/lit/ - Literature

>>22452273
Fukuyama is a right-Hegelion. I think to call him a neo-con is unfair simply because most neo-cons were incredibly unrealistic/idealistic in how they viewed the world, while Fukuyama is a pragmatist realist who just so happens to be best known for his one super idealistic thesis. And even if the "End of History," thesis was flawed, it has some good points. No international movement that is broadly seen to be legitimate has emerged to challenge liberal democracy. Nothing like communism, or the reactionary defense of monarchism exists today; the closest is radical Islam and it's hardly a real competitor. Even states diametrically opposed to the liberal democracies still couch their criticism in liberal democracies own terms. Strongmen still take the title of president and have rubber stamp legislatures, they don't name themselves king, or emperor, or tsar. When they attack the West they do so by pointing out that the West fails to live up to its own standards ("and you lynch negros, you have an implicit ruling class"), tactility acknowledging that the values of liberalism are the yardstick by which to measure success, even as they excuse deviations by claiming those standards are unrealistic. Strongmen claim they are strongmen now only in order to control disorder and fight off foreign oppression, so that, one day, they can accomplish largely the same goals that liberal democracy lays out.

And in any event, the Last Man thesis is spot on in describing the rise of the "Manosphere," authors like Jack Donovan, the huge market for tactical gear, tactical baby carriers, consooming a warrior image, etc. Men who now have their subsistence needs met are lashing out for purpose, meaning— or as Hegel put it, recognition.

Fukuyama's best work is actually his two volume opus on "how do high standard of living states get that way." It's not so much his original theses that are great here, they are decent, but that the work is an encyclopedic view of all theories of state development since antiquity, that carefully compares them against the evidence of history.

But unlike partisan hacks, Fukuyama can also engage earnestly with the left, particularly because Hegel is a common bridge. Honneth, the surviving hierophant of the Frankfurt School is also a Hegelian, and is Freedom's Right is worth a read. Notably, you'll find no critical theory or SJWism. The shit that gets associated with the Frankfurt school is bizarre given they were "Western Marxist," that is, on the right fringe of the left. Honneth drifts further right with his Hegelianism and is actually probably not that far from later Fukuyama except on policy minutea.

Which is all to say, The Philosophy of Right is the greatest work of conservative political theory in history and probably also the greatest work of liberal political theory in history. It transcends and sublates our current divisions as much as it helped create them.

>>20753746
Go with this. Best volumes on state building and what makes high performing countries high performing. It's not so much Fukuyama's own additions that make it so good as it is that he summarizes all the work on the topic, from ancient philosophers to modern polsci and lists the arguments for and against them well.

Fukuyama had a reputation as a neocon, but this is pretty far off the mark and just due to his political work. But you don't have to love an administration's policy to work there. I find he's much more idiosyncratic and willing to challenge assumptions.

The End of History is good to. The article is fine, the book adds detail but the thesis doesn't change too much. Or read the book but stop after he explains Hegel's theory of history if you want. It's a great lens for reading history and explains Hegel in easy to understand ways. Unfortunately, he fuck up Hegel, doing Kojeve's truncated version and doesn't get that the dialectical will keep producing contradictions in modern liberalism, which we've seen in the years since. But it's still a good work.

The Great Courses political philosophy course is ok too.

But really to expand your horizons I would actually look at their courses on Monday Body Philosophy, Chaos Theory, and Information Science. Absolutely excellent primers. The Rise of Information is a good book if you like the information course. I will warn that it starts math heavy, but after a few lectures it gets into how information theory is applied to physics, biology, and economics.

/pol/ is simplistic drivel aimed at fueling outrage.

>>20543981
Forgot the pic.

As for The End of History, it's worth reading the article version or just the intro to the book. It has some good ideas on the success of liberalism and the idea of progress. This mostly comes from Fukuyama simply restating Hegel in more accessible and modern terms.

The problem is that he has a bad misreading of Hegel. In Fukuyama's telling, the dialectical worked like this:
>Liberal democracy comes on the scene way back with the birth of the USA and the French Revolution.
>It is victorious over monarchy as a system.
>However, it faces two strong challengers: socialism and fascism.
>A dialectical conflict ensues and both challengers ultimately collapse under their internal contradictions.
>Democracy emerges as the one serious form of governance with a claim to legitimacy. It succeeds in offering people recognition in a way no prior system could.

This is not how the dialectical works. Socialism and fascism emerged due to contradictions in liberal democracy. For instance, you get "socialism" from "the social question" which came up right after the "political questions" of elected government, constitutional rule of law, and the end of the mobility as a special legal class. The next question is: "how can the common people rule themselves if they are overwhelmingly illiterate, uneducated, and barely living above subsistence and dependant on landlords and factory owners to survive?" That is, "the public is too dumb to rule itself and too dependant on elites to cross them."

Enter socialism to address these issues. Socialism in the form of Marxism was the most successful brand of socialism in terms of revolutionary success, but other types did better electorally.

What Fukuyama missed is that Hegel's dialectical predicts that the "winner" in the contradiction will sublate the loser and take its definition on into itself. Liberal democracy did this. Universal education is now common in all liberal states, as are child labor laws, rights for unions, welfare programs, government healthcare (even the US does it for poor people and Boomers), etc. Liberal democracy sublated socialism to eliminate internal contradictions.

The second thread is nationalism/fascism. This was sublated too. We talk of a given people electing their own rulers. No one would think it would be legitimate for the US to annex Iraq so long as it let the people vote in US elections. Modern legitimacy, even for lefties, is defined by a given people choosing their rulers.

So now liberal democracy simply faces new contradictions. For instance, support for the welfare state is undergirded by a common national identity. What happens when mass migration undermines this identity? Legitimacy rests with a people. How do you address global issues, collective action problems (e.g. global warming), when legitimacy is held locally?