Francis Fukuyama: progressives are threatening our most cherished values

“Francis Fukuyama” was once the punchline to a gibe that went: “Have you heard the latest political science joke?” The reference was to the 1992 book that made Fukuyama famous, The End of History and the Last Man, and what was assumed to be its thesis: with the defeat of communism, liberal (capitalist) democracy had been revealed as history’s ultimate destination.

Francis Wheen captured the general tone of derision when he called it “one of the worst predictions in social science”. Didn’t the rising smoke from the Twin Towers simply falsify it? Fukuyama’s critics on the Right, no admirers of liberalism, preferred the idea of a “clash of civilisations”. Those on the Left, dreaming of a future beyond capitalism, thought him a smug bourgeois shill.

The jokes came from people who hadn’t read very far past the first half of the book’s title. They didn’t attend to Fukuyama’s explicit acknowledgement that there were many places across the world where history resolutely continued. All he denied was the possibility of a serious, realistic and coherent world-historical alternative to liberalism (and Osama bin Laden hardly provided that).

Of his more recent writings, his two-volume work of historically informed political theory – The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014) – has been acknowledged as a serious contribution to the subject, its length and erudition revealing him as better than a hack who happened to catch the political wind of the early 1990s.

His latest book is rather shorter. What he calls “classical” or “humane” liberalism, he reminds us, “is under severe threat around the world today”. And here, he is referring to principles – “equal individual rights, law, and freedom” – that could in principle be shared by people who call themselves progressives or conservatives. But in the face of its unpopularity these days among the bien-pensant, “its virtues need to be clearly articulated and celebrated once again”.

Is liberalism really that awful thing so loathed by the Left – “neoliberalism”? No, Fukuyama insists: that is an unfortunate but contingent historical deformation of an honourable worldview. The same is true for the political tendencies he deplores: “identity politics”, the cult of selfishness, relativism about factual truth, moralising censorship, and cynical forms of populist nationalism. Each of these tendencies has its origins in a liberal principle pushed to “extremes” (a word that appears on nearly every page of this book).

Fukuyama’s task is to return liberalism to the spirit of its historical origins in moderation, in the attempt “to calm political passions” aroused by religious disagreement. The original liberals, he says, “sought to lower the aspirations of politics”. A liberal politics aims not at the pursuit of the good life (as some religion or other conceives of it), but at securing the conditions of peace and security that make it possible to have a life at all – as opposed to a violent death.

That much is well said, and the large theoretical claims are helpfully interspersed with sensible policy proposals on such important practical subjects as what legal reforms might diminish the political power of tech companies and how the American political system might retain something of its tradition of divided government without devolving into a gridlocked “vetocracy”. Somewhat surprisingly, there is only the most glancing reference to liberal humanitarian intervention, surely one of the chief reasons for contemporary public disillusionment with the outlook.

What is unsatisfying about the book is not the inevitable omissions but the rather ipse dixit prose. Fukuyama has the bad habit of using the verb “argue” without a “because” or “therefore” in sight. It is not reassuring that he gets so many small things wrong. To pick a couple of blatant examples: “deontological” ethical theories are not so named because they are “not linked to any ontology” (it comes from the Greek for “one must”). If he insists, pretentiously, on including untransliterated Greek in his text, he and his editors should not give pedants the chance to point out that it is spelled wrong.

Crucial passages of philosophical exposition are, at best, tendentious. He claims that philosopher John Rawls’s academically influential theory of social justice “would seem to be empirically wrong”, pointing the reader to an endnote that contains no empirical data. He consistently conflates two importantly different ideas: the liberal insistence that the final ends of life may not be knowable and the quite different claim that there is no truth about these things. As if a liberal is required to be a relativist.

Stylistically, too, the book is uninspiring. Fukuyama’s formulations are often pithy, but they are rarely elegant and he has little ear for cliché. Every list is a “laundry list”, far too many things are described as a “feature and not a bug” and he is far too fond of that barbaric word, “absolutize”.

An author aiming to give a dying doctrine a shot in the arm needs several gifts (Fukuyama would say “virtues”) if the thing is to come off at all. His history needs to be accurate and the philosophical argumentation sound; that is to say, he must get things right. But he must also sound right. On both counts, Fukuyama’s results are decidedly mixed. Reading his book with the utmost sympathy for his conclusions, I could still only muster two cheers at the end, for him and for his embattled liberal worldview.

Liberalism and Its Discontents is published by Profile at ￡16.99. To order your copy for ￡14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop