A succession of cycles and contingencies, history has no overall direction. But if any trend can be discerned at the present time, it is hardly favourable to the west. In part this is the normal course of history. The western pre-eminence of the past few hundred years was never going to be permanent. . . . As it faces an increasingly disordered world, the greatest danger for the west comes from the groundless faith that history is on its side.
—John Gray
Many of us are reeling today. With the UK Brexit vote in June of 2016, it was evident that the populism genie was now fully out of the bottle, and suddenly something like the election of a demagogic Donald Trump was no longer beyond the realm of the possible. Indeed, it happened! What evil work would the genie next accomplish? Hence we seem to have been thrust into a new Zeitgeist that few of us anticipated or were prepared for.1 If, as many claim about the Brexit vote, this is just an understandable reassertion of national sovereignty in a world that has globalized a bit too quickly and a bit too ambitiously for modern societies to cope with, perhaps this is not such a radical transformation of the political landscape in the Western world. And yet there are signs that something much darker and more ominous is unfolding. Especially with the election of Trump and his willingness to appoint an alt-right enabler as his chief strategist, the cultural-political shift seems to have been quite sudden, and many today are groping for intellectual or philosophical orientation in what seems to be a new world. “We are witnessing the birth of a new political order,” as Steve Bannon himself puts it, and it does feel a bit like that. How do we interpret, first ideologically and then philosophically, what all of this may mean?
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously (and obviously quite prematurely) proclaimed the universal triumph of bourgeois liberal democracy.2 Perhaps liberal democracy as it has developed in the West did not speak to all the multifarious longings of the human spirit. No matter; it had come out on top because all significant alternative ideologies either had been defeated or had run out of gas. Liberal democracy and the liberal-democratic way of life won out through a kind of process of elimination, through the self-discrediting of the most radical rival worldviews. Well, this “end of history,” as Fukuyama called it, itself came to an end, as we all know, a mere twelve years later—on September 11, 2001—with the spectacular display by a jihadi ideology of its wholesale rejection of the liberal dispensation. Yet the revolt against Fukuyama’s end of history did not end there. Today we see other radically illiberal ideologies coming out of the woodwork to threaten, root and branch, the moral-political world that we thought had been built on broad popular consensus. This crisis affects political philosophy as well. Leading philosophers of egalitarian liberal democracy such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas had presumed that the basic premises of liberal democracy were an established achievement built on a universal basis (a shared commitment to liberal justice in Rawls’s case, a shared commitment to communicative reason in Habermas’s case). They didn’t say that it represented a Fukuyama-like end of history, but in effect that was implicit in their doctrines. If ferociously antiliberal views of life are still very much in play (and much of what we are seeing in contemporary politics would have to be a kind of optical illusion in order for us to think otherwise), the enterprise of contemporary liberal theory may have to be rethought at a deep level to take account of the manifestations of antiliberal backlash. In particular, the atrocious ideologies currently gaining ground in Europe and in other parts of the world are forcing us to reconsider what John Gray has called “the liberal delusion” (the faith that history favors liberalism).
In the brief reflections that follow, I want to elaborate a bit further on the suggestion already offered that there is a direct connection between the perils of end-of-history thinking, or the liberal delusion à la Gray, and the question of how to do theory. To simplify the argument, I’ll restrict my discussion to three major philosophers of egalitarian liberalism: Rawls, Habermas, and Richard Rorty.3 Of these three, Rorty was the one who was most explicit about his end-of-historyism: “Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs.”4 According to the implicit philosophical horizon of Rawlsian and Habermasian egalitarian liberalism, we pretty much know what the moral and political truth is: it’s liberal democracy and liberal egalitarianism as they are broadly understood in the present day. The history that got us to that moral outcome is irreversible. The most urgent task of theory is to clarify the policy details of that true moral vision, not to question whether and why the moral vision itself is the correct one. So we mainly preach to the converted: “we liberals” address fellow liberals. Of course, there are differences among us: we have different religious commitments, for instance. But we abstract from those differences and seek common ground as much as we can. We try not to get drawn into bedrock debate about “metaphysics” or ultimate commitments (“we try to bypass religion and philosophy’s profoundest controversies,” as Rawls puts it). Rawls’s idea of “political liberalism” nicely captures this basic orientation or approach to the theory enterprise, but Habermas and Rorty, for instance, have their own ways of conveying the same fundamental purpose. Engaging with preliberal or transliberal moral and intellectual horizons is fairly pointless, since those other horizons have been historically superseded, deposited once and for all in the trash can of history. Hence for these three theorists (and countless others who pursue the project of liberal political philosophy), history rather than the making of a philosophical case seems to do most of the work—the heavy lifting—of establishing validity.5 According to a Habermasian conception, this is supposedly a “sociological-historical learning process.” That is, history delivers us to a new mode of experience and a new kind of rationality, beyond metaphysical commitments. But in fact there is no such thing. For Rawls, Rorty, and Habermas, Nietzsche has been refuted by history and sociology. He hasn’t! He can only be refuted by a more compelling account of the human good. Privileging proceduralist morality (as Rawls and Habermas both do) is a way of saying that at bottom we’re all liberals—which would be fine if it were actually true.
