Review Reviewed Work(s): The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama Review by: Michael Baur Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Sep., 1994), pp. 135-137 Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20129636 Accessed: 21-10-2019 12:21 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Review of Metaphysics This content downloaded from 150.108.161.119 on Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:21:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 135 look to Theophrastean texts in one way or another for insight into Ar istotle's thought. But the volumes will be of interest as well to special ists in the various areas of philosophy who are curious about the history of their area: logicians, for instance, will enjoy browsing the eighty-six pages of translated reports in the logic section, and in so doing will be able to examine Theophrastus's additions to the Aristotelian canon of syllogistic forms, his advances in regard to the hypothetical syllogism, and his interesting forays into modal logic; students of ethics and moral psychology will find much to reflect on in the seventy-seven pages of translated reports in the ethics section; and so on. In some areas, the results of the search are disappointing (through no fault of the scholarly team, of course): almost nothing has turned up regarding the problems of the central books of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and very little on topics central to the Posterior Analytics. In other areas, for instance zoology, the reports will be more useful alongside some of the "Opuscula," shorter essays which survive not (only) in quotation but in their own manuscript tradition and so are not included whole in these volumes. It is therefore good to hear that Project Theophrastus intends to prepare new editions of these in due course. Some of that work has already been done, and published, along with many Theophrastean studies of great value, in a series of Project Theophrastus conference proceedings called "Rutgers University Studies in Classical Humanities" (New Bruns wick: Transaction Books, 1983-). This two-volume set of reports will find their full use, of course, in conjunction with the commentary volumes to come (and ought to be ordered in anticipation of those volumes by librarians who might not otherwise want so specialized a collection of uninterpreted texts). But the two volumes should be celebrated for the contribution they already make, by themselves, to scholarship on ancient philosophy.?Allan Gotthelf, Trenton State College. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992. xxiii + 418 pp. $24.95?In this book, Fuku yama seeks to provide affirmative answers to two fundamental ques tions: Has the ideal of liberal democracy effectively triumphed throughout the world so that we can now speak of the end of human kind's ideological development and thus the end of history? If so, is this a good thing? In Part 1, Fukuyama notes that any defensible conclusions concern ing the inevitable progress of world history in the direction of liberal democracy cannot be based simply on what might turn out to be a contingent (and reversible) historical fact, such as the crumbling of communism in 1989. In Part 2, Fukuyama suggests that some evidence for the inevitability and universal validity of liberal democracy may be provided by the ineluctable laws and implications of scientific devel opment. Modern natural science "is the only large-scale social activity that is by consensus cumulative and therefore directional" (p. 80). The This content downloaded from 150.108.161.119 on Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:21:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 136 GIUSEPPE BUTERA AND STAFF human mastery of nature that is made possible by natural science seems to lead inevitably to capitalism, which in turn seems to require liberal democracy as a form of political organization. But is there really a necessary link between scientific-economic progress and lib eral democracy? After all, it is quite conceivable that future capital istic regimes which successfully satisfy all of man's material desires might not be liberal democracies at all, but rather authoritarian in nature. In Part 3 Fukuyama begins to suggest that any viable argument for the inevitability of liberal democracy must not be based on scientific or economic imperatives alone, but must appeal to the human "struggle for recognition." The desire for recognition is the desire to be es teemed as a being that is free and not simply determined by one's an imal nature, and is manifest in man's willingness to risk his own com fort, material belongings, and even life, all for the sake of winning the respect of others. This desire for recognition is exhibited in the more noble human passions of patriotism, courage, generosity, and public spiritedness. Of course, the desire for recognition (which was dis cussed even by the ancient Greeks under name of thymos) can also be "the starting point for human conflict" (p. 182). In spite of this prob lem, Fukuyama argues that some form of moderated thymos can still be preserved in modern liberal society in safe and productive outlets. To justify this claim, Fukuyama turns to Hegel's notion of labor. La bor, for Hegel, does