liberalism and its discontents book review

In this he reaffirms his “End of History” thesis: There is no real alternative on offer. Whether Fukuyama’s own account of liberalism is entirely satisfactory is another matter.įor Fukuyama, the challenges besetting contemporary liberalism arise from within liberalism itself. In itself this is a strong argument in favor of liberalism. It is also undertaken more by liberals than by anti-liberals, who find it convenient to meet liberalism with uncomplicated contempt than any attempt to understand it. As Trilling himself put it in The Liberal Imagination, “ criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time,” so that liberalism might “be aware of the weak or wrong expressions of itself.”Īttempting to recognize and reckon with genuinely illiberal views-seeking to understand your opponents-is a rare and welcome exercise.

In this Fukuyama follows earlier liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Lionel Trilling, and Isaiah Berlin, who sought to understand their opponents, not simply condemn them. But advocacy need not be distortion, and this work is the clearest brief account both of a broadly inclusive sense of liberalism and of some of the more interesting criticisms of it. Certainly, unlike his magisterial two-volume Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2015), this slender volume is more frankly an advocate’s work than an analyst’s. And his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, is a remarkably fair-minded-one might say liberal-minded-exposition of liberalism’s current predicament. Fukuyama, now at Stanford University, is a strong thinker. The slip-up is a little embarrassing, but it doesn’t really damage the book’s argument.

Even with this book, the pattern of neglect-by-vague-praise continues: None of its many reviewers, for all their pretense at comprehension, noticed that his drive-by definition of “deontology” (“not linked to any ontology or substantive theory of human nature”) is totally wrong: Deontology comes from deon, a Greek word here meaning something like “duty” and refers to the study of ethics. His subsequent work has received respectful public attention, but little scholarly engagement he is treated more as a symptom than an intellect. His notoriety for the “End of History” thesis is based on a misreading of that phrase, not a real reading of his 1989 National Interest article “The End of History?” or his less sanguine 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Francis Fukuyama’s work is generally treated much the way pigeons treat statues: as something on which to deposit badly digested ideas, which are then left for others to clean up.

Liberalism and its discontents book review