Liberalism and its Discontents—A Review

[Kamaji]

Liberalism and its Discontents—A Review

A Review of Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama. Profile Books, 178 pages (March 2022)

Seamus Flaherty
21 Apr 2022

Liberalism is in bad odour. In the third decade of the 21st century, it is an ideology with few friends. Derided with equal vigour by populists on the Right and “progressives” on the Left, it is no exaggeration to claim, as Francis Fukuyama does in his new book, Liberalism and its Discontents, that “liberalism is under severe threat around the world today.”

And yet, it was only just over 30 years ago that the same author—whose name is almost synonymous with liberal ideology—was proclaiming history’s “end.” Adopting Hegel’s historical teleology Fukuyama famously argued in 1992 that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the ultimate “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

So, history, it turns out, did not actually end, but what’s wrong with liberalism? Is it broken? Can it be fixed? Or was it a mistake, in the first instance, to prophesy that liberalism was history’s “absolute moment”? Like 1848, did history reach its turning point and fail to turn because it had some other telos—socialist, fascist, nationalist, religious?

Never an uncritical supporter of liberalism—always aware of the cultural and psychological toll its victory necessarily exacts—Fukuyama has long conceded that there “are many legitimate criticisms to be made of liberal societies.” Nonetheless, echoing Winston Churchill on democracy, Fukuyama insists still that “liberalism is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

In Liberalism and its Discontents, Fukuyama argues that the wrong kind of liberalism is what’s wrong with liberalism. Neoliberalism, namely, is what’s wrong with liberalism—that, and the idea of the “sovereign self” advanced in John Rawls’s left-leaning iteration of the political philosophy. Exchanging contingency for teleology, this is a Hegel-free Fukuyama, newly aware that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Liberalism and its Discontents is a sterling book. Fukuyama provides there a rousing defence of “classical,” or “humane,” liberalism. It is a call for liberalism to moderate itself if it wishes to survive from someone, notably, firmly embedded within the liberal tradition.

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Source:  https://quillette.com/2022/04/21/liberalism-and-its-discontents-a-review/