History ended. The only fight left is over who gets to inherit Michael Oakeshott’s legacy.

The end of history and the last man

Francis Fukuyama, the author of "The End of History” the 1989 lecture, which, along with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”which was written in response, framed much of the debate in international politics departments around the globe, has made a resurgent comeback. In a recent interview with DW, the influential social theorist argued that he’s still right about the end of history—that he’s been right all along. 

Author Francis Fukuyama

In response to a question asking how he’d respond to critics who question whether the triumph of Western liberal democracy was the last step in the human species’ sociocultural evolution—the endpoint of all human history, by saying, “I think the biggest problems have been with the misunderstanding. The concept of the end of history was the question: Where does the direction of history point? Does it point towards communism, which was the view of many intellectuals prior to that point? Or does it point towards liberal democracy? Which I think, in that respect, I'm still right.

History, in the philosophical sense, is really the development, or the evolution - or the modernization - of institutions, and the question is: In the world's most developed societies, what type [of institutions] are they? I think it's pretty clear that any society that wants to be modern still needs to have a combination of democratic political institutions in a market economy. And I don't think that China, or Russia, or any of the competitors out there really undermine that point.”

The End of History according to David Brooks

David Brooks in a recent New York Times piece advances an argument that echoes Fukuyama’s position. “The Cold War settled this contest of historic visions,” Brooks writes. “Democracy won.” 

David Brooks of the New York Times

But he’s a little less triumphant about this ideological victory than Fukuyama. Brooks cites Mark Lilla’s New Republic essay called “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age” as holding that “the post-Cold War era hasn’t meant the triumph of one ideology; it destroyed the tendency to rely upon big historic visions of any sort. Lilla argues that we have slid into a debauched libertarianism. Nobody envisions the large sweep of events; we just go our own separate ways making individual choices.”

Yes, history is over, Brooks asserts, but it has no shape. “The dream of universal democracy seems naïve. National interest matters most.” Brooks thinks Lilla is right to doubt Fukuyama in thinking that history is the inexorable march toward universal democracy—his piece “both describes and unfortunately exemplifies the current mood—and he laments it. “Arab nations are not going to be democratic anytime soon. The world is an aviary of different systems – autocracy, mercantile despotism – and always will be. Instead of worrying about spreading democracy, we’d be better off trying to make theocracies less beastly.”

Andrew Sullivan thinks Fukuyama was right and David Brooks is the only non-libertarian left standing

Andrew Sullivan wades into the debate—he’s ready to take Brooks on regarding his take on Lilla’s piece, on geopolitics, and, as we’ll see later, on Michael Oakeshott. Sullivan’s recent blog post more or less concedes that Fukuyama was right, too—calling “foolish” anyone who would “deny that most countries still seem headed over time toward Western norms. While I think Sullivan overstates the degree to which Francis Fukuyama was right, I completely agree with his point that illiberal, undemocratic political formations each have their own distinctive natures that need to be understood in their own terms, not as a lesser or greater form of democracy in potentia.

Andrew Sullivan of The Dish

Sullivan, the good Oakeshottian, rightly reminds us that “in the here and now, all sorts of hybrid [forms of government] are forming and will form, as they always have,” and that given such realities, “our goal in foreign policy is to understand them better by using the vast apparatus of political philosophy bequeathed to us by our Western canon, and tapping into our collective reserves of diplomatic and military experience, and adjust accordingly.” 

Sullivan labels Brooks a ‘liberal’ on the basis of Brooks’s impulse to assert the universal values found in American droit de seigneur. 

The passage in Brooks’s piece that Sullivan cites as being the exemplification of this ethos of American exceptionalism is this: “Such is life in a spiritual recession. Americans have lost faith in their own gospel. This loss of faith is ruinous from any practical standpoint. The faith bound diverse Americans, reducing polarization. The faith gave elites a sense of historic responsibility and helped them resist the money and corruption that always licked at the political system. Without the vibrant faith, there is no spiritual counterweight to rampant materialism. Without the faith, the left has grown strangely callous and withdrawing in the face of genocide around the world. The right adopts a zero-sum mentality about immigration and a pinched attitude about foreign affairs. Without the faith, leaders grow small; they have no sacred purpose to align themselves with.”

