[Book review] Liberalism and its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama

The last time Liberalism faced a serious challenger to its hegemony—in the sense of controlling an industrial war machine actually capable of destroying the West—Liberalism responded by creating an artificial sun and dropping it on that enemy. It’s important to remember that once Liberalism was once a self-confident creed, calling for a new way of life, one which respected the (property) rights of all, not just of the royalty and aristocracy. Starting some time in the eighteenth (or maybe seventeenth, or even sixth) century, Liberalism re-wrote the political game; so much so, that today it’s the ideological water we swim in. Alas at the quarter-way mark of the 21st century the waters are foetid and rank. Gross inequality marks the West as parts of England and Europe haven’t grown since before the millennium. Governments struggle to actually govern, with services like prisons and the law being cut and riots on the streets. Topping it all off, we’ve breached the 1.5 degree warming barrier and seem set to breach 2 degrees.

Not to worry. Francis Fukuyama has come to Liberalism’s rescue. Liberalism and its Discontents is 2022 book aimed at redressing the balance of our political conversations in favour of a much maligned ideology. As a book it has several merits: the least of which is that it’s a slim volume, written with a clarity unusual for political philosophers. In under 150 pages Fukuyama deftly presents Liberalism, its history, and where Liberalism finds itself in the 21st century. Alas, otherwise it’s frustrating. A combination of the totally anodyne, with passages that are genuinely insightful in their defence of liberalism. It’s just that I wish the good bits were more frequent and the anodyne stuff was less…anodyne.

The main thrust of the book is that the twin schools of Liberalism—on the right, the defence of property rights; and on the left, the fight for personal freedoms for African Americans, Gays, and Women—have gone “too far”. Private property, once a tool to protect individuals from rapacious Kings, is now an instrument of oppression, now produces Babylonian levels of inequality. The injunction that citizens aspire to become rational utility maximisers now produces a polity where the common good is fully denuded. On the left, this selfishness has led to individuals who wish to realise their “truths” within their lifetime—truths such as: gay people do not deserve persecution, or that women are the political equals of men.

Further, one couldn’t possibly have any real objection to liberalism, as it’s simply the default ideology that the word comes with nowadays. Any alternatives would be worse, but especially any democratic interference in the economy, or personal conduct which would be unbecoming in the Hoover institution. Fukuyama’s Liberalism is a thin and wan thing. Thins aren’t perfect, but any attempt to make them better is doomed; so we are better off settling for some reforms, and otherwise behaving moderately. It’s as if he’s going round going “oh me, oh my. what are we to do?” It’s not exactly inspiring.

Which is why it’s important to remember that the last time anybody seriously challenged Liberalism, liberals built a literal sun and dropped it on the challengers. There used to be a sort of red blooded liberal who didn’t have qualms at the defence of their ideology and way of life. Fukuyama absolutely is not in that tradition.

Fukuyama is very good a presenting the critiques of liberalism:

The first few chapters outline economic liberalism’s foundations: the defence of property rights. Fukuyama argues that any property rights would lead to inequality, and how Liberal ideology can become a front for class interests. There is a long discussion of the history of this sort of Liberalism; how liberalism was originally quite autocratic, or at least comfortable with autocracy. 19th century Britain and Prussia were hardly equitable societies, but they were Liberal ones. One inference of this section is that we need some kind of democratic counterbalance to economic liberalism. But Fukuyama dismisses this alternative: democracy is too easy to game. So even if property rights are exclusive, States should not dictate the terms under which they will protect property rights. Fukuyama seems more annoyed at the ability of governments to backslide democratically than he is of liberalism’s downsides.

He’s also pretty dismissive of the substance of some critiques. From the 19th century onwards, socialists have argued that markets require a pool of free labour, and that property rights exclude labourers and enclose them in a system that exploits them. Fukuyama just dismisses this one by saying that workers have gotten unimaginably richer, which is true and beside the point. The point of these critiques is that liberalism is an ideology where it’s possible to turn wealth into power, in a way which was not possible a few generations ago, or at any other point in human history. And that processes of enclosure and exclusion leave some people at the mercy of others. Property rights give some the power of domination over others, and that this is a morally bankrupt state of affairs.

He also seems to dismiss the idea that Liberalism started in a place where there were different classes of people, and it was written for and by a specific class of property owning people. And it was only through democratic, and not liberal, means that we have reversed this state of affairs. Both America before the civil war and America after the civil rights act could be plausibly described as liberal, but one is infinitely preferable to the other. It would be nonsense to suggest that we can’t have a debate over The Good(TM) without acknowledging that these changes were brought about through democratic means.

The next section of the book is really interested in selves, and the kinds of people that Liberal societies bring about. Firstly we are now too selfish, as a result of rampant unchecked property rights. Further, our notions of self-ownership have led us to realise our ‘authentic’ selves. Thus Liberalism has undermined itself by producing the kind of body politic which can no longer sustain the values of a Liberal society. I imagine that it would only be 1950s post-war America that had the requisite wealth as well as the moral fibre for Fukuyama.

