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Francis Fukuyama: biography, photos and interesting facts. Francis Fukuyama: biography, research and scientific activity Francis fukuyama philosophy

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Socio-political views of Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama at Nexus Instituut, 2005.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the socio-political views of F. Fukuyama in the context of political and socio-cultural transformations in the international system of relations and society at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries. and determination of prospects for the further development of global socio-political processes. The note is based on the analysis of socio-political issues in such fundamental works of the American philosopher and political scientist Francis Fukuyama as "The End of History and the Last Man", dedicated to the problems of politics after the collapse of communism and, as Fukuyama himself believed, the victory of liberalism over authoritarianism; "Trust: Public Virtues and the Path to Prosperity", reflecting the socio-cultural problems and the crisis of social and civic values of Western society at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries; "Great Divide" representing the "break of epochs" post-industrial society; “Our posthuman future: the consequences of the biotechnological revolution”, reflecting the socio-political aspects of the introduction and application of new technologies in the life of modern society; “A Strong State: Governance and World Order in the 20th Century” and “State Building. Power and world order in the XXI century”, in which the philosopher substantiated the thesis about the vital function of the state in modern political practice, protecting order, property and basic rights of citizens.

Methodologically, to understand the essence of the socio-political views of F. Fukuyama, the developments of N. Machiavelli, T. Hobbes, A. Tocqueville, K. Marx, M. Weber, L. Gumplovich, E. Durkheim, O. Spengler, T. Kuhn were used , K. Lorenz, K.G. Jung, K. Popper, N. Smelser, J. Ortega y Gasset, D. Bell, P. Bourdieu, F.G. Giddings, A. Toynbee, R. Ballamy, S. Eisenstat, D. Kellner, B. Lewis, J. Butler, W. Lippmann, G. Almond and S. Verba, S. Lipset, W. Rastow, E. Wallerstein, J. Nye, E. Toffler, G. Fisher, L. Hartz, S. Huntington, D. Soros, N.Ya. Danilevsky, L.N. Gumilyov, P. Sorokina, L.S. Vygotsky, B.V. Mikhailov.

Contained in the writings of D.P. Gavra, V.L. Inozemtsev, a large amount of factual material allows us to see the general political background and the conditions in which social and political transformations took place in modern society. Many aspects of transformations in the post-industrial society are revealed in D. Bell's monograph. P. Bourdieu's ideas describing the structural socio-political changes in post-modern society and comparing his ideas with the views of F. Fukuyama became a very valuable tool for writing a dissertation.

Among the Russian researchers devoted to the study of the socio-political aspects of the views of F. Fukuyama, the works of orientalists L. Medvedko and R.G. Landa, who criticize Fukuyama's ideas in the context of realities and political processes in the Near and Middle East; S.A. Zolotukhina O.M. Litvishko and V.S. Malakhov, who offer a description of multicultural processes in Western countries; A. Nazaretyan, A. Nekless, A.P. Tsygankova, A.B. Bushev, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of socio-political ideas, I. Nikolaev, A.Yu. Tsofnas, I. Yakovenko, describing the shortcomings of the concept "end of history" in the context of the interaction of politics and culture; famous geopolitician A.G. Dugin and international affairs specialist A.S. Panarin, who criticize Fukuyama's ideas. The use of these works made it possible to master a wide empirical research base, consisting of sources, publications in the media and materials from the Internet.

Socio-political issues "end of history"

Along with the disappearance of the bipolar system of international relations at the end of the last century, new regional conflicts have appeared or old ones have escalated. In this regard, in his works “The End of History?” and "The End of History and the Last Man" Fukuyama believed that as a result of the ideological victory of ideas, in the words of K. Popper and J. Sorros, the Western open society, the further development of mankind will take place in this vein.

In the future, the main problems of this society, including the use of biotechnology, sexuality, crime, freedom, power, morality and intelligence, are analyzed very carefully, in a style reminiscent of a parody of the dystopias of J. Orwell and O. Huxley, are analyzed in the work of Fukuyama "Our posthuman future". F. Fukuyama's superficial, sometimes even amateurish analysis of the problems of the relationship between genetics and sexuality, crime, cognitive processes, reveals that in the society of the future not only moral, but also qualitative scientific and technological progress is not foreseen, since "mass man", to use the expression of H. Ortega y Gasset, is not inclined to create anything outstanding, on the contrary, it is inherent in him to adapt elite culture and science to everyday practice. “Modern “mass man” does not know how to think, says Ortega y Gasset. Therefore, the formation of public opinion, - he concludes, - is a universal law of gravity. political history» . And if in the absence of progress due to the average mental abilities of the individual "posthuman society" sees F. Fukuyama as "end of history", then this anti-utopia is the most terrifying of all proposed in socio-political philosophy in the entire history of mankind. Nevertheless, according to F. Fukuyama, the victory of liberalism over communism means the embodiment in world history of a free rational society that does not strive for a further more perfect and ideal state in the near future.

In another work, F. Fukuyama claims that "the end of history cannot be until there is an end to science". In this case, if we turn to the concept of changing scientific paradigms as a factor of gradual revolutions in scientific knowledge T. Kuna, then we can assume that our "post-modern" society expects not only scientific revolutions, but also gradual changes in ideas and concepts about scientific and technological progress and its impact on the scientific and technological revolution, on the development of the economic and social systems of human civilization. Moreover, Fukuyama's model community development and the development of international relations may sooner lead to the beginning "New Middle Ages"- some modern, secularized parody of the medieval model of the organization of society with multiple loyalty of the individual in the absence of the supreme sovereign. The plurality of the consciousness of the postmodern individual in every possible way contributes to the development of multiple identities and the orientation of the individual to various, sometimes contradictory, models of political behavior and civic loyalty. Thus, citizens of the European Union can simultaneously focus on pan-European institutions and local communities, ignoring loyalty to the national state. Nevertheless, F. Fukuyama continues to assert the correctness of his forecast "end of history".

It should also be noted that the conflict-free "a society of victorious market-oriented liberalism", whose apologist is F. Fukuyama, denies the Marxist paradigm, according to which all existing aspects of religious and ideological confrontation, as well as all manifestations of the political life of society as a permanent struggle for power, serve the opposing interests of the parties participating in the conflict for dominance over the means of production. In this struggle, it is the material conditions that mobilize private interests for action and make it possible to express their ideas. While the Marxist materialist approach to history emphasizes the development of productive forces and the class struggle associated with it, Fukuyama smugly postulates about "end of history" how about "the final victory of liberalism". However, it is precisely in this statement that it fully describes the processes and transformations taking place in the social, political and international system at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st centuries.

In this context, it should be noted that the ideas of F. Fukuyama about "end of history" as a conflict-free society, they have several common points of contact with the views of non-conservatives or neo-Marxists. However, F. Fukuyama, despite his desire to oppose the original justification for the victory of liberalism over Marxism, actually follows the following arguments: according to F. Fukuyama, reducing the severity of ideological confrontation will inevitably lead not only to a decrease in the conflict potential of the system of international relations and socio-political practice, but also slowing down social dynamics. However, new global conflicts, according to F. Fukuyama, are hardly possible.

Thus, in concept "end of history" F. Fukuyama, one can find some excessive optimism when in his essay he proposed a model of a conflict-free society and world order, thereby self-confidently declaring the theory irrelevant "social ethology" Austrian biologist K. Lorenz, whose basic position public order, in this regard, should be considered as based on organized coercion, carried out by the state as a political institution, pacifying selfish individuals pursuing narrowly rational interests. Therefore, the model of a liberal-market social structure and international politics proposed by F. Fukuyama is impossible. In addition, to give to some individuals (and not to give them to others), and therefore it can be argued that the use of social and political, as well as international conflicts. The liberal ideology and market society proposed by F. Fukuyama can become an emotional basis for social solidarity and international integration processes. However, as M. Weber emphasized, solidarity can not only be the basis for cooperation, but can also contribute to the development of intergroup in the life of society, lead to rivalry.

Moreover, F. Fukuyama's attempt to establish in his article an exact conceptual framework "post-historical society" leads to a general philosophical difficulty in defining modernity in relation to the historical continuum. In this context, it should also be noted that the temporary victory in the late 1980s of liberal democratic and market ideas did not prove their superiority, since it was a mistake to assume that all communities would achieve an ideal political regime if they turned into "mass consumer society".