Toward a Libertarianism?

Sullivan argues that the same political ideology that regards government or governmental authority ‘axiomatically’ not keeping individuals from being what and who they want to be has been extended to apply to the international relationship of sovereign states. No super-power, even a benevolent one, has the “right to dictate the choices and fate of any other individual country, however despotic and evil its regime might be.” So, there’s no principle to stop Putin from annexing Crimea or to keep Israel from pursuing its policy agenda against the West Bank. Sullivan cites the Iraq war as the cause célèbre of this movement—as “a catastrophe now regarded as utterly illegitimate by everybody on the planet, apart from a few Cheney dead-enders and Tony Blair.”

Arguing over Oakeshott & what it means for politics

Michael Oakeshott argued that "politics is the art not of imposing a way of life, but of organising a common life… the art of accommodating moralities to one another." 

Michael Oakeshott

Oakeshott, interestingly, while Sullivan espouses a theory hewed from Oakeshott’s politics, it was Brooks who used Oakeshott’s thought as a guide to dealing with the goings-on in Iraq as far back as 2003. Brooks even cites Sullivan as providing the best insight into how to understand Oakeshott. “Sullivan, he wrote, observes that “the easiest way to grasp Oakeshott is to know that he loved Montaigne and Shakespeare. He loved Montaigne for his skepticism and Shakespeare for his array of eccentric characters. Oakeshott seemed to measure a society by how well it nurtured idiosyncratic individuals, and he certainly qualified as one.”

Brooks, circa 2003, sounds a lot like Sullivan from this morning—a similarity that extends beyond their shared desire to cultivate intellectual and personal idiosyrancies to encompass their outlooks on geopolitics.  In his 2003 piece ‘Arguing with Oakeshott, Brooks wrote, “We can't know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. Be aware of what you do not know. Do not go charging off to remake a society when you don't understand its moral traditions, when you do not even understand yourself. Do not imagine that if you conquer a nation and impose something you call democracy that the results will be in any way predictable. Do not try to administer a country from behind a security bunker.”

Whose conservative?, Which rationality?

In thinking through the political landscape in 2003, Brooks made a ‘concession’ to his imagined Oakeshott: “government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. The Middle East could not continue down its former course.” 

What was Brooks’s basis for holding such a position? He broke to Oakeshott, who was ambivalent about the American revolution, and thought that the ideals espoused in 1776 and the political regime that followed worked “precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.” 

Compare that to Sullivan’s contemporary position that, in politics, we now must bracket “the simple democracy-spectrum and look for how to deal with various forms of oligarchy, kleptocracy, or emerging democratic society. Now and again, a little nudge might help (see the Balkans in the 1990s). But for the most part, the changes we want will happen without us (Tunisia, anyone?), and the places where we simply act as if the world were a blank page ready to be filled by democracies (Israel, Libya, anyone?) will turn out to be a case study in the frequent destiny of good intentions.”

I’m not the rationalist, you are

Both Brooks and Sullivan are careful to avoid the ideological plague that Oakeshott identified: rationalism. 

“By a pardonable abridgement of history,” Oakeshott wrote, “the rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon’s hopes and the neglect of the skepticism of Decartes; modern rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.” 

Oakeshott traces the evolution of the rationalist from his seventeenth century origins, in which what “was ‘L’art de penser’, became Your mind and how to use it, a plan by world-famous experts for developing a trained mind at a fraction of the usual cost. What was the Art of Living has become the Technique of Success, and the early and more modest incursions of the sovereignty of technique into education has blossomed into Pelmanism.”

Sullivan and Brooks both advance positions relative to international intervention that draw heavily on the ‘conservative’ thought of Michael Oakeshott. Interestingly, both react to Lilla’s use of the aviary metaphor. It’s Sullivan, though, who makes explicit the anti-rationalist insight borrowed from Oakeshott that would guide the Oakeshottian confronting such an unfriendly world. Sullivan is right: such a world calls for aviarists, not ideologues. 

