Francis Fukuyama came up in a book I was reading today, and he is a philosopher who argues that the world is moving towards all governments being liberal democracies driven by capitalism and technology. This liberal democratic techno world would be paradise and the end of history to Fukuyama.
You can buy his books, click here!
My only other exposure to him was during a philosophy course when the professor practically spit his name, and called him right wing scum, and said that it wasn’t worth reading.
In retrospect this piques my curiosity.
Fukuyama puts forward the ideas of:
The end of History
and
The last man
So anyways, from what I can tell, Fukuyama is something of a hero to neo-conservatives (conservative is a misnomer when neo is in front of it, because for one it translates as NEW Conservative, and how can you have something to conserve and be new at the same time, and neo-conservatives are actually radical thinkers engaged in a plan to do things that they think will better the world, like spread liberal democracy).
Political Theologians, like the Muslim leaders in the Middle East, view liberal democracy as a threat because with liberal democracy comes moral relativism and the introduction of the idea that religions are just narratives. This would undermine their hold on power, and the basis for their societies too.
This is not commonly discussed, but the despised neo-conservatives are actually trying to spread liberalism into the most conservative places in the world… Confused yet? It gets better, there is a old guard right wing and the (neo) new right wing, they are united by ties to business, but there is nothing religious about the ideology of the neo-conservatives.
Neo-Conservatism is the right wing branch of post-modern political philosophy, and it is evangelical not in the traditional sense but in the sense that it advocates the spread of technology and liberal democracy.
Whichever side you are on, it can not hurt to understand this influential thinker.
edit: Fukuyama denounced Neo-conservatism in the context of the current administration and the war in Iraq in his most recent book.
Filed under: Francis Fukayama, The Last Man, The end of history