not simply satisfy man's material desires; labor also satisfies man's desire for recognition, since it is by transforming the natural world through his labor that man can discover his own freedom and capacity for overcoming his natural limitations. Human labor is objectified in the form of property, and so the recognition of property rights in liberal democracy is equally a recognition of man's thymotic nature. In Part 4 Fukuyama emphasizes that the survival of the modern liberal state does not simply allow, but even requires, the preservation of man's premodern, thymotic impulses: "no real-world society can long survive based on rational calculation and desire alone" (p. 215). In the fifth and final part of this book, Fukuyama addresses what he considers to be the greatest challenge to his thesis concerning the uni versal validity of liberal democracy. This challenge was articulated most powerfully by Nietzsche, who thought that liberalism's goal of "uni versalizing recognition" ultimately trivializes and devalues it. For Nietz sche, liberal democracy gives birth to a society where the typical citizen is the "last man" who no longer risks his own comfort and security for the sake of something greater than himself. In response to this chal lenge, Fukuyama assures us that "nature . . . will conspire" to preserve a substantial degree of man's thymotic nature, even within modern lib eral democracies (p. 315). Properly understood, "modern liberalism is not based on the abolition of the desire for recognition so much as on its transformation into a more rational form" (p. 337). Fukuyama's account is excellent for its demonstration of the acute relevance of philosophical ideas to what is at stake in modern liberal democracies. In showing the relevance of philosophical ideas, how ever, Fukuyama sometimes fails to plumb the depth of the ideas them This content downloaded from 150.108.161.119 on Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:21:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 137 selves, or to do full justice to the philosophers who originally articulated them. Nevertheless, these shortcomings should not make one lose sight of what the book really seeks to show: that ideas have consequences.? Michael Baur, The Catholic University of America. Gillett, Grant. Representation, Meaning, and Thought. Oxford: Claren don Press, 1992. x + 213 pp. $49.95?Gillett's goal is to articulate and defend a view of the nature of thought that opposes the widely-accepted view that thoughts are internal states whose representational content is owed to causal connections with the environment, and whose interac tions play a part in the causation of behavior. According to Gillett, discourse about human mental activity is not about goings-on in an inner realm of causal representational states" (p. 99; my emphasis). What is it about, then? Gillett's alternative view rests entirely upon an account of the nature of concepts. "To grasp a concept is to master a principled way of responding to the world involving techniques of selected atten tion and directed search for criteria! information which reveals whether a presentation instances the concept in question" (p. 3). Two features of Gillett's account deserve emphasis. First, it turns out that responding to the world in "a principled way" is not merely a matter of responding to it in a defacto rule-governed way: "In using a concept, a thinker does not merely respond but can represent to himself the fact that a norm governs that response and is independent of it" (p. 68). Second, the responses to the world which concept-mastery requires are meant to be public responses, apparently taking the form (always?) of judgements expressed in a natural language. The centrality of this account of concepts to Gillett's overall project justifies some critical commentary. First, as one might fear of any ac count influenced by the later Wittgenstein, the account smells alarmingly behaviorist. Though Gillett does give the matter some intermittent dis cussion, he does not make it really clear either how his view avoids being behavioristic, or else what is wrong with traditional objections to be haviorism, objections which might at first blush seem to apply to his position. Second, Gillett never quite gets around to stating his account of what it is to have a thought; he tells us (perhaps) what it is to possess concepts, but not what the difference is between two people who pos sess the same concepts but who think different thoughts with them. Consequently, it never clearly emerges what "discourse about human mental activity" really is about, if it is not about "an inner realm." Chapter 1 contains Gillett's account of concepts. Chapter 2 develops an account of the self based on it. In Chapter 3, Gillett argues against the view that explanation of actions is causal explanation, and proposes an alternative: "to explain an action is to latch on to the rule-governed techniques an agent is using to deal with his environment at a given time" (p. 64). Chapter 4 outlines an account of how children acquire con cepts, and also suggests that connectionism supports his account of This content downloaded from 150.108.161.119 on Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:21:50 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms