There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher, the late British Prime Minister once said, highlighting what she thought of the responsibility of the individual. Thatcher’s idea of maximum individual and minimum state was the centrepiece of her economic philosophy. Her administration privatised public industries, deregulated the financial sector and dismantled the welfare state, unleashing a new era of free market policies. Across the Atlantic, President Ronald Reagan of the U.S. did the same. What was then called Reaganomics and Thatcherism, which came to be known as “neoliberalism”, spread across the world as a leading economic philosophy of the ruling classes in both liberal and authoritarian states. But neoliberal economic policies also heightened inequality, which created social tensions that eventually led to the rise of far-right leaders and parties on one side and radical identitarian groups on the other, which is now threatening liberalism itself. This is the context of Francis Fukuyama’s latest book, Liberalism and its Discontents.
Fukuyama is a western political philosopher who doesn’t need an introduction to a global audience. He shot to fame with his 1989 essay, ‘The End of History’, written a few months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in which he argued that humankind’s end (objective or target) is liberalism. But his recent books, Identity (2008) and Liberalism, are an acknowledgement that the political situation today is demonstrably different from 1992 when he updated the essay into the book, The End of History and the Last Man. While he still believes that liberalism is the end of history, the liberal theory he embraces is no longer triumphant and the road is long and bumpy. Hence the title: Liberalism and its Discontents.
Taken to extremes
It is an earnest attempt by a die-hard liberal to understand the criticism the theory faces and identify solutions. For Fukuyama, the fundamental tenets of liberalism — personal autonomy, individual rights, equality and property ownership — are sacrosanct. The problem contemporary liberalism faces is that it was taken to the extremes by both the right and the left in the context of “grotesque inequalities” triggered by neoliberal experiments. In the book, Fukuyama emerges as a liberal democrat who believes in the role of state (without the state, liberal principles cannot be implemented), regulated markets and limited welfarism (individuals need to be protected “from adverse circumstances beyond their control”).
He also challenges some of the historical criticism of liberal theory. Fukuyama argues that Abraham Lincoln based his fight for the abolition of slavery on the Declaration of Independence which says “All men are created equal.” He calls into question the argument that it was colonialism that made the West rich, citing the examples of the modernisation of East and Southeast Asian economies in the last quarter of the 20th century. For him, communist China saw its best economic performance when it flirted with liberalism.
But the problem with Fukuyama’s narrative is that it treats classical liberalism as a pristine theory that’s dissociated from the violence committed by its practitioners. That allows Fukuyama, who argues there’s no alternative, to continue to believe in the moral superiority of liberalism without any qualms, like the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1957. When the Declaration of Independence, one of the foundational documents of liberalism, was announced, the U.S. was a slaveholding country and it continued to be so for decades. Even after the “Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen” of 1789, France continued its racist policies at home and abroad for decades. European colonialism is today largely seen as a racist, violent project, unleashed by the same liberals who believed in individual autonomy, equality and consumer rights.
Liberal excesses
Colonialism didn’t come to an end because the colonial masters one day decided to respect liberal principles — it was brought to an end by decades-long anti-colonial, nationalist movements which often met with violent reaction from their overlords. This violent project didn’t come to an end with the collapse of colonialism. Liberal internationalists in the West, commanding over the world’s most dangerous militaries, started invading countries in the East to export democracy and liberal values, and thereby shattering societies and dismantling states, spawning anarchy and violence. The list is endless, from the Irish famine of 1845 to the Iraq war of 2003.
For Fukuyama, neoliberalism is an aberration that could be fixed with state intervention. But minimum state and the autonomy of big industries were part of classical liberalism as well. Before the birth of the regulatory state, as Fukuyama writes, financial and industrial giants had enormous influence over state policies. Neoliberalism is actually a return to this original principle that’s based on maximum individual. Fukuyama gives the example of post-war European welfarism to argue that liberal democracies could build an equity-based development model. But he has overlooked two underlying factors — the tragedy of the Great Depression that strengthened the call for a stronger state and the threat of communism and working class revolutions. When he writes about the economic development of Southeast Asian nations, Fukuyama conveniently sidesteps the fact that these countries have historically had stronger state control over societies and economies, which manifested in their response to the COVID-19 crisis, in contrast to that of the West’s. Even in the case of China, the real question is whether China flirted with liberalism or liberalism flirted with China?
Liberalism as a political theory, a governance model (liberal democracy) and an economic philosophy (private property ownership) have played a critical role in human progress. But it’s not an ideological hegemon and like other theories, it also has a very violent history. Many liberal theorists, driven by what Pankaj Mishra calls a “fanatical conviction of moral superiority”, do not see this historical context and the problematic praxis of liberalism. Fukuyama is not an exception.
Liberalism and its Discontents; Francis Fukuyama, Profile Books, ₹499.
stanly.johny@thehindu.co.in