It should also be noted that F. Fukuyama connects the development of democratization and liberalization with the intensification of economic cooperation between the countries of the world. Since, according to F. Fukuyama, "economic development is usually accompanied by political liberalization", further democratization and liberalization of the political system of countries "third" And "fourth" Fukuyama, paradoxically, connects the world with the spread of the latest technologies, since in order to use "hi-tech" it is necessary to borrow not only Western economic institutions, the free market system, but also the ethics of individual freedom. Thus, Fukuyama argues that the growth of individualism and individual freedom are necessary for the economic success of both individuals and the socio-economic system of entire countries and regions.

According to F. Fukuyama, it is precisely "economic development ... leads to liberal democracy", the emergence of a middle class, which forms the basis of civil society and a high level of education. These conditions are necessary "for democratic political participation, which under certain circumstances is institutionalized in democratic government". However, it should be noted that many advanced technologies are used by modern authoritarian and anti-democratic regimes (Syria, North Korea, Iran and others). "rogue countries") not at all to promote the ideas of individual freedom and democratic participation, but to create all kinds of weapons of mass destruction, suppress organized political opposition and establish systems of surveillance and information gathering for individual dissidents.

Linking the development of democracy and liberal ideas with the development of economic ties and technological cooperation between countries "Global North" with countries "Global South", F. Fukuyama paradoxically reproduces the Marxist thesis about the primacy of the basis over the superstructure (or, in Western terminology, infrastructure over the superstructure) and, accordingly, the economy over politics. Thus, Fukuyama, like Western Marxists, tends to prefer the economic factor over other factors of social and political development in taking into account social change. Consequently, Fukuyama's statement about the victory of liberalism over Marxism looks somewhat superficial, if Fukuyama himself unwittingly reproduces, somewhat in a modified form, the Marxist thesis about the primacy of economics over politics as a factor in social and political change. And it was precisely against this type of economic determinism, prone to unfounded social forecasts and projects bordering on a socio-political utopia, that K. Popper opposed.

It should also be noted that it is socio-cultural factors that prevent the emergence of capitalism, a market economy, for example, it is socio-cultural traditions and a centralized state that prevented the transformation of proto-capitalism into capitalist relations in Ancient Egypt, the ancient world and Medieval China, and only in Europe in the late Middle Ages, partly under the influence of the Protestant ethic, capitalism became the main factor in the economic life of European society. However, the absolutization of capitalism as a socio-economic phenomenon of European society is a fundamentally erroneous trend, because, if we follow the logic of F. Fukuyama himself, the rationalization of the economic and managerial practices of modern society can offer more effective ways of economic production and cooperation than capitalism.

Fukuyama on International Conflicts of the Future

In this context, an essay by F. Fukuyama with an expressive title "End of History" should be regarded as a programmatic article of neo-mondialism in the early 1990s, when it became necessary to formulate the main directions of US foreign policy as a global hegemonic power. The US victory over the USSR marked the offensive new era in the history of international relations, for the description of which original conceptual models were required. However, F. Fukuyama in the article "End of History" describing "victorious march" liberalism on the planet, back in 1989 admitted that in the world there are "not taken" outposts that pose a threat to world development according to the neo-liberal scenario: the USSR, China, as well as countries in which the government is carried out on the basis of Islamic fundamentalism, which initially introduces a certain "anti-Western» potential.

After the publication of the essay "The End of History" in 1989 and the monograph "The End of History and the Last Man" in 1992, the history of human civilization itself continues its development, independent of the views and views of social philosophers. Answering the call on September 11, 2001, F. Fukuma was forced to confirm that “world politics after 9/11 is shifting gears abruptly”. If in the early 1990s soviet system, "the last serious rival of liberal democracy", disintegrated, and the American political and economic system was called by F. Fukuyama victors in the fight against the main ideological opponents: absolutism, fascism and national socialism, as well as communism, then at the beginning of the 21st century the situation in the international arena and the socio-political situation in countries the West has changed radically. After the events of September 11, 2001, the United States defeated Taliban and continue the war with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, have invaded Iraqi territory and are ready to invade Iran and Syria. In the Arab world and in other third world countries, anti-American and anti-Western sentiments are on the rise. Moreover, American democratic institutions turned out to be inadequate for Iraq at the beginning of the new millennium, information technology did not bring the mirage closer. "global village" to reality, and traditional nation-states are still the main actors in international relations.

Fukuyama besides concept "end of history", also offers two more possible options wars of the future: war between industrialized and post-industrial countries, as well as between countries of Western and Confucian culture. However, the last two types of conflicts do not seem feasible in the near future, since the military power and geopolitical influence of the United States as a hegemonic power surpasses not only the Western European powers, but also the powers of Southeast Asia.

Moreover, the use of this concept in geopolitical doctrines and concepts can lead to sad consequences, both for the Americans themselves and for the society against which intervention is carried out under the influence of this theoretical concept. By setting itself unattainable goals, such as the occupation of Iraq and the possible invasion of Iran, American foreign policy ends up wasting the resources of national wealth. Thus, American politicians confirm that they are not able to adapt their foreign policy in order to adapt to a changing domestic or international order in order to pursue national interests.

Moreover, modern American foreign policy refutes Fukuyama's thesis about the gradual rationalization of the means and methods of management after the disintegration of the USSR, since maintaining the solvability of the interests of power and society, maintaining their balance - this, in the words of W. Lipmann, is the main task of a superpower. The loss of solvability means the loss of weight and credibility in the international community, which occurs through the response to inadequate threats, thereby violating the status quo of the system of international relations.

conclusions

The study carried out in the note allows us to analyze the socio-political views of F. Fukuyama regarding the processes taking place in postmodern society at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries:

Firstly, the method of system analysis, thanks to which theoretical concepts were compared with the development of regional political processes, allowed the use of a systematic approach in the study of socio-cultural and socio-political problems at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries. This made it possible, by analyzing the social system of the post-industrial society, to consider in detail the socio-political problems and conflicts and ways to resolve them in the views of F. Fukuyama.

Secondly, the historical and descriptive method, revealing the features of real social, political and international processes, made it possible to identify the historical stages of social dynamics in post-war Western society and to determine the fundamental historical moments of F. Fukuyama's conceptual theses.

Thirdly, the method of comparative analysis of various points of view made it possible to identify the most vulnerable aspects of F. Fukuyama's socio-political thinking.

Fourth, dialectical method, which makes it possible to correlate the evolution of the views of experts and politicians with transformations in international and political processes, made it possible to measure the evolution of Fukuyama's views with changes in the objective reality of international life and domestic politics at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries.

The results of the study can be synthesized in the following provisions:

First, in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 21st century, the processes of international relations and politics were by no means determined by "end of history", but by the desire of the United States to maintain its role as hegemon and neutralize the influence of the Russian Federation, EU member states and other regional powers in the international arena. The contradictions between the liberal ideological doctrine and modern political practice lead to justified criticism of the concept "end of history" both among left-wing politicians and researchers, and among conservative researchers.

Secondly, despite the declining role of modern political liberalism in political practice and thinking, liberal ideology plays an important role in international and domestic political processes. However, economic and political liberalism is not the only relevant political ideology and practice that provides security and social support for the government of states in the international arena and in domestic political processes. Thus, neo-traditionalist and neo-fundamentalist views and ideologies are being strengthened, the socialist and communist movement is not disintegrating in European countries and on the Latin American continent. Thus, both the shortcomings of political and economic liberalism and the emergence of new ideologies, as well as "ethnic revival" not only in countries "third" And "fourth" peace hinder the establishment of a global society with the values of economic liberalism and universal human rights. The contradictions of F. Fukuyama's concept were evident during the events of September 11, 2001 and during the ongoing new US crusade against terrorism under the banner of neoliberal values. Therefore, the superiority of economic liberalism and universal values is by no means absolute and is based only on the speculative assumptions of F. Fukuyama.

