Liberal Democracy as the End of History

Christopher Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136624971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Francis Fukuyama claims that liberal democracy is the end of history. This book provides a theoretical re-examination of this claim through postmodernist ideas.

The book argues that postmodern ideas provide a valuable critique to Fukuyama's thesis, and poses the questions: can we talk about a universal and teleological history; a universal human nature; or an autonomous individual? It addresses whether postmodern theories - concerning the movement of time, what it means to behuman, and what it means to be an individual/subject - can be accommodated within a theory of a history that ends in liberal democracy.

The author argues that incorporating elements of postmodern thought into Fukuyama's theory makes it possible to produce a stronger and more compelling account of the theory that liberal democracy is the end of history. The result of this is to underpin Fukuyama's theory with a more complex understanding of the movement of time, the human and the individual, and to show that postmodern concepts can, paradoxically, be used to strengthen Fukuyama's theory that the end of history is liberal democracy. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, postmodernism and the work of Francis Fukuyama.

1

Methodology

An Approach to Philosophical Analysis

Introduction

My objective in this chapter is to provide an explanation, clarification and justification for the methodology I use in this book. I intend to explore postmodern approaches to conducting philosophical analysis and work from within this tradition. However, I have a larger aim in this chapter, and that is to outline what I believe to be a unique and interesting methodological approach for philosophical analysis, one which involves a blending of ideas from postmodern theory. My methodological approach is not the simple adoption of a pre-existing method, but a blending of ideas about doing philosophical research which I have developed from postmodern theories about textual analysis and approaches to conducting research. My approach is original and unique because, despite relying on preexisting ideas, it seeks to synthesise them to produce a new approach to philosophical analysis.

Although my methodological approach utilises ideas found in postmodern thought, the methodology I adopt is in keeping with the overall aim of the book, which is to find commonality and convergence between Modernist-Enlightenment and postmodern systems of thought. As I stated in the Introduction, I seek to find common ground between these two apparently opposing modes of thinking; and, my methodological approach aims to mirror this. My methodological approach converges with some Modernist methodological approaches, those which focus on the arguments and prioritise analysing the ideas and arguments of thinkers and texts. My approach does stand in contrast to the Cambridge School of intellectual history and its contextual approach, the approach of people like Skinner, who argue that a textual approach is in ‘danger of writing historical nonsense’.¹ However, even the contextualist method of analysing philosophical ideas seeks to find value in texts. For instance, Skinner argues that he wants people to use texts from the past so that they can ruminate on their own contemporary values; thus, he defends his methodology from accusations of antiquarianism by arguing that texts can provide valuable insights into our own contemporary location.² Thus a parallel can even be found between my approach and this approach, since both approaches to philosophical analysis are based on the objective of offering insights into the contemporary.³

Before I go on to elucidate my approach to philosophical study, I wish to remind the reader of the overall objective, structure and purpose of the book. My objective is to assess whether liberal democracy is the end of history. Thus, in Chapters 2 and 3, I put forward an idea of how history could end in liberal democracy. I do this through Fukuyama; however, I do so by constructing my own theory of how history might end in liberal democracy, through a modifying of Fukuyama’s ideas. I take things which are useful to me from Fukuyama’s work to construct the notion of a history which ends in liberal democracy. This exploration of Fukuyama’s thought is not an attempt to (re)produce his meaning. In Chapters 2 and 3, I do not seek to produce an exposé of Fukuyama’s thought, but an application and utilising of Fukuyama’s work. My aim is to test out the idea that history has ended in liberal democracy, rather than conducting an examination of Fukuyama and his critics per se; this is a result of the methodology I use and the conclusions I reach about how we should go about conducting research in philosophy.⁴ Thus, I invert the process and logic of constructing a methodology to suit my aims and objectives; instead, I construct a method for studying philosophy, derived from the hypothesis that the philosophical analyst cannot be objective and cannot locate the ‘true’ text that he/she is studying; and, then, in the book, I attempt to apply this as a methodology.

My approach to philosophical analysis starts from the question, how does the analyst use an author, a text or an idea? Therefore, my approach to philosophical analysis is self-reflective; it is not an examination of an author, but an examination of the value an author, text or idea has for the analyst, given the analyst’s current purpose.⁵ By trying to use authors and their ideas for the particular value they contain, I am not inviting an analysis of the author or text, itself. In the book, I bring in a range of postmodern thinkers to pose questions to Fukuyama; I use these authors, but I do not try to unlock their political/philosophical vision, e.g. I do not attempt to construct Butler or Rorty, etc. Instead, I use their ideas when they offer a powerful critique of Fukuyama to see if, and how, their ideas undermine the notion of a history which ends in liberal democracy. I am aware of the differences in opinion and philosophical outlook between the various postmodern authors, but I do not raise these disagreements, since my aim is to utilise these thinkers, their ideas and concepts to critique the notion of a history and liberal democracy.

