Tuesday, June 20, 2006
A Couple of Interesting Articles
(Via Arts&Letters Daily.)
The first is by Roger Scruton on Francis Fukuyama and the 'end of history'. The article is too brief for Scruton to develop his ideas at any length, but I heard him talk about a similar thesis at Villanova sometime last year. Here are the three concluding paragraphs:
Second is a scathing review by Peter Beaumont of Noam Chomksy's Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. While claiming that Chomsky does land some 'crunching punches', Beaumont's major beef is that the book is long on rhetoric, short on ideas, and irresponsible with information. As a bonus, you can find out by reading the article that Beaumont believes in recoverable authorial intent. One claim that was confusing to me: Beaumont claims that under the Bush administrations 'American officials' have been responsible for 'kidnapping' while 'storm[ing] their way around the globe'. Is that true? I haven't heard or read anything about official American kidnappings.
The first is by Roger Scruton on Francis Fukuyama and the 'end of history'. The article is too brief for Scruton to develop his ideas at any length, but I heard him talk about a similar thesis at Villanova sometime last year. Here are the three concluding paragraphs:
Fukuyama is wrong to believe that Hegel was the first historicist philosopher. He was preceded by Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) and Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Ibn Khaldun made the useful point that historical processes are not governed by culture and knowledge only, but also by the will to reproduce. This will, he believed, dwindles as people become habituated to luxury, and dynasties therefore rise and fall according to a quasi-biological logic.
That, clearly, is far too simple an hypothesis. But it adds something that is missing from most historicist theses, and especially from those German theories that appeal to Kojève and Fukuyama, namely the permanent legacy of human biology. Much that we attribute to history we ought rather to attribute to biology – including aggression, territorial expansion and maybe even scapegoating, racism and the all-pervading emotion that Nietzsche called ressentiment.
Christ taught us to overcome those things, and paid the price for doing so. Maybe it is the long-term effect of his sacrifice that so much of European history looks like a process of steady emancipation from the grim realities of species life. But that only tends to confirm the thesis that Fukuyama attributes to Huntington: that the march of history towards liberal democracy is a local achievement of Christian culture.
Second is a scathing review by Peter Beaumont of Noam Chomksy's Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. While claiming that Chomsky does land some 'crunching punches', Beaumont's major beef is that the book is long on rhetoric, short on ideas, and irresponsible with information. As a bonus, you can find out by reading the article that Beaumont believes in recoverable authorial intent. One claim that was confusing to me: Beaumont claims that under the Bush administrations 'American officials' have been responsible for 'kidnapping' while 'storm[ing] their way around the globe'. Is that true? I haven't heard or read anything about official American kidnappings.
