I read this book, which is a thoughtful critique but ultimately a stalwart defence of liberalism, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, and it felt urgent and timely. Vladimir Putin, as Francis Fukuyama reminds us, has declared liberal democracy “obsolete”. His is not an uncommon opinion, even in liberal democracies. Thirty years ago, following the inglorious collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Fukuyama gained international recognition for his book entitled The End of History and the Last Man. It argued that liberal democracy was essentially “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”.
As events such as 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq wars and the 2008 financial crisis took their toll on liberalism’s self-confidence, Fukuyama’s work was denounced as the height of Hegelian hubris. He was seen as a naive believer in the inevitability of a western-defined idea of progress, and as someone who was blind to liberal democracy’s failings.
In some respects, the criticisms were unfair, or at least aimed at arguments he never made. But there seems little doubt that Fukuyama has had to eat rather a lot of humble pie. As he writes: “It’s clear liberalism has been in retreat in recent years.”
In that time, Fukuyama has backed away from the American neoconservative agenda that he had initially supported, and has watched as authoritarian leaders such as Putin, China’s Xi and Turkey’s Erdoğan laid claim to the world stage. He cites sobering statistics that political rights and civil liberties have been falling for the past 15 years around the world, having risen for the previous three and a half decades.
On top of all that, rightwing populists and leftwing progressives have made significant inroads into western politics. Following Donald Trump’s attack on democracy, and Britain’s rejection of European-style liberalism, the US and UK still adhere to liberal democracy, but it’s not exactly a political and economic system in which its beneficiaries feel much pride.
The first difficulty when it comes to rousing the liberal spirit is that liberalism is famously difficult to define. It has become one of those words that mean different things to different political groupings. A vital strength of this slim, elegant book is that it is crystalline in its definitions, even while acknowledging the complexities of practice. Although liberalism is under attack from both left and right, it is from the left that the more serious intellectual challenge comes. Fukuyama recognises this fact and attempts to address the left’s criticism. Essentially a system that is founded on the principle of equality of individual rights, law and freedom has evolved rather conspicuous inequalities in each of those realms.
The most glaring are the economic inequalities that have grown in the west, particularly in the US and UK, over the past 40 years. Fukuyama attributes these to “neoliberalism”, the belief in unfettered markets as the means of delivering the goal of consumer welfare. But, Fukuyama contends, this is a distortion of liberalism, which has a much larger social remit than simply economic efficiency. It’s not just a question of regulating and limiting big business – although Fukuyama argues for both – but of appreciating the social capital that attains from redistribution and narrowing of inequalities. At times the former adviser to the Reagan administration can sound like a Scandinavian social democrat. Almost.
Nonetheless the postmodern left maintain that inequalities and injustice are not a malfunction of liberalism but instead a manifestation of structural power built in at a foundational level. His exegesis of critical theory from Marcuse through to Foucault, and how it has been widely adopted as a tool of sociopolitical analysis, is a brilliantly acute summary of the way some aspects of liberal thought have consumed themselves. The pursuit of individual autonomy or “self-actualisation”, for example, has become mired in an identity politics that subsumes the individual into rigidly defined groupings based on ethnicity, gender or sexuality. In a way, argues Fukuyama, this is a necessary step to address structural inequalities and counteract the misplaced notion that the individual is the only unit of social importance.
Taken to its extreme, however, this kind of analysis offers no liberation, but the revelation of ever deeper layers of oppression, in which individual thought is an illusion, and all intellectual interaction is subject to the power dynamics of group hierarchies. Everything, by way of this understanding, including empirical science, becomes a social construct designed to benefit the powerful.
As Fukuyama notes, it’s a form of conspiratorial thinking that has been duly adopted by the right, who saw measures enacted during the pandemic – mask wearing, vaccination and social-distancing – as signs of a hidden power elite. Although he outlines some familiar complaints about social media monopolies and their baleful effect on political discourse, the overall sense you gain from this book is that liberalism is in crisis because of the complacency that set in with its successes. Liberal democracy has delivered on many fronts, but with each step forward it left many constituencies behind.
Its opponents like to speak of the “Tina” – there is no alternative – way of thinking as a liberal democratic shibboleth that must be exposed. And so it must. There are alternatives – as the likes of Putin, Xi and their imitators conspicuously demonstrate. They’re just not good ones. However, liberalism cannot afford to rely on the flaws of its antagonists. It needs to refresh, re-evaluate and rethink. This book does not supply all, or enough, of the answers. But it’s a good place to start with asking the essential questions.
• Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama is published by Profile (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