Third, "failure of confidence" and other civic values in the post-industrial countries of the Western world is due to the natural entry of the United States and other countries into the information age of development, approaching the model of a post-modern society, and not the rejection of the American or Western culture as such (which is inherent only to left-wing radicals and some extremist-minded representatives of various ethnic minorities). The involvement of the United States in the process of resolving numerous conflicts in the region of the Middle East, as well as Southeast Asia, necessitates the transformation of the US political culture into an open and public one. The United States, like any other country, must adopt a culture of greater openness in the information age. It is also necessary to develop cooperation between government departments with American business and with non-governmental organizations. However, propaganda television and radio broadcasting (projects of public diplomacy) will not be able to radically change the negative attitude of the majority of the inhabitants of the region of North America and Western Europe towards state institutions. Consequently, in order to improve the image of state and political institutions, a radical transformation of state policy and social initiatives and reforms in the process of resolving social conflicts and contradictions is necessary.

Fourth, as a result of the crisis of civil and social values at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. political and legal foundations were laid for further strengthening the conflict potential of American society. The unsuccessful attempt by the American authorities to create new post-industrial values in a transforming society, when the socio-political structure and mobility is changing, is not only a consequence of "crisis of confidence" in American society and other post-industrial Western countries, as well as the result of an incorrect assessment of the motives of American citizens and an erroneous strategy of social reform, ignoring the interests of social agents and organizations.

Summing up the conclusions made in the study, the following should be noted. The possibility of a stable and peaceful transition of Western societies to the post-industrial and informational stage of development depends not only on successful foreign and domestic policy initiatives of state institutions and departments, but also on the effective functioning of political and social institutions, as well as on the condition of a stable interaction of the values of civil society and social organizations. and associations. However, ultimately, the establishment of social peace and stable development in Western societies is possible by creating conditions for social integration based on common socio-cultural values. Only in this way is it possible to stop the confrontational elements of social dynamics and achieve a mutually beneficial peaceful settlement of social conflicts.

Along with this look:
Globalization: Fukuyama vs. Huntington
Political modernization
liberal democracy

Francis Fukuyama. Illustration: gvsu.edu

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama became widely known worldwide for his book The End of History and the Last Man, in which he proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy around the world as the end point of the sociocultural evolution of mankind. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages of the world and caused the widest response in the scientific community and the media. Now the former apologist for the global liberal world order is observing its crisis and is trying to comprehend the phenomenon using the particular example of the United States. From Fukuyama's point of view, the reason for the decline of the United States is not liberalism itself, but a particular political model of American democracy that has become a source of dysfunction. Recognizing the limitations of this approach, however, it should be recognized that in the aspect of studying the functioning of the US state apparatus, the proposed article by Fukuyama contains interesting observations. In general, it can be recognized that the methodology proposed by him can be applied much more widely, not only to the crisis of any democratic model, but also to an authoritarian one. What follows is a brief retelling of a very lengthy article by Francis Fukuyama.

Public administration specialists record a steady decline in the overall quality of American government over more than a generation. A number of studies of the activities of federal services paint a depressing picture. Federal employees appear to be more motivated by compensation than by missions, which cannot compete on remuneration with businesses and nonprofits. They are dissatisfied both with their reward for work that is done well, and the lack of consequences for doing work that is done poorly. The US bureaucracies themselves operate under numerous and often conflicting mandates from Congress and the courts. As a result, they are costing US taxpayers a significant amount of money while their record is highly questionable. The internal decision-making system of bureaucracies is often blocked, and a high degree of morale staff and cohesion celebrated in the past are lost. Bureaucratic autonomy in the US beyond the routine intervention of Congress is not a bad thing, but rather a good thing, because it better ensures the professionalism of civil servants. Fukuyama examines the general crisis of governance in the United States using a specific example of the history of one federal agency - the US Forest Department.

Political scientist Samuel Huntington used the term "political decay" to explain the political instability in many newly independent states after World War II. Huntington argued that socio-economic modernization creates problems for "traditional political orders", which leads to the mobilization of new social groups whose participation cannot be "accommodated" in existing political institutions. Thus, political decay is caused by the inability of institutions to adapt to changing circumstances. Decline is in many ways a condition of political development: the old has to be broken in order to open the way for the new. But transitions can be extremely chaotic and violent, and there is no guarantee that the old political institutions will continually and peacefully adapt to the pattern of the new conditions. This situation is a good starting point for a broader understanding of the phenomenon of US political decline.

The very stability of institutions is also a source of political decline. Institutions are created to meet the needs of specific circumstances, but when circumstances change, institutions fail to adapt. One reason for this is cognitive: people develop mental models of how the world works, and tend to stick with them even in the face of contradictory evidence. Another reason is vested interest: institutions favor the "insider class" who shape the status quo and resist pressure for reform.

Political decline thus occurs when institutions fail to adapt to changing external circumstances, either because of intellectual inflexibility or because of the power of current elites interested in defending their positions. Decline can overwhelm any type of political system, authoritarian or democratic. And while democratic political systems theoretically have self-correcting mechanisms that allow them to reform, they also offer opportunities to legitimize the activities of powerful interest groups that can block needed change. This is exactly what has been happening in the United States in recent decades. Many of their political institutions are being observed to become increasingly dysfunctional, and there is no guarantee that this will change without a significant upheaval to the political order.

Max Weber argued that there is a difference between politics and administration. Politics was the realm of achieving ultimate goals, subject to democratic challenge, and administration was the realm of implementation, which could be studied empirically and subjected to scientific analysis. In the United States, the reform of the civil service, carried out at the end of the 19th century, proceeded from a similar attitude, based on the proposals of such scientists and politicians as Francis Lieber, Woodrow Wilson And Frank Goodnow. They believed that the achievements of the then natural sciences were quite applicable to solving social problems. The belief that public administration can turn into a science, now seems naive.

Further, Fukuyama argues that one of the sources of the decline of the United States is a specific democratic model adopted as the basis for the functioning of American statehood and does not meet the requirements of modernity.

In the United States, the Madison model of democracy is enshrined in the US constitution. (1) By design, this model of democracy was supposed to mitigate the problem of “insider capture” and prevent the emergence of a dominant faction or elite that could use their political power to impose tyranny. To do this, power is distributed among competing branches of government, and this creates opportunities for competition between different interests in a large and diverse country. But Madison's democracy often doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Elite insiders tend to have higher access to power and information, which they use to protect their interests. And ordinary voters have nothing against a corrupt politician, unless stolen money is directly involved in the case.

Cognitive inflexibility or biases also hold back social groups from mobilizing for their own interests. For example, in the United States, many working-class voters support candidates who promise to cut taxes on the wealthy, even though such tax cuts deprive them of important government services themselves.

The various lobbying groups of manufacturers are focused on the prices of their products, unlike ordinary consumers or taxpayers, who are "dispersed" and the prices of these goods make up only a small part of their budgets.

Liberal democracy is almost universally associated with a market economy that tends to produce winners and losers and reinforce what James Madison called "different and unequal opportunities for acquiring property." This type of economic inequality is not bad in itself, as it stimulates innovation and growth and occurs in conditions of equal access to the economic system. However, this becomes highly problematic when economic winners seek to turn their wealth into unequal political influence. They can do this by bribing the legislator or bureaucrat, that is, on the basis of a transfer of benefits, or, more destructively, by changing institutional rules in their favor - for example, by closing down competition in markets where they already dominate, that is, by behind the slope of the playing field is increasingly steep to your advantage.

Modern liberal democracies have three branches of government—executive, judicial, and legislative—corresponding to the three main categories of political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and democracy. The executive branch is the branch that uses force to enforce rules and implement policies. The judicial and legislative powers limit the executive power and direct it in the public interest. At the heart of institutional priorities in the United States, with its long tradition of mistrust of state power, has always been the priority of coercive institutions - the judiciary and the legislature over the state.

American politics in the 19th century could be described as "a state of courts and parties," in which government functions that in Europe would have been performed by one of the executive branches of the bureaucracy were instead performed by judges and elected representatives in the United States. Prior to the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, public offices in the United States were filled with employees on the basis of nomination on the basis of patronage by political parties. The creation of a modern, centralized, merit-based bureaucracy capable of exercising nationwide jurisdiction only began in the 1880s, and the number of professional civil servants slowly increased half a century later in the New Deal era. These changes came much later and more hesitantly than in countries such as France and Germany. "Big government" in the United States has grown especially after the presidential election Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. But apparently, the irreversible increase in the volume of government in the 20th century masks a large decline in its quality. This is largely due to the fact that the United States has returned in a certain way to the old "state of the courts and parties", that is, to a system in which the courts and the legislature have usurped many of the executive's own functions, which makes the actions of the government, in general, inconsistent and ineffective.

