The Importance Of Progress

It is important to stress that the issue is not whether mankind has made progress over the millennia. Surely it has. The exact nature and extent of the progress can be measured in any number of ways. The material progress of mankind has been staggering, especially in the last two hundred years. Ditto for mankind’s political progress, despite the tyrannies and despotisms that remain. As Francis Fukuyama points out, in 1790 there were only three liberal democracies in the world: the United States, France, and Switzerland. Today, there are sixty-one. That is remarkable progress. But it is also contingent progress, reversible by the same means that accomplished it in the first place: the efforts of individual men and women.

Indeed, one of the great casualities of Hegel’s system is the whole realm of individual initiative. Francis Fukuyama has told us that “in the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy,” precisely because at the end of History nothing remains for those disciplines to accomplish. But how often, even before Hegel, has that end been proclaimed. Gilbert Murray, in The Classical Tradition in Poetry, recalled being told that “one of the very earliest poems unearthed in Babylonia contains a lament that all reasonable subjects for literature are already exhausted.” And just about the time Hegel was proclaiming the end of History, we find the French painter Eugène Delacroix observing that “Those very ones who believe that everything has been said and done, will greet you as new and yet will close the door behind you. And then they will say again that everything has been done and said.”

One of the most serious moral problems with the idea of the end of History is that it implacably transforms everythi...

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...e philosophically inclined. The inconvenient question is only whether the story it tells is true. Perhaps, as Kierkegaard suggested, Hegel was a man who had built a palace but lived in the guard house.

Francis Fukuyama’s own addiction to palace building shows itself in a response to critics that he published in the Winter 1989/90 issue of The National Interest. “In order to refute my hypothesis,” he writes “it is not sufficient to suggest that the future holds in store large and momentous events. One would have to show that these events were driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that claimed to supersede liberalism.” But this would be the case only if one grants Francis Fukuyama’s premise—that we are in possession of a “systematic idea of political and social justice.” In fact, it may be that what we need is not a better theory but less theory.