All Roads Lead to Western Democracy - Francis Fukuyama
Ideas about what it means to be modern are soon dated. Not so long ago theories were in vogue claiming that a “scientific-technical revolution” was under way that would lead to a single type of government spreading throughout the world. Originally promoted by Daniel Bell in the 1950s, the theory of convergence suggested that the Soviet Union would evolve to become like the advanced industrial societies of the West. The idea was given a new lease of life during the Gorbachev era, when the long-awaited convergence seemed about to occur. In fact, as is now known and some suspected at the time, the Soviet Union was not evolving toward any kind of Western-style modernity. Lacking internal legitimacy, the Soviet state could not reform itself, and instead it collapsed. After a period of chaos a new system of government did emerge, but it was a hypermodern version of despotism rather than a modern democratic state. The convergence with the West that Bell and others believed was under way has not happened, and there is nothing to suggest that it will happen.
Such are the vagaries of academic reputation that Bell’s name does not appear in the index of Francis Fukuyama’s new book. Yet in many ways Fukuyama is continuing Bell’s project, which was itself a continuation of earlier theories. There have been many attempts to show that only one kind of government is viable in modern conditions. Comte was confident that modern development could lead only to a type of hierarchical technocracy; Marx was convinced that so long as industrial society did not relapse into barbarism it would end in communism; Spencer was adamant that industrialism and laissez-faire capitalism would prove to be one and the same. Sidney and Beatrice Webb had no doubt that the future of civilization could be secured only by adopting something like the collectivism that existed in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Other theorists—including Hayek, who in later years revived a variant of Spencer’s crackpot evolutionism to argue that the free market was destined to spread throughout the world—could be added to the list. But the thinker in recent years who has been most prominent in claiming that modernization can have only one destination has been Fukuyama.
Like earlier theories, Fukuyama’s proposes an end point of political evolution that accords with prevailing notions of progress. Comte, Marx, Spencer, the Webbs, and Hayek each claimed to have identified laws of social development that (without being entirely deterministic) impelled humanity in a specific direction. In every case, the direction was the one that the author of the theory viewed as the most desirable for the species. Perhaps it is not surprising that there should be such an unfailing coincidence of putative laws of social development with progressive political hopes. Thinkers who produce grand theories of history are no less provincial in their outlook than any other section of humanity, and it is only to be expected that they would imagine that their values should be those of the species at large—if not at present, then in the future that is unfolding. What is harder to explain is how these theorists could believe—as they all did—that science underwrites their faith that their values will prevail.
Modern thinkers pride themselves on their objectivity. But if there are discoverable laws of social development—a large and problematic assumption—why should they conform to our changing conceptions of progress? If, like the laws that natural science aims to discover, these laws of development reflect objective features of the world, why should they be impelling humanity toward a better life? Few modern thinkers have entertained the possibility that social evolution might be moving in a direction that is thoroughly undesirable. (Joseph Schumpeter, who hated socialism but saw it as inevitable, is one of the handful who come to mind.) In any case, how could laws of history underpin human progress when views about what constitutes progress are so ephemeral and so divergent? Some human values are universal and enduring, but ideas of progress come and go like fashions in hats. Theories of convergence reflect disparate and incompatible ideals of human betterment. What all such theories have in common is that they have come to nothing. None of the regimes that was believed to be the near-inevitable end point of modern development has emerged anywhere in the world.