The courts operating in the British tradition of case law are to blame. The history of American courts demonstrates the ever-increasing judicial component in decisions that, in other developed democracies, are handled by administrative bureaucracy. This leads to an increase in costly litigation, slow decision-making, and extreme incompatibility with law enforcement. Today in the United States, instead of controlling the government, the courts have become alternative tools for expanding government control. In parallel, executive power was usurped by Congress. Interest groups, having lost the ability to corrupt legislators directly through bribery, have found other ways to capture and control them. These interest groups exert influence disproportionate to their place in society. They distort taxes and spending, and increase the overall level of the deficit and the ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They also undermine the quality of public administration through numerous mandates issued by Congress. Both phenomena - the constant increase in the judicial component in decisions, and the spread of the influence of interest groups, as a rule, undermine the credibility of the government. Distrust of government is then perpetuated and feeds on itself. Distrust in the executive bodies leads to the requirement of frequent legal checks of the administration, which reduces the quality and efficiency of management. At the same time, the demand for public services is driving Congress to introduce more and more executive mandates. Both processes lead to a reduction in bureaucratic autonomy, which in turn leads to a rigid, uncreative, and incoherent outcome of government. The crisis of democratic representation is expressed in the fact that ordinary citizens do not feel that their supposedly democratic government really reflects their interests, and is not controlled by various shadow elites. Paradoxically, the peculiarity of this phenomenon is that the crisis of representation was largely due to reforms designed to make the system more democratic. As a result, today there is an overabundance of law and too much democracy in relation to the American state possibility.

The starting point for the development of negative processes was the civil rights movement in the 1950s, when fundamental decisions were generated by the courts. The model of using courts to enforce new social rules was then used by many other social movements - from guard environment and consumer safety, to women's rights and same-sex marriage. In the second half of the twentieth century, all European countries went through similar changes in the legal status of racial and ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals. But in France, Germany and Great Britain, the same result was achieved not through the courts, but through the Ministry of National Justice, acting on behalf of the parliamentary majority. Legislative rule changes were driven by public and media pressure, but were carried out by the government itself, not by private individuals acting in concert with the justice system.

In countries like France and Germany, the law came first, then the modern state, and then democracy. In the United States, by contrast, the very deep tradition of English common law came first, then democracy, and only then the development of the modern state. The American state has always remained weaker and less capable than its European or Asian counterparts. More importantly, American political culture since its inception has been built around distrust of the executive branch.

The role of lawyers in the United States expanded dramatically during the turbulent years of social change in the 1960s and 1970s. Together with Congress, as a result, the United States received a huge expansion of the regulatory functions of the state.

This system is cumbersome not only in the level of self-regulation, but in the highly "legalistic" way in which it is carried out. Congress created a bunch of new federal agencies, but did not delegate to these bodies the ability to deviate from the rules - the kind that European or Japanese government agencies use. Congress deliberately encourages litigation by expanding the pool of possible plaintiffs. If at the end of the 1960s there were about a hundred courts for public administration problems a year, then in the 1980s - 10 thousand, and more than 22 thousand at the end of the 1990s. Often such conflicts in Sweden or Japan were resolved through silent consultation, while in the US the interested parties in the bureaucracy fought through formal litigation. Because of this, public administration is increasingly faced with uncertainty, procedural complexity, redundancy, lack of completeness, and high transaction costs. The system has become much less predictable. From the point of view of the quality of public policy, the system leads to high costs with no guarantee of results. What American conservatives often don't realize is that the underlying distrust of government makes the American system much less efficient at judiciary regulation, something that has been chosen in democracies with strong executive powers.

Interest groups are to blame. Another notable feature of the US political system is its openness to the influence of interest groups. Such groups can exercise their influence by acting on the government through the courts or simply directly. Trading political influence for money in the modern US goes through the back door in a form that is perfectly legal and hard to eradicate. The criminalization of bribery is narrowly defined in US law as a specific transaction in which the politician and the private party explicitly agreed on a “you to me, I to you” principle. The law does not cover what sociologists call "reciprocal altruism," or what an anthropologist might label as gift-giving. In an altruistic relationship, one person gives a benefit to another without the explicit expectation that they will be rewarded with a favor in return. The exchange means rather a moral obligation to return the favor in some way in the future. It is on the basis of this kind of deal that US industry lobbying is based. Modern states create strict rules and incentives to overcome the tendency to favor family and friends, including practices such as civil service examinations, merit qualifications, and conflicts of interest. There are anti-corruption laws against bribes. But the power of natural sociability is so strong that it finds a way to infiltrate the system. The rules for blocking nepotism are still strong enough in the US to prevent overt favoritism from becoming a common feature in modern US politics, although it is interesting to note how strong the desire to create political dynasties like the Kennedy brothers, the Bush families, and the Clinton family is.

Mutual altruism is rampant in Washington and is the main channel through which interest groups have succeeded in corrupting the government. Concerned groups are able to legally influence members of Congress simply by making a donation with no definite expectation of favors being returned. Often the legislator himself initiates a gift exchange in favor of an interest group in the hope that he will receive some benefit after leaving public service. The explosion of lobbying in Washington and the rise of interest groups has been an amazing sight in recent decades. For example, in 1971 there were 175 registered lobbying firms in Washington. A decade later - about 2,500. In 2009 - 13,700.

Often the influence of interest groups and lobbyists does not stimulate new policies, but makes existing legislation much worse than it could be. The legislative process in the United States has always been much more fragmented than in countries with parliamentary systems and disciplined parties. A jumble of congressional committees with overlapping jurisdictions often results in multiple and conflicting mandates. This decentralized legislative process produces inconsistent laws and practically invites the participation of interest groups who, if not strong enough to form general legislation, can at least protect their specific interests. Ordinary Americans express universal disdain for the influence of interest groups and money in Congress. Opinion polls show that confidence in Congress has fallen to an all-time low, just above single digits.

In today's United States, the elites speak the language of freedom but are perfectly happy to settle for privilege. Economist Olson noted in his work that in times of peace and stability, democracies tend to accumulate all more interest groups. Instead of creating wealth through economic activities, these groups use the political system to extract benefits or rents for themselves. These rents are collectively unproductive and costly to society as a whole. But the general public was bound by the lack of collective action. As a result, negative phenomena can only be stopped by a big shock, such as wars or revolutions.

By Madison, a cacophony of interest groups will collectively interact to produce the public interest in the same way that free market competition provides the public good through individuals acting on their narrow selfish interests. Catch called this phenomenon "the interest group of liberalism". But not all groups are equally capable of organizing collective action. The interest groups that vie for the attention of the US Congress do not represent the entire American people, but the most organized and (which often comes down to that) the richest parts of American society. This tends to work against the interests of the unorganized, who are often poor, poorly educated, or otherwise marginalized.

Political scientist Morris Fiorina presented significant evidence that the American "political class" is far more polarized than the American people themselves. Politics is determined by well-organized activists, whether in the party and Congress, the media, or lobbying interest groups. The sum of the actions of these groups of activists does not give a compromise position, but leads to polarization and deadlock in politics.

Blocking decisions. Fukuyama calls this phenomenon the rise of "vetocracy". The US Constitution protects individual freedom through a complex system of checks and balances that were specifically designed by the founders to limit the power of the state. In practice, in the US constitutional system, powers are not so much functionally divided as duplicated in all branches, which leads to periodic usurpations of one branch by another and conflicts. Federalism often does not delegate certain powers to the appropriate level of government, but rather duplicates them at several levels. With such a system of redundant and non-hierarchical power, different parts of the government can easily block each other. Combined with the general expansion of the power of the courts in politics and the wide influence of interest groups, the result is an unbalanced form of government that undermines the prospects for needed collective action.

The effectiveness of consensus decision-making deteriorates rapidly as groups become larger and more diverse, and so for most groups decisions are not made by consensus but with the consent of some subset of the population. The smaller the percentage of the group needed to make a decision, the more easily and effectively it can be done.

The US political system has many more checks and balances, or what political scientists call "veto" points, than other modern democracies. This raises the costs of collective action, and in some cases makes it impossible at all. In earlier periods of US history, when one side or the other was dominant, this system served as a means to moderate the will of the majority and force it to pay more attention to the minority.

Compared to the American Madison system, the British system of democracy appears to be a more evenly balanced and highly competitive party system. T. n. The Westminster system, which developed in England in the years after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, is one of the most executive in the democratic world, since in its pure form it has very few veto points. The tradition of free media in the United Kingdom is another important informal means of control over the executive branch. There is only one all-powerful legislative chamber in the Westminster system. In the Westminster system, there is no separate presidency, no strong upper house, no written constitution, and therefore no judicial review, no federalism, or devolution of state power to localities. In the UK, a majoritarian electoral system, along with strong party discipline, tends to produce a two-party system and a strong parliamentary majority. The termination of debate by legislators requires a simple majority of members of Parliament. The parliamentary majority chooses a government with a strong executive power, and once it makes a legislative decision, the decision cannot be challenged in the courts at all. This is why the British system is often described as a "democratic dictatorship". But with the concentration of power, the Westminster system still remains fundamentally democratic, because if the voters don't like the government, they can re-elect it. By a vote of no confidence, they can do this immediately, without waiting for the end of the term. This means that the government is more sensitive to the perception of the general good than to the needs of specific interest groups or the lobbying system.

The difference between the systems of Westminster and Madison is obvious when one compares the rather simple procedural adoption of the budget in the UK and the long and painfully difficult one in the USA. However, the classic Westminster system no longer exists anywhere in the world, including in the UK itself, as that country gradually adopted a system of checks and balances. However, the United Kingdom still has fewer veto points than the United States. Germany, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries in particular have been able to maintain higher levels of trust in government, making public administration less adversarial, more coherent and better adapted to the changing conditions of globalization. The picture looks different for the EU as a whole. In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in the number and sophistication of lobbying groups in Europe. With a shift in governance from national capitals to Brussels European system in general, it begins to resemble what exists in the United States. Individual parliamentary systems in Europe can afford fewer veto points than US checks and balances, but with the addition of a large European level, many more veto points are added to it. The rise of the EU is also Americanizing Europe regarding the role of the judiciary. The new structure of European jurisprudence, with its multiple and overlapping layers, increased rather than reduced the number of judicial vetoes in the system.

Solving today's societal problems requires a healthy, well-functioning political system, which the United States does not currently have. Some of the Latin American countries that copied the US presidential system in the 19th century have similar problems with decision blocking and politicized administration.

The US Congress jealously guards its right to legislate. Several congressional committees often produce repetition and duplication, or several agencies are created with similar goals. The Pentagon, for example, operates under the control of 500 mandates, for which it must report annually to Congress. Congress created about 50 separate employee retraining programs and 82 separate teacher development projects. The financial sector in the US is divided between the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and a host of state attorneys general who decided to take over control of the banking sector. Ironically, public opinion polls show a high degree of public trust in precisely those institutions, such as NASA, that are least subject to immediate democratic oversight. The US political system presents a complex picture in which the system of checks unnecessarily constrains the decision-making process.

The process and consequences of political disintegration. In an environment of acute political polarization, the decentralized US system is less and less able to represent the interests of majoritarian groups and over-emphasizes interest groups and activists in organizations that collectively do not constitute the sovereign American people. This is not the first time the US political system has been polarized and indecisive. In the middle of the 19th century, it could not resolve the issue of expanding slavery to new territories, and in the last decades of the 19th century it could not determine what was the priority of politics - an agrarian or industrial society. Madison's system of checks and balances and parties with their clientele running the political system was sufficient to rule an isolated and largely agrarian country in the 19th century, but not now a globalized world power.

Today, once again, the United States has fallen into the trap of its own political institutions. Because Americans do not trust government, they are generally unwilling to delegate decision-making power to it, as is the case in other democracies. Instead, Congress enacts complex rules that reduce government autonomy and lead to slow and costly decision-making.

The government does not act well under the given conditions, which confirms the lack of trust in it on the part of the people. The latter, under these conditions, does not want to pay higher taxes, which, as the people believe, the authorities will waste. But without adequate resources, the government cannot function properly.

Two obstacles stand in the way of reversing the trend towards disintegration. The first of these is a matter of policy. Many politicians in the United States admit that the system does not work well, but nonetheless they have strong interests in maintaining the status quo. No political party has an incentive to cut itself off from access to interest group money, and interest groups don't need a system where money doesn't buy influence.

Just as it did in the 1880s, there should be a reform coalition in the United States, uniting groups without a stake in the current system. But achieving collective action among such groups is very difficult. They need guidance and a clear program. Neither is currently observed.

The second problem lies in the world of ideas. The traditional American solution to the perception of government dysfunction is to try to expand democratic participation and transparency. But most citizens have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with complex issues of public policy. Therefore, increased participation will simply pave the way for well-organized groups of activists to gain more power. The obvious solution to this problem would be to abandon some of the potential democratizing reforms, but no one dares to imagine that the country needs less participation and transparency.

As a result, the development of the country's political malady and the unlikely prospect of constructive and gradual reforms will prolong the process of disintegration of the American political system, which is likely to continue until some external blow brings a real coalition of reforms into the light and activates it into action.

(1) James Madison (1751-1836) - American statesman, the fourth President of the United States, one of the key authors of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Francis Fukuyama is a prominent American political scientist, futurist and sociologist of Japanese origin. Born October 27, 1952 in Chicago. He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, and a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy and Middle East policy from Harvard.

From 1979 to the present, he has been a member of the RAND Corporation's Department of Political Science in Washington, DC.

From 1981-1982 and 1989, he served at the US State Department's Policy Planning Staff, first as a Middle East Policy Specialist and then as Deputy Director for European Political-Military Affairs. In 1981-1982, he was a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations on the Palestinian Authority.

Honorary Doctorate from Connecticut College, Doane College, Member of the Supervisory Boards of the following organizations: National Endowment for Democracy, The National Interest, and The New America Foundation, Member of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Democracy. Member of the Public Policy Department at George Mason University. Author of over 80 works, including The End of History and The Last Man (1992), which won the Los Angeles Times Literary Criticism Award and the Premio Capri International Award.

F. Fukuyama broke into the scientific elite when his article “The End of History?” was published in The National Interest in the summer of 1989. This was followed by a book of the same name ("The End of History and the Last Man", 1992), and in the summer of 1999 "The National Interest" set aside almost half the issue for a special discussion around the article that shook the world ten years earlier (see. " Francis Fukuyama's Second Thoughts" - "The National Interest", Summer 1999,? 56, pp. 15–44). By this time, Professor Fukuyama had already authored four books: The End of History was followed by Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), The End of Order (1997) and The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order” (1998), to which two more have been added in recent years: “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution” (2002) and “State-Building. Governance and World Order in the 21st Century" (2004).

We present the key points of Francis Fukuyama's article "The End of History?" with a few comments. We remind readers that this concept paper was published in 1989.

FROM F. FUKUYAMA'S ARTICLE "END OF HISTORY?"

…Watching events unfold in the last decade or so, it's hard to get rid of the feeling that something fundamental is happening in world history.

The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is obvious, first of all, because liberalism has no viable alternatives left.

What we are probably witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or another period of post-war history, but the end of history as such, the completion of the ideological evolution of mankind and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.

The idea of the end of history cannot be considered original. Its most famous propagandist is Karl Marx, who believed that historical development, determined by the interaction material forces, has a purposeful character and will end only by reaching a communist utopia, which will resolve all contradictions. However, this conception of history - as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle and an end - was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Max Weber begins his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by pointing out the differences in the economic activities of Protestants and Catholics. These differences are summed up in the proverb: "Protestants eat well, Catholics rest in peace." The central theme of Weber's work is to prove, contrary to Marx, that the material mode of production is not a "basis" but, on the contrary, a "superstructure" rooted in religion and culture. And if we want to understand what modern capitalism and the profit motive are, we should, according to Weber, study the prerequisites for both that are available in the sphere of consciousness.