The key Aspects of my Methodology

Before I produce a detailed explanation of my methodological approach, I will highlight and summarise the key aspects of the approach and methodology I take to philosophical analysis. Through an exploration of the notion of the death of the author, I argue that the first principle to follow when reading political philosophy from a postmodern perspective is to reject attempts to locate the ‘true’ meaning/ intention behind a text/author. I follow Barthes in accepting that the meaning of a text is ultimately deferred, since it is not the author, but the reader, who creates the meaning. This is not to say that the reader creates the whole meaning; rather, the reader has a context, and only through his/her context is he/she able to read (and create) the meaning of the text. This then leads to the second part of my approach to philosophical analysis; if we take the claim that it is the reader who produces meaning, I argue that the analyst of a philosophical work needs to explicitly narrate a meaning from the text, constructing an argument/idea which he/she wishes to take from it. Therefore it does not matter where a reference is from, and references to particular authors are merely invitations to take ideas/arguments from them in order to see how these ideas and concepts can be beneficial to the analyst. Following on from this, the third claim I make is that philosophical analysis and the reading of philosophical texts⁶ must serve a useful purpose. Since my approach to philosophical analysis is an approach which tries to find something in the text which works and serves a purpose for the analyst’s contemporary motivations, I argue that philosophical analysis needs to be an exercise in taking ideas/arguments from a text which act as the foundation or emancipatory basis for our own arguments about politics, political theory, society, etc. Thus, I embrace Rorty’s idea of being a ‘misreader’ of texts, where the reader takes ideas from the text and things which the author/audience may not have found there.⁷

Throughout this chapter, and this book, I place into doubt the legitimacy of references to ‘evidence’ and ‘truth’, since for postmodernists, ‘evidence’ does not allow us to construct a ‘truth’, since ‘evidence’ becomes encoded to tell a particular story and the same ‘evidence’ could be emplotted to tell a different story. The claim made by myself and many postmodernists is that ‘evidence’ is mute/neutral – it has a perpetual promiscuity and allows itself to be encoded by the analyst to narrate a particular narrative. Following on from my claim that there is an inability to find the meaning of a text and that ‘evidence’ is mute and then emplotted to tell a narrative, I argue that postmodern philosophical analysis rests on an acknowledgement of the fluidity of a text. There is, in a sense, no text which is complete prior to the reader – the text awaits part of its meaning to be imbued into it. Thus, the primary argument which is asserted in this chapter is the claim that the text has no fixed meaning without the reader, since the reader can only read the text from within his/her own present-centred culture and present-day conceptual schemes. Thus I argue that when the analyst interprets the text, he/she contextualises it through the limitations of his/her experiences and narrates or encodes his/her own meaning/argument into the text/author. I argue that since the analyst does not access the ‘true’ text, he/she has no reason to seek to produce a coherent account or (re)construction of the text(s) he/she is studying. I conclude that philosophical analysis ought to be a self-reflective process, whereby the analyst embraces the uniqueness of a passage in a text and takes from it what he/she deems to be most important to his/her own present-centred discourses. This rejection of producing a coherent text/author means the reader/analyst has greater freedom in how he/she uses texts/authors.

The methodology I propose is one which involves reading a text as a ‘stream of consciousness’ – a series of ideas, which emanate from the philosopher/text but where the reader only sees a text/author as something which is producing a variety of useful ideas. This allows the reader to re-fashion these ideas to his/her own socio-cultural-temporal context and purposes. Thus I argue that a text, in effect, floats free from time/space, since it is reconstructed, unlocked and recreated for a specific purpose in different socio-cultural-temporal contexts. I conclude that a text cannot be read in isolation since it is read within the socio-cultural-temporal expectations and understandings of the analyst; and, therefore, the meaning imbued into the text contains contextual references to the analyst’s own personal experiences, biases and ways of understanding/perceiving the world. Therefore, my approach to philosophical analysis is a method which recognises that the philosophical analysis which I conduct is being done for its own purposes and is performing an explicitly positioned narrative encoding of the texts which I have examined.

The Death of the Author

I begin my exploration of my methodological approach through an examination of Foucault’s and Barthes’ notion of the death of the author, since my rejection of ‘truth’ and subsequent rejection of trying to ‘locate’ the ‘true’ intention of the author is developed from the idea of the death of the author. For Foucault, the ‘author’ is not different from other men, and is not a genial creator who precedes the work, but a functional principle, since culture/society limits, excludes and effects the discourse the ‘author’ can produce. For Foucault, the text is an effect of the discourse of the social/temporal origins of its production; and, therefore, the author is effectively anonymous and the author function effectively disappears. Thus, Foucault concludes that it no longer makes sense to ask: who spoke?⁸ Foucault’s concept of the death of the author does not provide an approach to reading a text. However, if it no longer makes sense to ask who spoke or attempt to locate the ‘author’s’ meaning, we are left to ponder a new question: what methodology can we adopt for analysing and interpreting philosophical texts?

