talented pianist or the most brilliant physicist.

It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master.

The very distinction between masters and slaves was abolished, and the former slaves became the new masters—not of other slaves, but of themselves.

Popular self-government abolishes the distinction between masters and slaves; everyone is entitled to at least some share in the role of master.

The fact that the American Founding Fathers did not use the terms "recognition" and "dignity" did not prevent the Lockean language of rights from sliding effortlessly and invisibly into the Hegelian language of recognition.

If human beings were nothing but reason and desire, they would be perfectly content to live in a South Korea under military dictatorship, or under the enlightened technocratic administration of Francoist Spain.

Will man be forever content to be recognized simply as the equal of all other men, or will he not demand more in time?

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'

States in many cases sit in uneasy tension with peoples, and in some instances might be said to be at war with their peoples.

Unlike money, which can simply be divided, dignity is something inherently uncompromisable: either you recognize my dignity, or the dignity of that which I hold sacred, or you do not.

Christianity in a certain sense had to abolish itself through a secularization of its goals before liberalism could emerge.

This led to the situation described by Hegel as characteristic of the early periods of lordship and bondage: violent and idle masters, and a class of fearful and dependent slaves with little concept of their own freedom.

The realm of politics remains autonomous from that of culture, and has its own special dignity as the point of intersection between desire, thymos, and reason.

The fact that democracy took off because it was the most rational possible political system and "fit" a broader human personality shared across cultures is not seriously considered.

Successful political modernization thus requires the preservation of something pre-modern within its framework of rights and constitutional arrangements, the survival of peoples and the incomplete victory of states.

The British had invented radar and were well ahead of the Germans in technology, yet the German machine was surprisingly good because the antenna was machined to tolerances superior to anything that could be produced in England.

In fact, their behavior is irrational in strictly utilitarian terms: they work so hard that they are never able to make use of their money; they can't enjoy their leisure because they have none; and in the process they ruin their health and their prospects for a comfortable retirement, because they are likely to die sooner.

Nonetheless, 'the idea of duty in one's calling' lived on 'like the ghost of dead religious beliefs' in the contemporary world, and the work ethic of modern Europe could not be fully explained without reference to its spiritual origins.

There are minute rules, as comforting as bandages; individual perception and judgment, which once called forth his creativity, are relinquished as burdens.

Those who feared the consequences of consumerism for the work ethic tended, like Marx, to forget the infinitely elastic nature of human desire and insecurity, which continues to push people to work up to their physical limits.

The paternalistic loyalty shown by a company to its worker is repaid by a higher level of effort on the part of the worker, who is working not only for himself but for the glory and reputation of the larger organization.

Like political liberalism, economic liberalism is not totally self-sustaining, but depends on a degree of irrational thymos.

But it may not win every battle, finding instead that certain cultures and certain manifestations of thymos are difficult to digest.

The strength of the Islamic revival can only be understood if one understands how deeply the dignity of Islamic society had been wounded in its double failure to maintain the coherence of its traditional society and to successfully assimilate the techniques and values of the West.

But the moment he seeks to assert his personal dignity and rights against the group, he is subject to a social ostracism and loss of status that can be as devastating as the overt tyranny of traditional despotisms.

In many Asian societies, by contrast, such wholesale rejection of the prevailing consensus by a lone individual would be regarded as lunacy.

Democracy is a drag on growth, Lee has argued, because it interferes with rational economic planning and promotes a kind of egalitarian self-indulgence in which a myriad of private interests assert themselves at the expense of the community as a whole.

The tyranny would be one of deference, the willing obedience of people to higher authority and their conformity to a rigid set of social norms.

The triumph of the coldest of all cold monsters has been incomplete.

The true progenitor of realism was Machiavelli, who taught that the best states would have to emulate the policies of the worst states if they were to survive.

In its most extreme form, realism treats nation-states like billiard balls, whose internal contents, hidden by opaque shells, are irrelevant in predicting their behavior.