The Plan to resist all planning is better than its opposite, but…

Oakeshott dismissed Hayek’s brand of political economic thinking with the line, “A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics.” He did so on grounds that Hayek had committed the kind of intellectual sin that Sullivan and Brooks are trying so hard to avoid: he was a rationalist. As Oakeshott put it, “This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom—not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine.”

Sullivan and Brooks come to slightly different political positions from a very similar ideology. One thinker who better articulates the principled reasons (and the reasons are important—Oakeshott argued, “when we come to consider what a man actually thought, it is not [the] bare ideas which are important, but the grounds or reasons for them which he believed to be cogent, the ratio decidendi”) we might hold for deciding one way or another is Richard Flathman. 

Willful liberalism and the liberal principle

Flathman persuasively argues in favor of what he calls the 'liberal principle'. Flathman’s liberal principle holds "it is a prima facie good for persons to form, to act on, and to satisfy and achieve desires and interestes, objectives and purposes."

In addition to the liberal principle, Flathman calls for a general presumption in favor of freedom—meaning when we assess what people should and should not be allowed to do, our default position should always be in favor of letting them do it. And any restriction on human action needs to pass a rigorous bar.

The highest ideal available to us, from Flathman’s perspective, is individuality "understood as self-making or self-enacting." And that the pursuit of this ideal requires "abundant social and political plurality and, essential to both, the widest possible freedom of action." His devotion to individual freedom is so extensive, those passages come from a book called Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist.

Flathman is consistently silent on matters of policy and how his ideas translate to the realm of politics (he comes by thisdisposition largely via Oakeshott, who thought that theory and practice were modally different enterprises. Many thinkers believe that theory and practice are different on normative grounds—for Oakeshott, the disjunction was epistemological!). But Sullivan’s take on politics can certainly fit easily within Flathman’s theoretical framework. Like Sullivan, Flathman argues insistently against the coercive power of the modern state.

Though Flathman is as wary of state power as any thinker I know, he’s no libertarian. Though it’s very begrudgingly, Flathman does allow that institutions are both necessary and desirable.

His reason? The most important question that can be asked about institutions is "whether or in what ways...[institutions] contribute to or obstruct attempts to pursue and...realize...the ideals of self-making, self-overcoming, and self-enactment."

Instead of libertarianism, Flathman posits a 'willful liberalism' in which a society will only work well so long as “a substantial number of people” for the most part “take care of themselves,” and don’t need to be “cared for” by others or by society. And there must be associates who, by cultivating virtuosities such as civility and especially magnanimity, care for others in the sense of not inflicting themselves harmfully or destructively on the latter.

Taking Flathman’s willful liberalism as a guide would allow for principled intervention—not on the basis of Brooks’s ‘spiritual’ purposiveness or Sullivan’s too-fatalistic libertarianism—but when it looks like stepping in is likely to do better for the institutions and institutionalisms people need to care for themselves.

Even better than Flathman: Mose Allison

I wasn’t convinced by either Fukuyama’s claim that history was at an end, or that any ideological opponent to ourselves as Hegelian last men would be on the wrong side of this post-historical world. You’d have to take a long—very long—view to be as sanguine as Fukuyama is here, “I think we're in for a rough period of time, with both Russia and China expanding. But I do think that it's a limited phenomenon - that in the long run, there's really only one important organizing idea out there: the idea of democracy in a market economy. So in the long run, I'm still optimistic.”

Whether Sullivan is correct that the answer is conservative—with conservatism properly understood—or more liberal—as Richard Flathman’s cultivation of a Nietzschean ‘pathos of distance’ vis-à-vis the coercive power of the modern state, the appropriate response to the set of circumstances we find ourselves in is perfectly embodied by Mose Allison:

“Ever since the world ended / There’s no more black and white / Ever since we all got blended / There’s no more reason to fuss and fight / Dogmas that we once defended / No longer seem worthwhile / Ever since the world ended / I face the future with a smile.”