Have we really come to the end of history? In other words, are there still some fundamental "contradictions" that modern liberalism is powerless to resolve, but which would be resolved within the framework of some alternative political and economic arrangement? Since we start from idealistic premises, we must look for the answer in the sphere of ideology and consciousness. In the past century, liberalism has faced two main challenges - fascism and communism.

According to the first, the political weakness of the West, its materialism, moral decay, loss of unity are the fundamental contradictions of liberal societies; From his point of view, only a strong state and a “new man” based on the idea of national exclusiveness could resolve them. As a viable ideology, fascism was crushed by World War II. This, of course, was a very material defeat, but it turned out to be also a defeat of the idea.

Far more serious was the ideological challenge posed to liberalism by the second great alternative, communism. Marx argued, in Hegelian language, that there is a fundamental insoluble contradiction inherent in a liberal society: it is the contradiction between labor and capital. Subsequently, it served as the main accusation against liberalism. Of course, the class issue has been successfully resolved by the West. This does not mean that there are no rich and poor in the United States, or that the gap between the two has not widened in recent years. However, the roots of economic inequality are not in the legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributive; it is rather a matter of the cultural and social characteristics of its constituent groups inherited from the past. The Negro problem in the United States is not a product of liberalism, but of slavery, which still persisted. for a long time after it was formally abolished.

From the author. I would like to emphasize the following. Fukuyama's ideas about the two challenges to liberalism - fascism and communism - are still the fundamental ideological basis of US geopolitics. It is enough to read the official reports of US President George W. Bush (for example, the February 2005 report to the US Congress). But after all, in this way two completely different ideologies are equated: fascism (misanthropic) and communism (the main principle is internationalism), which is absolutely wrong. And of course, one cannot agree with Fukuyama's thesis that "of course, the class issue has been successfully resolved by the West." It just has not been resolved, and the contradictions between labor and capital are aggravated, including in the United States.

But the power of the liberal idea would not be so impressive if it did not affect the greatest and oldest culture in Asia - China. The very existence of communist China created an alternative pole of ideological attraction and, as such, posed a threat to liberalism. But over the past fifteen years, Marxism-Leninism as an economic system has been almost completely discredited. Beginning with the famous Third Plenum of the Tenth Central Committee in 1978, the Chinese Communist Party set about the decollectivization of agriculture, which affected 800 million Chinese. The role of the state in agriculture was reduced to the collection of taxes, the production of consumer goods was sharply increased in order to instill in the peasants a taste for a universal state and thereby stimulate their work. As a result of the reform, grain production was doubled in just five years; at the same time, Deng Xiaoping had a solid political base, which made it possible to extend the reform to other areas of the economy. And besides, no economic statistics can reflect the dynamism, initiative and openness that China has shown when reform began. China is by no means a liberal democracy today.

No more than 20% of the economy has been transferred to market rails, and, more importantly, the country continues to be run by the self-appointed Communist Party, which does not allow even the slightest hint of the possibility of transferring power to other hands. Deng made none of Gorbachev's promises to democratize the political system, and there is no Chinese equivalent to glasnost. The Chinese leadership is far more circumspect in its criticism of Mao and Maoism than Gorbachev is with Brezhnev and Stalin, and the regime continues to pay verbal tribute to Marxism-Leninism as its ideological foundation. However, anyone familiar with the worldview and behavior of the new technocratic elite ruling China today knows that Marxism and ideological dictate no longer have any political significance and that for the first time since the revolution, bourgeois consumerism has found real meaning in this country. The various recessions in the course of reform, campaigns against "spiritual pollution" and attacks on political "deviations" should be seen as tactical ploys used in the process of making an extremely difficult political transition. By sidestepping the issue of political reform while shifting the economy to a new footing, Deng managed to avoid the "blow of foundations" that accompanies Gorbachev's perestroika. Yet the appeal of the liberal idea remains very strong as economic power shifts into the hands of the people and the economy becomes more open to outside world. Currently, more than 20,000 Chinese students are studying in the US and other Western countries, almost all of them are children of the Chinese elite. It is hard to believe that, having returned home and joined in the government of the country, they will allow China to remain the only Asian country not affected by the general democratic process. The student demonstrations, which first took place in Beijing in December 1986 and have been repeated recently in connection with the death of Hu Yaobang, are only the beginning of what will inevitably turn into a growing movement to change the political system.

From the author. At the end of 2005, it can be clearly stated that Fukuyama is wrong. Moreover, it can be stated that his statements on China are a special form of strategic information and ideological operation aimed at the collapse of China. It can be recorded that the plans for an information war against China, voiced by Fukuyama, completely failed, at least 16 years after they were voiced.

However, for all the importance of what is happening in China, it is the events in the Soviet Union - "the birthplace of the world proletariat" - that drive the final nail into the coffin of Marxism-Leninism. In terms of official institutions, not much has changed in the four years that Gorbachev has been in power: the free market and the cooperative movement are a tiny part of the Soviet economy, which continues to be centrally planned; the political system is still in the hands of the Communist Party, which has just begun to democratize and share power with other groups; the regime continues to claim that its only aspiration is to modernize socialism and that Marxism-Leninism remains its ideological basis; finally, Gorbachev is confronted by a potentially powerful conservative opposition capable of returning a lot of things back to normal.

What happened in the four years after Gorbachev came to power is a revolutionary assault on the most fundamental institutions and principles of Stalinism and their replacement by others not yet liberal in the proper sense of the word, but bound together precisely by liberalism. Gorbachev's repeated claims that he seeks to return to the original meaning of Leninism are themselves only a variant of Orwell's "double speech". Gorbachev's statements are quite understandable: having completely debunked Stalinism and Brezhnevism, blaming them for today's difficulties, he needs some kind of foothold to justify the legitimacy of the power of the CPSU. However, Gorbachev's tactics should not hide from us the fact that the principles of democratization and decentralization that he proclaimed in the economic and political sphere are extremely destructive for the fundamental tenets of both Marxism and Leninism. At present, the Soviet Union can in no way be considered a liberal or democratic country; and it is unlikely that perestroika will be so successful that in any foreseeable future a similar characterization can be applied to this country. However, at the end of history, there is no need for all societies to be liberal; it is enough to forget the ideological claims to other, higher forms of community life. And in this regard, the Soviet Union has undergone very significant changes over the past two years: criticism of the Soviet system, sanctioned by Gorbachev, has turned out to be so deep and destructive that the chances of a return to Stalinism or Brezhnevism are very small.

From the author. Fukuyama sings an ode to M. Gorbachev and rejoices in the successful progress of the strategic information operation aimed at the collapse of the USSR. The author has already expressed his extremely negative assessment of M. Gorbachev's activities in the destruction of our state. It seems to me that a kind of Nuremberg Tribunal is needed, only Russian (preferably in Stavropol), to clarify all the circumstances and reasons for how this former combine operator was able to geopolitically “throw back” Rus' 500 years ago. On November 10, 2005, the author expressed the idea of creating a Public Tribunal for a public investigation of the anti-state activities of M. Gorbachev on the air of the Voice of Russia radio station (Commonwealth program, for all former Soviet republics). Judging by calls from listeners and subsequent responses, this idea received wide support from the population of the former USSR.

Let us cite the data of a survey of viewers of the TVC channel on the evening of March 11, 2005. Only one question was asked: what are the results of Gorbachev's perestroika?

Democracy and openness - 1.5% Poverty and lack of rights - 70% The collapse of the USSR - 28.5%.

It is M. Gorbachev who is responsible for the fact that Russia was thrown back to the geopolitical boundaries created in the south and west of Rus' by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century.

Gorbachev is guilty of the fact that during the years of his reign, the external debt increased by 5.5 times, and the gold reserves decreased by 11 times. Which, in turn, led to the poverty of the majority of the population of the former USSR.

Gorbachev is guilty of the fact that the aggressive NATO bloc is already bordering today on Russia weakened by him. After all, it was Gorbachev who refused to sign a legal agreement on the non-expansion of the NATO bloc to the East in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from of Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed to the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. 20 years after Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) invited Russians to evaluate the events of that time.

