Nietzsche’s argument drew from the tripartite division of the soul in Plato’s Republic. Its fatal flaw is its drive toward equality: Democracy is synonymous with universally enforced mediocrity. According to Nietzsche, democracy’s fatal flaw is not that it produces greater and greater inequalities, as the left thinks. The elder Fukuyama disregards the brakes that his younger self was at pains to set up.Īs the full title of his famous book- The End of History and the Last Man-indicated, the young Fukuyama was responding to Nietzsche’s accusation that the human type produced by democracy is the contemptible “Last Man.” A tepid hedonist, the Last Man has no longing for excellence and finds what is noble unintelligible. Yet the most astonishing aspect of the change is Fukuyama’s altered stance toward the revolution of unlimited technological progress.
The nuanced account of human nature has vanished, swept up in the absolutization of an “inner self,” the recognition of which forms the core of the new liberalism. Fukuyama’s defense of liberal democracy has changed, and in ways that reveal a fundamental transformation of American liberalism itself. Yet, strangely enough, his new book contains passages that sound just like the caricature his detractors attacked.
Liberal democracy, Fukuyama held, was the only regime that satisfied most of the perennial desires of human nature, although there would be delicate and difficult trade-offs. His detractors often accuse him of triumphalism, but Fukuyama’s argument was more sophisticated than they realize. To the general public, Francis Fukuyama’s name is synonymous with the “end of history” thesis, which contends that since the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism, liberal democracy is the only ideology that has a universal appeal. Farrar, straus and giroux, 192 pages, $26
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