Military capabilities—the quantities of tanks, planes, and guns—are not as fickle, but constitute in themselves indicators of intent.

History was rather a chaotic and ceaseless series of struggles among nations, in which liberalism had no particularly privileged position.

Treating a disease that no longer exists, realists now find themselves proposing costly and dangerous cures to healthy patients.

The ultimate ground of war among states is therefore thymos rather than self-preservation.

Are cases of countries seeking to grow smaller equally instances of the struggle for power, as those cases where they are seeking to grow larger through conquest and military buildup?

It does not matter how many tanks and planes a country has if its soldiers and airmen are not willing to get in them and use them against the nation's purported enemies.

With its advent, religion was defanged by being made tolerant.

Tocqueville, amazed that she speaks of this as lightly as she discusses the weather, attributes the softening of customs that had occurred since then to the rise of equality.

In such states megalothymia has found other outlets besides war, or else has atrophied to the point that there is little left to provoke a modern version of the bloody battle.

They know that their neighbors are too self-indulgent and consumerist to risk death, full of entrepreneurs and managers but lacking in princes or demagogues whose ambitions alone are sufficient to start wars.

The demand for this kind of recognition leads potentially to conflict with other groups seeking recognition for their particular dignity.

Moreover, once mass populations were motivated for war by nationalism they could rise to heights of thymotic anger seldom seen in dynastic conflicts, constraining leaders from dealing with enemies moderately or flexibly.

Uzbek and Kazakh nationalists are today going back to libraries to 're-discover' historical languages and cultures that are for many of them entirely new acquisitions.

The French can continue to savor their wines and the Germans their sausages, but this will all be done within the sphere of private life alone.

Like religion, nationalism is in no danger of disappearing, but like religion, it appears to have lost much of its ability to stimulate Europeans to risk their comfortable lives in great acts of imperialism.

On the contrary, most advanced European states would seek to avoid entanglement in such controversies like a tar baby, intervening only in the face of egregious violations of human rights or threats to their own nationals.

For the foreseeable future, the world will be divided between a post-historical part, and a part that is still stuck in history.

All developed democracies have imposed limits on immigration at one time or another, but this has usually been done, so to speak, with a bad conscience.

The relationship between democracies and non-democracies will still be characterized by mutual distrust and fear, and despite a growing degree of economic interdependence, force will continue to be the ultima ratio in their mutual relations.

But in making calculations of power, democracies have to remember that legitimacy is a form of power as well, and that strong states frequently hide grave internal weaknesses.

International law is merely domestic law writ large.

The post-historical world is one in which the desire for comfortable self-preservation has been elevated over the desire to risk one's life in a battle for pure prestige.

Left to themselves, can those stable, long-standing liberal democracies of Europe and America be indefinitely self-sustaining, or will they one day collapse from some kind of internal rot, much as communism has done?

Not everyone can be a concert pianist or a center for the Lakers, nor do they have, as Madison noted, equal facilities for acquiring property.

This expression is a misnomer, insofar as the social structure of modern democracies still resembles the classic pyramid, rather than a Christmas ornament bulging in the middle.

The real injury that is done to poor or homeless people is less to their physical well-being than to their dignity.

A political movement may one day revive Aristophanes' plan in the Assembly of Women to force handsome boys to marry ugly women and vice versa, or the future may turn up new technologies for mastering this original injustice on the part of nature.

These passions exist in American society because of, and not despite, the smallness of its actual remaining inequalities.

Autonomous man, rationally able to follow laws he has created for himself, was reduced to a self-congratulatory myth.

The intellectual impasse in which modern relativism has left us does not permit us to answer either of these attacks definitively, and therefore does not permit defense of liberal rights traditionally understood.

One is reminded of Groucho Marx's joke that he would never want to be a member of a club that would admit him as a member: what is the value of recognition that comes to everyone merely by virtue of being a human being?

But in the end, the mother will know if she has neglected her child, the father will knew if he has gone back to drinking, the daughter will know if she has lied, for 'the tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself.'