At present, the attitude towards him is rather negative: 45% have a negative attitude towards him, among them 19% are sharply negative; 13% - more or less positive and a third of the respondents (34%) - neutral. It seems that the attitude towards this politician in Russian society has stabilized, in any case, three years ago it was about the same as it is now.

At present, the majority of respondents (61%) are rather negative about the perestroika initiated by M. Gorbachev, 14% are rather positive, and 13% are not interested in perestroika.

All-Russian opinion poll conducted by VTsIOM on March 5–6, 2005. 1600 people were interviewed in 100 settlements in 40 regions, territories and republics of Russia. The statistical error does not exceed 3.4%.

And now, dear readers, once again carefully read the words of Fukuyama: “The restoration of the authority of power in the Soviet Union after the destructive work of Gorbachev is possible only on the basis of a new and strong ideology, which, however, is not yet visible on the horizon.” In this case, Fukuyama cannot be agreed in any way. Rus' has an ideology that has always led to success, even in the most difficult moments of our history. This is the ideology of "Moscow - the Third Rome", which must be adapted to the realities of the 21st century.

Let us assume for a moment that fascism and communism do not exist: does liberalism still have any ideological competitors? Or in other words: are there any contradictions in a liberal society that cannot be resolved within its framework? Two possibilities arise - religion and nationalism.

Everyone celebrates in Lately the rise of religious fundamentalism within the Christian and Muslim traditions. Some are inclined to believe that the revival of religion indicates that people are deeply unhappy with the impersonality and spiritual emptiness of liberal consumerist societies. However, although there is a void, and this is, of course, an ideological defect of liberalism, it does not follow that religion becomes our perspective. Nor is it at all obvious that this defect can be eliminated by political means. After all, liberalism itself appeared when religion-based societies, not having come to an agreement on the issue of a good life, found themselves incapable of providing even the minimum conditions for peace and stability. The theocratic state as a political alternative to liberalism and communism is offered today only by Islam.

Another "contradiction" potentially insoluble within the framework of liberalism is nationalism and other forms of racial and ethnic consciousness. Indeed, a significant number of conflicts since the Battle of Jena have been caused by nationalism. The two monstrous world wars in this century are the product of nationalism in its various guises.

people, and there should have been about 500 million. And the real winners of the First World War were Great Britain and the USA. During the Second World War, the United States literally “profited” and was able to solve its internal economic problems due to the war (eliminated 19 million unemployment, etc.)

What does the end of history mean for the sphere of international relations? It is clear that much of the third world will remain in the margins of history and serve as an arena of conflict for many years. But we will now focus on the larger and more developed countries responsible for much of world politics. Russia and China are unlikely to join the advanced nations of the West in the foreseeable future; but imagine for a moment that Marxism-Leninism ceases to be a factor driving the foreign policy of these countries - an option, if not yet a reality, but has recently become quite possible. How then will the de-ideologized world in the sum of its characteristics differ from the world in which we live?

The usual answer is that it is unlikely that there will be any differences between them. For it is widely believed that ideology is only a cover for great power interests and that this causes a fairly high level of rivalry and conflict between nations. Indeed, according to one popular theory in the academic world, conflict is inherent in the international system as such, and to understand its prospects, one should look at the form of the system - for example, is it bipolar or multipolar - and not at the specific nations and regimes that form it. In essence, here the Hobbesian view of politics is applied to international relations: aggression and insecurity are taken not as a product of historical conditions, but as universal characteristics of society.

Expansionism and rivalry in the nineteenth century rested on a no less "ideal" basis; it just so happened that the ideology that drove them was not as developed as the doctrines of the twentieth century. First, the most "liberal" European societies were illiberal because they believed in the legitimacy of imperialism, that is, in the right of one nation to dominate other nations, regardless of whether those nations wished to be dominated. The justification for imperialism varies from nation to nation, ranging from the crude belief that force is always right, especially when it comes to non-Europeans, to the recognition of the Great Burden of the White Man, and the Christianizing mission of Europe, and the desire to "give" the culture of Rabelais and Molière to the colored. But whatever this or that ideological basis, each "developed" country believed in the acceptability of the domination of a higher civilization over the lower ones. This led in the second half of the century to territorial conquests and to no small extent served as the cause of the world war.

Our future depends, however, on the extent to which the Soviet elite adopts the idea of a universal state. From publications and personal meetings, I draw an unambiguous conclusion that the liberal Soviet intelligentsia gathered around Gorbachev came to understand the idea of the end of history in a surprisingly short time; and to a large extent this is the result of contacts with European civilization that took place already in the post-Brezhnev era. New Political Thinking envisions a world dominated by economic interests, lacking ideological grounds for serious conflict between nations, and in which, consequently, the use of military force is increasingly illegal. Post-historical consciousness, represented by "new thinking", is the only possible future for the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, there has always been a strong current of Great Russian chauvinism, which, with the advent of glasnost, gained greater freedom of expression. It is quite possible that for some time there will be a return to traditional Marxism-Leninism, simply as a rallying point for those who seek to restore the "foundations" undermined by Gorbachev. Unlike the propagandists of traditional Marxism-Leninism, ultranationalists in the USSR passionately believe in their Slavophile vocation, and one gets the feeling that the fascist alternative is still quite alive here.

From the author. Fukuyama states that "our future (according to the author - the future of the NBI) depends, however, on the extent to which the Soviet elite will assimilate the idea of a universal state." Until 2003, the Soviet and post-Soviet ruling elite implemented Fukuyama's wishes. Fukuyama sees the main threat to the world domination of the New British Empire in the restoration of the traditional and successful geopolitical doctrine of Rus' "Moscow-Third Rome". He is very afraid of this prospect and therefore immediately “sticks” informational labels of “Great Russian chauvinism”, etc.

The disappearance of Marxism-Leninism, first in China and then in the Soviet Union, will mean the collapse of it as a viable ideology with a worldwide history.

cal value. And although there will still be some orthodox Marxists somewhere in Managua, Pyongyang or Cambridge (Massachusetts), the fact that no major state will have this ideology in service will completely undermine its claims to the avant-garde role in history. Its death will simultaneously mean the expansion of the "common market" in international relations and reduce the likelihood of a serious interstate conflict.

This by no means means that international conflicts will disappear altogether. It follows from this that both terrorism and national liberation wars will remain on the agenda.

Francis Fukuyama called the changes that began to take place in the late 1980s "something fundamental", because they posed a number of insoluble problems for science and politics. The end of the Cold War, the privileged position of the United States as the sole superpower, provoked a change in the geopolitical situation, and as a result, the question of a new world order arose. He was the first to try to answer it in The End of History, summary which we will consider today.

What attracted attention?

Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" made a lot of noise. Interest in this work was caused by a number of specific circumstances. First, the public saw it in 1989. At that time, the Soviet Union still existed, and even in the abstract it was impossible to imagine that it would someday fall apart. But Fukuyama wrote precisely about this. If you study even the summary of Fukuyama's The End of History, you can confidently say that his article was a kind of terrorist forecast about the near and distant future. Here the principles and features of the new world order were fixed.

Secondly, in the light of recent events, Fukuyama's work has become sensational and has attracted public attention. In terms of its significance, Fukuyama's work is comparable to S. Huntington's treatise The Clash of Civilizations.

Thirdly, Fukuyama's ideas explain the course, results and prospects for the development of world history. Here the development of liberalism is considered as the only viable ideology, on the basis of which the final form of government arises.

Biographical information

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is a Japanese-born American political scientist, economist, philosopher, and writer. He worked as a senior fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Democracy and Law at Stanford. Prior to that, he was a professor and director of the international development program at the Hopkins School of Studies. In 2012, he became a Leading Fellow at Stanford University.

Fukuyama is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man. She came out in 1992. In this work, the writer insisted that the spread of liberal democracy around the world will be evidence that humanity is at the final stage of sociocultural evolution, and it will become the final form of government.

Before proceeding with the study of the summary of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, it is worth knowing a few interesting facts about the author and his work. This book was translated into 20 languages of the world: it caused a great resonance among the scientific community and in the media. After the book saw the world, and the idea put forward in it was repeatedly called into question, Fukuyama did not abandon his concept of the "end of history". Some of his views changed much later. At the dawn of his career, he was associated with the neo-conservative movement, but in the new millennium, due to certain events, the author sharply moved away from this idea.

