Francis Fukuyama: The Long Arc of Historical Progress

[Nevilledog]

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Adam Thierer
@AdamThierer
"From a long-term perspective, liberalism has seen its ups and downs but has always come back in the end."
Excellent @WSJ feature essay by @FukuyamaFrancis on "The Long Arc of Historical Progress." Closing paragraph is spot on.
https://wsj.com/articles/the-long-arc-of-historical-progress-11651244262?page=1…
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4:31 PM · Apr 30, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-arc-of-historical-progress-11651244262?page=1

No paywall
https://archive.ph/5obNI

In a recent article in the Atlantic, the historian Anne Applebaum wrote that “There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them.” Her practical point was clear: Only by actively fighting back could the world’s democracies save themselves from Vladimir Putin and the world’s other newly assertive autocrats. But she was also making a deeper point: That there is no broad pattern to history or possibility of historical progress over time; outcomes are simply the result of actors duking it out over and over again. As she tweeted about the piece: “There is no arc of history, nothing inevitable about either democracy or dictatorship. What happens tomorrow depends on what all of us do today.” The “arc of history” likely refers to a favorite phrase of President Barack Obama, who often used it in adapting Martin Luther King Jr. ’s declaration, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In a narrow sense, Ms. Applebaum’s argument is incontrovertible. There is no underlying historical mechanism that brings us inexorably toward a liberal world order, similar to the Marxist belief that history would culminate in Communism. Mr. Putin’s attack on Ukraine demonstrates that many people in the West had grown complacent about the peace and prosperity brought about by the liberal order that has prevailed in recent decades. They didn’t think that anyone would challenge that order, certainly not with tanks and rockets and outright territorial aggression. And it is clearly true today that the liberal order requires believers in democracy to actively support it, in Ukraine and around the world.

But while we can agree on the short-term urgency of action, it is not at all clear that there is no arc of history or that this arc does not bend toward some form of justice. Social scientists and historians have addressed this question for years under the rubric of “structure” versus “agency” as the source of historical change. Structure refers to broad forces like technology, social classes, climate and geography, as determinants of political and economic outcomes. Agency, by contrast, refers to the decisions and actions taken by individual human beings, whether leaders at the top or actors at the grass roots. The idea of an “arc of history” does not deny the importance of individual agency; it just sees those actions within conditions set by larger structural forces.

“History,” as I used it in my 1989 article “The End of History?” and my 1992 book elaborating on the subject, did not refer to events but to that underlying structure: history with a capital H, what in today’s language would be called modernization or development. Since at least the late 18th century, an important current in Western thought maintained that there was indeed a universal and progressive historical process unfolding over the centuries, as opposed to earlier views that maintained that history was cyclical or simply a random process. This line of thought raises two separate questions: First, does History in the sense of modernization exist, and second, if so, toward what kind of society is it pointing? The first question is rather easy to answer; the second is much more complicated.

*snip*

[empedocles]

1. Big Picture

[malaise]

2. I have not given a shit about anything he says or writes since

his End of History. He’s a stupid man.