To elucidate how I intend to read philosophical texts, I turn to Barthes, who preceded Foucault in proclaiming the death of the author. However, Barthes postulates a different reason for proclaiming the death of the ‘author’. For Foucault, the ‘author’ dies, because he/she does not create the work, since the discourse precedes the ‘author’ and is fashioned in society; whereas, for Barthes, the ‘author’ dies because ‘a text is not a line of words releasing a single … meaning (the “message” of the Author-God)’.⁹ Based on Foucault’s theory, it makes little sense to say the author ‘dies’, since the ‘author’ is a functional principle; thus it would be more accurate to say the ‘author’ never lived, i.e. the discourse passed through a functional principle and we happen to call this ‘functional principle’ an ‘author’. However, for Barthes, the author lived, but dies because he/she does not control the meaning of the text he/she produced. Barthes argues meaning is ultimately deferred; the ‘author’ does not create the meaning – this is done by the reader: ‘the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred’.¹⁰ It is the reader who produces the meaning of the text: ‘the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’.¹¹ I intend to use this idea as the basis for my self-reflective approach to philosophical analysis.During the course of this book, and also in future work and projects, I will not read texts for their original meaning; I intend to create their meaning by reading and discussing them. Additionally, I must also erase myself from this work, since this text, like all others, remains incomplete until its meaning is (re)constructed by you, the reader.

This idea of an anonymous author who does not control the text he/she produces can also be found in Derrida’s theories about textual analysis. Derrida, too, recognises that meaning is inscribed into the text by the reader. Derrida argues that ‘if you were to bide your time awhile here in these pages, you would discover that I cannot dominate the situation’.¹² Derrida sees the process of reading as an active, rather than a passive, process and argues ‘writing is read; it is not … the decoding of a meaning or truth’.¹³ Derrida’s idea is not that anything can be taken from a text, but that the context of the readership has a bearing on the meaning of the text and, thus, the text is outside itself. The basis of my approach to philosophical analysis is the idea that when we read a text, we do not merely unearth something created by the writer, since there is an active part in reading, which involves the producing of the text through our own contextual understandings.

Using Philosophical Texts: Explicitly Constructing an Idea from the Text

Before I go on to discuss how I propose to use philosophical texts, I need to quickly summarise the conclusions which I have thus far reached regarding the reading of philosophical texts. First, I have argued that it is not entirely possible to reconstruct the original text, i.e. we cannot merely locate the meaning the author wished to convey; and second, I have argued that a text is made-up of a multiplicity of meanings, and a meaning is selected by the reader. This then leads to the second important part of my methodology for philosophical analysis – when I conduct analysis of philosophical texts, I narrate a meaning of the text and explicitly construct an argument/idea which I wish to take from it. My approach to studying philosophical texts is not a study which conducts investigations of authors; instead, I study authors only to find ideas which are valuable. For instance, the argument that history has ended with liberal democracy is an idea I wish to interrogate and I will do so through an exploration of Fukuyama.

This method is inspired by the postmodern historian, Jenkins, who argues that it does not matter where a text comes from, e.g. Ancient Greece, nineteenthcentury Japan, yesterday’s newspaper, etc.¹⁴ Thus my references to philosophers, e.g. Fukuyama, Foucault, Derrida, etc., are not invitations to study these writers – it does not matter who spoke, the references to these works are invitations to take from the work/author ideas/arguments which can be beneficial to us today. Jenkins notes that his concept of using an idea in a way which is beneficial for us today, rather than demonstrating a concern for the origins of the idea, is an approach inspired by Rorty’s approach to philosophy.¹⁵ I intend to synthesise Rorty’s approach to writing philosophy with Jenkins’ approach to reading history in order to construct a method for using philosophical texts.

Rorty argues that we should ditch metaphysical assumptions from philosophy; he dismisses searching for truth and, instead, he seeks to ask, has our philosophy served a useful purpose?¹⁶ In answering philosophical questions Rorty does not look for an essence of truth; instead, he looks for something which works. I intend to read philosophical texts in the same philosophical mood. I will not be searching for the true meaning of the text but a reading of the text which can serve a useful purpose. More explicitly, Rorty advocates a ‘mis-reading’ of philosophical texts. To do a ‘mis-reading’ of a text, we do not need to ask the author/text about its intentions; instead, we can ‘beat’ the t...