Nietzsche pointed out that any form of real excellence must initially arise out of discontent, a division of the self against itself and ultimately a war against the self with all the suffering that entails: 'one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.'

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

For thus you speak: 'Real are we entirely, and without belief or superstition.' Thus you stick out your chests—but alas, they are hollow!

As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone.

Human life, then, involves a curious paradox: it seems to require injustice, for the struggle against injustice is what calls forth what is highest in man.

Or would it turn out that man's satisfaction, as opposed to his happiness, arose not from the goal itself, but from the struggle and work along the way?

They will want to be citizens rather than bourgeois, finding the life of masterless slavery—the life of rational consumption—in the end, boring.

Megalothymia is, as it always was, a morally ambiguous phenomenon: both the good things and the bad things of life flow from it, simultaneously and necessarily.

The founders of modern liberalism understood, in effect, that Alcibiades' desire for recognition might have been better directed toward manufacturing the first steam engine or microprocessor.

The Alpinist has, in short, re-created for him or herself all the conditions of historical struggle: danger, disease, hard work, and finally the risk of violent death.

A tea ceremony does not serve any explicit political or economic purpose; even its symbolic significance has been lost over time. And yet, it is an arena for megalothymia in the form of pure snobbery.

A private association, no matter how small, constitutes a community, and as such serves as an ideal of a larger project toward which an individual can work and sacrifice his own selfish wants.

Raising children or making a marriage work through a lifetime requires personal sacrifices that are irrational, if looked at from a cost-benefit calculus.

The sense of identity provided by regionalism and localism diminishes, and people find themselves retreating into the microscopic world of their families which they carry around with them from place to place like lawn furniture.

One suspects that some people will not be satisfied until they prove themselves by that very act that constituted their humanness at the beginning of history: they will want to risk their lives in a violent battle.

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause.

No one knows anybody else. But all are seized by one earnest emotion: War, war, and a sense of togetherness.

It fires indiscriminately, shooting out the legs of not only the 'absolutisms,' dogmas, and certainties of the Western tradition, but that tradition's emphasis on tolerance, diversity, and freedom of thought as well.

The dissatisfaction arises precisely where democracy has triumphed most completely: it is a dissatisfaction with liberty and equality.

Rather than the mark of exceptional character, it became an experience forced on masses of men, and ultimately women and children as well.

These are not the hallmarks of a civilization wound tight like a spring, ready to immolate itself on the pyre of new and unforeseen fanaticisms, but rather of one quite satisfied with what it is and will be.

Rather than a thousand shoots blossoming into as many different flowering plants, mankind will come to seem like a long wagon train strung out along a road.

There are, of course, scholars who would suggest that political participation in the Soviet Union is somehow not real. . . such assertions do not seem to me to be worth prolonged and serious discussion.

The difficulty in fitting totalitarian states into Weber's categories suggests the limitations of his rather formal and artificial system of ideal types.

Its imposing military structure, the largest in the Middle East and based on oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia's, proved hollow because in the end the Iraqi population was not willing to fight for the regime.

I fully endorse Jeremy Azrael's view that the Russian people are owed an apology by their numerous Western detractors, who believed them incapable of choosing democracy, and by their own Russophobic intelligentsia.

Indeed, these societies were regarded as so different that they were studied by separate disciplines of 'Sinology,' 'Sovietology,' or 'Kremlinology,' that paid attention not to the broad sweep of civil society, but only to politics, its supposed sovereign, and often the politics of a group of ten or twelve powerful men at that.

Hence Athenian democracy was able to execute its most famous citizen, Socrates, for in effect exercising his right of free speech and corrupting the young.

And the whole story of Hegel would indeed not be worth relating, were it not for its more sinister consequences, which show how easily a clown may be a 'maker of history.'

Hence the need for greater comfort does not exactly arise within you directly; it is suggested to you by those who hope to make a profit from its creation.

the Russians and the Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer.