There are many plausibly liberal countries: America is liberal, but so is South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong (up to 1997). There is nothing in this book that would lead a reader to prefer one of these polities over the other.Similarly 1950s America with all its racism, or 1970s Britain where women couldn’t have a bank account without the permission of her father. There’s nothing in the book which could tell us, one is preferable. Some would say that this is a strength of liberalism, that it can coexist with many cultural and political variations, but we have to be specific about our visions of collective future. Without a specific vision of what we want, we will end up with what we have.

These critiques don’t really have teeth. It’s just not true that liberalism requires some kind of sovereign self which we have to authentically realise. Black, queer, and feminist politics came about because of specific autocratic policies that liberalism as an institutional doctrine were comfortable with. Not because women, gays, and blacks felt that they were denied a real self. Gays were hunted throughout society! Women were denied the vote and the ability to open bank accounts, to live on their own, or to earn money independently of men. Blacks were enslaved, and when they were set free they were institutionally discriminated against for a century. The politics of liberation wasn’t about realising something ‘inner’ which was hidden, it was about ending manifestly unjust practices. If we have an operating system of the world which is happy with slavery or racial segregation or denying agency to one half of the human population, then how good can this ideology actually be? How liberating and how livable are these ideas?

Fukuyama singles out a few key thinkers as especially problematic. There is Charles Mill and Carole Pateman, and, of course, Michel Foucault. The point of The Sexual Contract or The Racial Contract is to show that the kind of ‘getting back to basics’ liberalism of Fukuyama is untenable. Liberalism was hopelessly bound together with domination, and the kinds of problems we see today are not liberalism gone too far and that if we got back to some lost Eden then everything would be alright. We always have the responsibility to carry on politics, we will never escape politics, politics will never be done with us. There is no moderate position here: you either want a liberalism where women can participate fully in the economy, or you don’t. Both would be plausibly liberal. The book never goes so far as to stake out the moral case for anything like feminine emancipation or ending segregation. This plays into it’s sort of oldest child ‘woe is me’ voice. At first it is ok, but it soon becomes grating: a refusal to take a stand on questions of The Good turns into a studied avoidance of them.

The few pages on Michel Foucault are especially egregious, as essentially everything Fukuyama says about Foucault is incorrect. Foucault was not a champion of authentic and unchanging selves which have to be expressed, but a theorist of how power operates to produce bodies politic.

Once, the sovereign had absolute power over the bodies of the nation. As in, the literal bodies. Punishments were meted out through losing a finger or a hand, prisoners were executed, drawn and quartered, their corpses displayed throughout town. Now, power has withdrawn to private spaces: the prison. Instead of exercising power over the body of the condemned, instead power is exercised through timetables and discipline. Here the sovereign exercises power over the souls of the prisoners. This is a crucial distinction: previously there was a class of people who were criminals (you could tell because they had lost limbs), but now everybody could be a criminal. Our entire relationship to a state apparatus has completely changed. We are all under suspicion and surveillance.

When the sovereign is deposed there has to be a new site of power. Liberal societies have located this in the law. But liberal societies create spaces and loopholes to the law with the specific intent that the law not apply. These are given names like ‘refugee processing centre’ or ‘for profit prison’ or ’special economic zone.’ These are spaces filled with people to whom the normal rules do not apply. Refugees have no recourse, nor do prisoners. In special economic zones any and all worker protections are stripped, the thinking being that this will improve economic efficiency. Instead what happens is that a new class is created: workers who it is ok to brutalise.

The book also never discusses how power actually works in modern societies, and thus what is distinctive and new about them. A lot of ink is wasted on the charge that liberal societies are societies of rules, but you could say that about other societies. All societies have had rules, from the Roman penal code to the constitution of America. What is distinctive about liberal societies is how power operates. It’s a pity that Fukuyama doesn’t engage with the work of Foucault or Deleuze more thoroughly.

Fukuyama also charges that liberal societies have become overly bureaucratic and technocratic. This charge also fails: the Chinese empire had an army of technocrats. What is new about modern liberal societies is that they explicitly regulate life. Not life as a metaphor, in the sense of how one lives (the choice of how one deposes of your time is left always to the individual). Instead liberal societies explicitly regulate life itself: individual’s ability to metabolise. These rules come in the form of vaccine mandates (or not) as well as agricultural rules over what is and isn’t allowed into particular territory. This is a new form of power, wholly invented in modern times, and completely unprecedented. There is no engagement with this line of thinking in the book.

Ultimately for Fukuyama Liberalism acts as a sort of comfort blanket, or imaginative fog which stops us from seeing alternatives—say a world where we are as rich and as technologically savvy, but also where that wealth is impossible to turn into power and domination. The book reads more like a litany, or a prayer, than an actual defence of the status-quo; almost as if Fukuyama realises that whatever we have is no good, and we cannot go on like this