First part

Before considering the summary of Fukuyama's The End of History, it is worth noting that the book consists of five parts. Each of them deals with separate ideas. In the first part, Fukuyama explores the historical pessimism of the present. He believes that this state of affairs is the result of world wars, genocide and totalitarianism, which are characteristic of the twentieth century.

The disasters that have befallen mankind have undermined faith not only in the scientific progress of the 21st century, but in all ideas about the direction and continuity of history. Fukuyama asks himself whether human pessimism is justified. He explores the crisis of authoritarianism and the confident emergence of liberal democracy. Fukuyama believed that humanity was moving towards the end of the millennium, and all existing crises left only liberal democracy on the world stage - the doctrine of individual freedom and state sovereignty. An increasing number of countries are adopting liberal democracy, and those who criticize it are unable to offer any alternative. This concept has surpassed all political opponents and has become a kind of guarantor of the culmination of human history.

The main idea of F. Fukuyama's "The End of History" (a brief summary makes this clear) is that the main weakness of states is the inability to legitimacy. Apart from the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, there was not a single state in the world where the old regime was completely removed from activity by armed confrontation or revolution. Regimes changed due to the voluntary decision of the main part of the rulers of the old regime to transfer the reins of government to the new government. from power was usually provoked by crises, when it was necessary to introduce something new in order to avoid anarchy. This concludes the first part of Fukuyama's summary of The End of History.

Second and third parts

The second and third parts of the book are independent essays that complement each other. They tell about the universal history and events that testify to the logical conclusion of human evolution, the point at which will be liberal democracy.

In the second part, the author emphasizes the character modern sciences while focusing on the imperatives of economic development. Even from the summary of Fukuyama's The End of History, one can conclude that a society striving to prosper and protect its independence must take the path of innovative development and modernization. Economic development leads to the triumph of capitalism.

Fukuyama believed that history strives for freedom, but also craves recognition. People are constantly striving for society to recognize their human dignity. It was this desire that helped them overcome the animal nature, and also allowed them to risk their lives in hunting and battles. Although, on the other hand, this desire became the reason for the division into slaves and slave owners. True, this form of government was never able to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the first or the second. To eliminate the contradictions that arise in the struggle for recognition, it is necessary to create a state based on the general and mutual recognition of the rights of each of its inhabitants. This is how F. Fukuyama sees the end of history and a strong state.

Fourth part

In this section, the author compares the typical craving for recognition with Plato's "spirituality" and Rousseau's notion of "self-love". Fukuyama does not lose sight of universal human concepts such as "self-respect", "self-esteem", "self-worth" and "dignity". The attractiveness of democracy is associated primarily with the personal freedom of a person and equality. With the development of progress, the importance of this factor increases more and more, because as people become more educated and richer, they increasingly demand that their achievements and social status be recognized.

Here Fukuyama points out that even in successful authoritarian regimes there is a desire for political freedom. The thirst for recognition is precisely the missing link that connects liberal economics and politics.

Fifth part

The last chapter of the book answers the question of whether liberal democracy can fully satisfy man's thirst for recognition and whether it can be considered the end point of human history. Fukuyama is sure that it is the best solution to the human problem, but still it also has its negative sides. In particular, a number of contradictions that can destroy this system. For example, the strained relationship between freedom and equality does not ensure equal recognition of minorities and disadvantaged people. The method of liberal democracy undermines religious and other pre-liberal attitudes, and a society based on freedom and equality is unable to provide an arena for the struggle for supremacy.

Fukuyama is sure that this last contradiction is the main one among all the others. The author begins to use the concept of "the last man", which he borrows from Nietzsche. This "last man" has long ceased to believe in something, to recognize some ideas and truths, all that interests him is his own comfort. He is no longer able to experience keen interest or awe, he simply exists. The End of History and the Last Man summary focuses on liberal democracy. The last man is here regarded rather as a by-product of the activity of the new regime of government.

The author also says that sooner or later the foundations of liberal democracy will be violated due to the fact that a person will not be able to suppress his desire to fight. A person will start fighting for the sake of the battle itself, in other words, out of boredom, because it is difficult for people to imagine life in a world where you don’t have to fight. As a result, Fukuyama comes to the conclusion that not only liberal democracy can satisfy human needs, but those whose needs have remained unsatisfied are able to restore the course of history. This concludes the summary of The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama.

Essence of the work

The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama is the first book by an American political scientist and philosopher, published in 1992. But before it appeared, in 1989 the world saw the essay of the same name. In the book, the author continues his main ideas.

There is a certain consciousness in society that favors liberalism. Liberalism itself can be considered a universal ideology whose provisions are absolute and cannot be changed or improved upon.
By "the end of history" the author understands the spread of Western culture and ideology.
The process of introducing Western culture into society is considered an undeniable victory for economic liberalism.
The victory is a harbinger of political liberalism.
The "end of history" is the triumph of capitalism. Anthony Giddens wrote about this, who noted that the end of history is the end of any alternatives in which capitalism overthrows socialism. And this is a change in international relations.
This is the victory of the West, which Fukuyama considers as a single integral system and does not see significant differences between countries, even in terms of economic interests.
The End of History divides the world into two parts. One belongs to history, the other to post-history. They have different qualities, characteristics and features.

In general, these are the main ideas of The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama.

Strong state

Separately from the "end of history", Francis Fukuyama considered such a thing as a "strong state". With the rise of political and ideological problems, the central of which was the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, Fukuyama radically reconsiders his political position and becomes a supporter of a strong state. Over time, the world was presented after the "End of History" and "Strong State" by F. Fukuyama. In short, this book created an unexpected sensation among readers. The author began it with this thesis:

Building a strong state is about creating new government institutions and strengthening existing ones. In this book, I show that building a strong state is one of the most important problems of the world community, since the weakness and destruction of states are the source of many especially serious world problems ...

At the end of the book, he offers an equally epic statement:

Only states and states alone are capable of uniting and expediently deploying forces to ensure order. These forces are needed to ensure the rule of law within the country and to maintain the international order. Those who advocate "twilight statehood" - whether they are free-market advocates or committed to multilateral negotiations - must explain what exactly will replace the power of sovereign nation-states in modern world… In fact, this chasm has been filled by a motley collection of international organizations, crime syndicates, terrorist groups and so on, which may have some degree of power and legitimacy, but rarely both. For lack of a clear answer, we can only return to the sovereign nation-state and again try to figure out how to make it strong and successful.

Change of mind

If earlier the author advocated liberalism, then in 2004 he writes that liberal ideologies that promote the minimization and restriction of state functions do not correspond to modern realities. He considers the idea that private markets and non-state institutions should perform some state functions as perverse. Fukuyama argues that weak and ignorant governments can be a source of serious problems in developing countries.

In the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama believed that liberal values were universal, but with the advent of the new millennium, he began to have doubts about this. He even agreed with the ideas that said that liberal values were born due to the specific conditions of the development of Western countries.

Fukuyama considers “weak” states to be those countries in which human rights are violated, corruption flourishes, institutions are underdeveloped traditional society. In such a country there are no competent leaders and social upheavals are constantly occurring. This often leads to armed conflicts and mass migration processes. Weak states often support international terrorism.

Levels of a strong state

The views of Francis Fukuyama began with liberal democracy, but life has shown that this is not enough. Mankind is not ready to peacefully coexist with each other, and if in some states it has become possible to stifle animal impulses for struggle, then in others they become prevalent. And Fukuyama starts talking about a strong state that will not be analogous to a totalitarian or authoritarian power.

This notorious power is seen on two levels:

all citizens are provided with social security, political stability and economic prosperity:
the country is competitive in the international arena, able to withstand the numerous challenges of globalization.

In conclusion, we can say that both the first and second books provide an opportunity to understand the reasons for the split of the West, the causes of confrontations and the financial crisis in different countries peace.

Francis Fukuyama: biography, photos and interesting facts. Francis Fukuyama: biography, research and scientific activity Francis fukuyama philosophy

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