It is this hierarchy among paradigms that ensures a coherence and unidirectionality to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

This kind of state-centered reform "from above" is, of course, a two-edged sword; while destroying traditional or feudal institutions it also creates a new, "modern" form of bureaucratic despotism.

Apart from the economic consequences of abolishing the division of labor, it is not clear that a life of such dilettantism could ever be satisfying.

If modern technology has not served to make men happier, but has become their master and destroyer, then the prospect of a cataclysm that would, so to speak, wipe the slate clean and force mankind to start over would be a manifestation of the benevolence of nature rather than of nature's cruelty.

Chapter 9. The Victory of the VCR

The notion that either the political or economic liberalism of the developed world should be the end point of historical development was attacked as a form of 'cultural imperialism'.

In any case, import substitution was particularly indiscriminate in Latin America, and was continued long after it could be justified for the protection of new industries.

Ideology provides little guidance in resolving a struggle between, say, two branches of the chemical industry for investment resources.

A better term would perhaps be 'failed' or 'incompetent' totalitarianisms, which nonetheless fails to capture their brutality.

Fundamentalist Shi'ism, like fascism, can be seen as a nostalgic effort to recover a form of pre-industrial society through new and radically different means.

Individuals may believe that they have 'clear and distinct ideas' concerning these topics, but so do lunatics and madmen, and the distinction between the two is not always clear-cut.

For according to him, men were fundamentally equal in their ability to kill one another; if one was physically weaker, then he could still get the better of his opponent through cunning or by ganging up with other men.

But civil society is the precondition for a liberation of human acquisitiveness: man can accumulate not just what he needs, but whatever he wants without limit.

The previous regime, armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology, denigrated man into a production force and nature into a production tool.

This routine acceptance of moral degradation is itself part of the degradation of thymotic life that Havel sees as an inevitable consequence of post-totalitarian communism.

Other emotions may be more common and more venerated—patriotism, idealism, vengeance, enthusiasm of every kind—but they are no substitute for a thirst for fame and honor.

The general will, made up of the individual wills of the citizens of the republic, could be thought of as a single, giant thymotic individual who found satisfaction in his own freedom to be self-determining and self-assertive.

Kojève argues that the fear of death is metaphysically necessary to the slave's subsequent development, not because he flees it, but because it reveals to him his essential nothingness.

National unity is the only true precondition for democracy listed by Dankwart Rustow in 'Transitions to Democracy.'

While not denying the importance of economic and cultural factors, Linz and his associates have properly emphasized the autonomy and dignity of politics, and put it into much better balance with the realm of the sub-political.

A certain Russophobia among the Russian elite itself, a deep pessimism in the ability of Soviet citizens to take control of their own lives, and a fatalism about the inevitability of strong state authority, at a certain point become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Contemporary 'Liberation Theology' in Latin America is a worthy heir to the Counterreformation insofar as it has served to de-legitimize rational, unlimited capitalist accumulation.

In Japan, the primary social relationships are not with one's contemporaries, but vertical ones between sempai and kohai, superior and inferior.

In an astonishing reversal of customary linguistic usage, he calls theories that take account of domestic politics 'reductionist,' in contrast to his theory, which reduces the entire complexity of world politics to the 'system.'

It is not at all clear that World War I was the result of multipolarity so much as a decayed multipolarity that increasingly resembled bipolarity.

The graphic portrayal of violence on film is probably a reflection of how unusual it is in the lives of the people who attend those films.

The re-emergence of a politically significant degree of revanchism in a democratic Germany against a democratic Poland will be an important test of the thesis that liberal democracies don't fight one another.

It is interesting that many new national groups are seeking sovereignty despite the fact that their size and geographical position make them unviable militarily as independent entities, at least according to realist premises.

Frequently slighted or neglected by realists who believed the Cold War was entirely a matter of tank divisions and nuclear warheads, the U.S.-sponsored radios turned out to play a major role in keeping alive the idea of democracy.

Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of history, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals, and would indulge in love like adult beasts.

It is the state in which the basis of man's humanity withers away, or in which man loses his humanity.

See the discussion of Nietzsche's relationship to German fascism in the introductory chapter of Werner Dannhauser, Nietzsche's View of Socrates.

Cooper, Barry. 1984. The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. "The End of History?" The National Interest no. 16 (Summer): 3-18.

Harrison, Lawrence E. 1985. Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case.

Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies.

Pye, Lucian W. 1990a. "Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism."

Strauss, Leo. 1991. On Tyranny. Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, revised and expanded edition, ed. V. Gourevitch and M. Roth.

Beast with red cheeks, 162, 170-180, 188

Christianity: as slave ideology, 62, 196-198, 205, 261, 301

Dignity, 167, 168, 173, 174, 176, 180, 196-198, 201, 204-206, 214, 237, 295-298

Glory, as form of recognition, 162, 183, 184

Master and slave relationship, 147, 152, 155-156, 159-160, 182, 192-198, 200-201, 205, 207, 214, 217, 245, 259, 261, 300, 308-309

Nationalism, 171, 207, 266-275; as form of recognition, 201, 214, 266, 270.

Recognition, desire for, 135, 144, 147, 150, 152-163, 165, 166, 170-191, 288, 289

Thymos, 162-165, 168-191, 198, 201, 204, 206-207, 213, 214, 288, 289, 334, 337; origins of work, 223-234; relationship to culture, 213; war and, 255, 256, 259.

thymotic origins of, 223-234

More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the 'end point of mankind's ideological evolution' and the 'final form of human government,' and as such constituted the 'end of history.'

We have become so accustomed by now to expect that the future will contain bad news with respect to the health and security of decent, liberal, democratic political practices that we have problems recognizing good news when it comes.

Modern natural science is a useful starting point because it is the only important social activity that by common consensus is both cumulative and directional, even if its ultimate impact on human happiness is ambiguous.

The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige.

The desire for recognition that led to the original bloody battle for prestige between two individual combatants leads logically to imperialism and world empire.

The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a 'last man' who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favor of comfortable self-preservation.

The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of us into deep historical pessimists.

Four years of indescribably horrible trench warfare, in which tens of thousands died in a single day over a few yards of devastated territory, was, in the words of Paul Fussell, 'a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth.'

The suicidal self-destructiveness of the European state system in two world wars gave lie to the notion of superior Western rationality.

Societies of which permanent criticism is an integral feature are the only livable ones, but they are also the most fragile.

The year 1989—the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution—marked the decisive collapse of communism as a factor in world history.

Any number of Soviet young people, despairing of the deteriorating quality of life in the USSR, will tell you that their only desire is to live in a 'normal' country.

Even non-democrats will have to speak the language of democracy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard.

The more one knows about a particular country, the more one is aware of the 'maelstrom of external contingency' that differentiated that country from its neighbors, and the seemingly fortuitous circumstances that led to a democratic outcome.

But to cite the failure of liberal democracy in any given country, or even in an entire region of the world, as evidence of democracy's overall weakness, reveals a striking narrowness of view.

He stands proudly on the pyramid of the world-process; and while he lays the final stone of his knowledge, he seems to cry aloud to listening Nature: 'We are at the top, we are at the top; we are the completion of Nature!'

Zulu spears were no match for British rifles, no matter how brave individual warriors were: mastery of science was the reason why Europe could conquer most of what is now the Third World.

One might say in fact that it was in the highly complex and dynamic 'post-industrial' economic world that Marxism-Leninism as an economic system met its Waterloo.

The developed North had locked up the world market for sophisticated manufactured goods like automobiles and airplanes, leaving the Third World to be, in effect, global "hewers of wood and drawers of water."

The American Founding Fathers may have been angered over the attempts of the British Crown to tax them without representation in Parliament, but their decision to declare independence and fight Britain in order to establish a new democratic order can hardly be explained as a matter of economic efficiency.

The Universal Historian must be ready to discard entire peoples and times as essentially pre- or non-historical, because they do not bear on the central "plot" of his or her story.

Therefore, to speak of the 'origin' of self-consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for 'recognition.'

Indeed, we do not even have a corrimon vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts.

Man is a fundamentally other-directed and social animal, but his sociability leads him not into a peaceful civil society, but into a violent struggle to the death for pure prestige.

Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself.

Hegel, in other words, finds something morally praiseworthy in the pride of the aristocrat-warrior who is willing to risk his life, and something ignoble in the slavish consciousness that seeks self-preservation above all else.

Hobbes compares his state to the Leviathan because it is "King of all the children of pride."

It is rather that they saw the problem of politics as being in some sense the effort to persuade the would-be master to accept the life of the slave in a kind of classless society of slaves.

Lockean man did not need to be public-spirited, patriotic, or concerned for the welfare of those around him; rather, as Kant suggested, a liberal society could be made up of devils, provided they were rational.

It is the part of the personality which is the fundamental source of the emotions of pride, anger, and shame, and is not reducible to desire, on the one hand, or reason on the other.

The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message: 'I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.'

It is only thymotic man, the man of anger who is jealous of his own dignity and the dignity of his fellow citizens, the man who feels that his worth is constituted by something more than the complex set of desires that make up his physical existence—it is this man alone who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers.

The master's worth is therefore recognized by someone not quite human.

The very distinction between masters and slaves was abolished, and the former slaves became the new masters—not of other slaves, but of themselves.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'

States in many cases sit in uneasy tension with peoples, and in some instances might be said to be at war with their peoples.

Unlike money, which can simply be divided, dignity is something inherently uncompromisable: either you recognize my dignity, or the dignity of that which I hold sacred, or you do not.

In many Asian societies, by contrast, such wholesale rejection of the prevailing consensus by a lone individual would be regarded as lunacy.

Democracy is a drag on growth, Lee has argued, because it interferes with rational economic planning and promotes a kind of egalitarian self-indulgence in which a myriad of private interests assert themselves at the expense of the community as a whole.

The tyranny would be one of deference, the willing obedience of people to higher authority and their conformity to a rigid set of social norms.

In such states megalothymia has found other outlets besides war, or else has atrophied to the point that there is little left to provoke a modern version of the bloody battle.

For the foreseeable future, the world will be divided between a post-historical part, and a part that is still stuck in history.

The post-historical world is one in which the desire for comfortable self-preservation has been elevated over the desire to risk one's life in a battle for pure prestige.

Left to themselves, can those stable, long-standing liberal democracies of Europe and America be indefinitely self-sustaining, or will they one day collapse from some kind of internal rot, much as communism has done?

The real injury that is done to poor or homeless people is less to their physical well-being than to their dignity.

A political movement may one day revive Aristophanes' plan in the Assembly of Women to force handsome boys to marry ugly women and vice versa, or the future may turn up new technologies for mastering this original injustice on the part of nature.

These passions exist in American society because of, and not despite, the smallness of its actual remaining inequalities.

Autonomous man, rationally able to follow laws he has created for himself, was reduced to a self-congratulatory myth.

The intellectual impasse in which modern relativism has left us does not permit us to answer either of these attacks definitively, and therefore does not permit defense of liberal rights traditionally understood.

One is reminded of Groucho Marx's joke that he would never want to be a member of a club that would admit him as a member: what is the value of recognition that comes to everyone merely by virtue of being a human being?

Or would it turn out that man's satisfaction, as opposed to his happiness, arose not from the goal itself, but from the struggle and work along the way?

One suspects that some people will not be satisfied until they prove themselves by that very act that constituted their humanness at the beginning of history: they will want to risk their lives in a violent battle.

Beast with red cheeks, 162, 170-180, 188

Christianity: as slave ideology, 62, 196-198, 205, 261, 301