www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc2bvU4sWBY
* citaat : ” When the Soviet bloc began to crumble and the signs indicated that the USSR might soon follow, the focus on opening up dependent societies returned as well. Francis Fukuyama, a member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff under Paul Wolfowitz and a resident RAND Corporation consultant, captured the neocons’ triumphant mood with his ‘End of History’ article in The National Interest. Announcing the ‘unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’ (1989: 3), on a scale that has left only a handful of rogue states (and liberal academics) committed to Marxism, Fukuyama declares that with the collapse of Soviet state socialism, all systematic historical alternatives to liberal capitalism have exhausted themselves.
Fukuyama bases his argument on the idea of the universal homogeneous state of Strauss’ interlocutor, Kojève. Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind of 1987 restates the superiority of pragmatism over philosophically grounded European social thought (which he sees as a corrupting influence on the American intelligentsia; Reisch 2005: 371); Fukuyama however treads where few US scholars have dared when he engages with Hegel and (in the book version) Nietzsche.
Whether Hegel can be called as a witness for the triumph of Lockean liberalism is one thing. But the propagandistic impact of Fukuyama’s intervention cannot easily be overstated. Capitalism is the endpoint of economic development; Schumpeterian polyarchy, the climax of political development. Multiparty elections are about selecting a government, but given that ‘the economy’ has already reached the best of all worlds, its management cannot be tinkered with. Any remaining states not submitting to Western supremacy lack legitimacy; they are ‘mired in history’ and can no longer assert sovereign equality against the heartland, which alone is entitled to write the rules for the international order. In this respect Fukuyama’s role is not that of an original thinker (most of what is interesting is already in Kojève and other sources), but as a neocon propagandist. * *
Kees van der Pijl (2014: 213-214) The Discipline of Western Supremacy: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, Volume III. ISBN: 978 0 7453 2318 3; ISBN: 978 1 8496 4889 9 EPUB eBook
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[ The absolute Knowledge of the Wise Man who realizes perfect self-consciousness is an answer to the question,”What am l” The Wise Man’s real existence must therefore be “circular” (that is to say, for Hegel, he must be a Citizen of the universal and homogeneous State) in order that the knowledge that reveals his existence may itself be circular – i.e., an absolute truth, Therefore: only the Citizen of the perfect State can realize absolute Knowledge. Inversely, since Hegel supposes that every man is a Philosopher – that is, made so as to become conscious of what he is (at least,it is only in these men that Hegel is interested,and only of them that he speaks) – a Citizen of the perfect State always eventually understands himself in and by a circular – i.e., absolute – knowledge.
This conception entails a very important consequence: Wisdom can be realized, according to Hegel, only at the end of History.
And one cannot understand this as long as one does not know that the Wise Man must necessarily be Citizen of the universal (i.e., nonexpandible) and homogeneous (i.e., nontransformable) State. And one cannot know this until one has understood that this State is nothing other than the real basis (the “substructure”) of the circularity of the absolute System: the Citizen of this State, as active Citizen, realizes the circularity that he reveals, as contemplative Wise Man, through his System.
Alexander Kojève (1980:93-94): Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. 0-8014-9203-3 (het citaat is geredigeerd; cursivering in het origineel ]