We don’t know what the future will bring. The majority of people in Egypt today believe that Sharia should be the law of the land and that Egypt should be a theocratic state. That is, piety and not discursive or communicative equality should be the center of political existence. Who can guarantee that that view won’t prevail a hundred years from now (or sooner)? And what happens to the Rawlsian-Habermasian appeals to procedural rationality and to pluralism as a sociological fact if it does prevail? Gray, in his critique of the liberal delusion, was right to challenge the presumption that history favors liberalism—that is, favors the idea of each individual having equal status in the conversation of one’s society. These (largely unacknowledged) liberal philosophies of history cover over a lot of tacit liberal complacency. Human history is as much a process of unlearning as of learning!
By contrast to this “post-metaphysical” orientation common to Rawls, Rorty, and Habermas, I think that it’s a big mistake to terminate the grand dialogue of visions of possible human life articulated throughout our theory canon. We need to retain our commitment to an enterprise of grand theory that doesn’t presume that we’ve arrived, necessarily, at the final moral horizon and now just need to “tinker with the details” (as Hegel more or less suggested with respect to the modern Rechtsstaat once the French Revolution and Napoleon had legislated the broader moral horizon for modern existence). The grand horizons, from Plato to Machiavelli to Hobbes to Locke and Montesquieu to Nietzsche and Marx and Heidegger, are still in lively contention today. Reading these thinkers doesn’t automatically turn us from liberals into something else (or hopefully it doesn’t!); but hopefully what it does do is draw us into a fully ambitious questioning of what human life expects of us.6
Rawls and Habermas offer differing versions of this procedural liberalism but do it with similar motivation and in a similar spirit, one could say. As a citizen, I find their conceptions of civic life attractive: tolerant, oriented toward the encouragement of civic deliberation and mutual respect among people who share a political community, and oriented toward the encouragement of public-mindedness. Our political communities would certainly be better as political communities if they more fully embodied these liberal, egalitarian, and civicist ideals. But the practice of political philosophy that Rawls and Habermas stand for represents a kind of “fifth-wheelism” of philosophy. Rawls, Rorty, and Habermas presume that people who live in modern liberal polities already know what the ultimate political good is, and there’s nothing that political philosophy can tell them that adds anything significantly new. It simply crystallizes the wisdom that liberal citizens already embody in their practice of citizenship: they deliberate with each other; they trade reasons and counterreasons; they presume that policies cannot be enforced without public justifications; and they treat each other as moral equals. If it’s these procedures that embody the right moral philosophy and if everyone already knows that this is what a modern liberal democracy entails, why do we need philosophy? A completely “proceduralized reason,” as Habermas conceives it, means that there is nothing further for philosophers to teach. Citizens in their procedural republic have already taught themselves all the essential moral truths. Yet this self-willed redundancy on the part of leading theorists of egalitarian liberalism will start to look fairly perilous if history surprises us (as it may well do) and keeps premodern and antimodern alternatives in vibrant contention with a liberalism that isn’t universally received as attractive. In short, the dominant articulations of contemporary liberal theory strike me as variations on end-of-history philosophical complacency.7
Human beings, deprived of the possibility of philosophical reflection, fall short of their proper humanity. Whatever our crises may be (and let’s face it, we currently face enormous political, cultural, and existential challenges that will not be easy to resolve with our current social, moral, cultural, and political resources), if those crises cause us to despair of casting theoretical or philosophical light on our darkness, the consequence will be not merely failures of praxis but, much more seriously, a diminished humanity. We cannot allow skepticism, cynicism, or political disillusionment to have that consequence. Being open to the possibility of philosophical reflection and philosophical dialogue, in any time and in any place, is what allows us to remain fundamentally hopeful as human beings. Political philosophy thrives in times of crisis (this is an old story in the history of the theory tradition!). Hence as our contemporary world gives some appearance of lurching into crisis, as citizens we may well have reason to despair; but as theorists (for those of us fortunate enough to be theorists), we have reason to anticipate a renaissance of political philosophy.
So here’s my proposal. We must read the great antiliberal theorists—Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and, yes, even Joseph de Maistre—not in order to appropriate them for liberal or leftist intellectual projects but in order to come to a deeper understanding of precisely why they turn their backs on bourgeois liberalism and hence why many of our fellow citizens are readily tempted to do the same. All the best theorists have, of course, always done this. But I’m inclined to think that, especially in recent decades, the confidence of the liberal West in the moral truth of the liberal-egalitarian dispensation and its idea of justice has duped theorists into thinking that this enterprise of radical and comprehensive philosophical dialogue is no longer essential.8 Hopefully, the shock of the populist-nationalist backlash we are currently seeing will jolt theorists, intellectuals, and citizens into recognizing what often turn out to be tacit and unconscious end-of-history assumptions. As I hope is illustrated by the commentaries on Nietzsche and Heidegger presented in this book, an honest dialogue with these thinkers requires that we take them seriously without in any way liberalizing or whitewashing their most appalling and most illiberal ideas. If we fail to grasp what these enemies of the democratic Enlightenment are really saying, then we’ll (deservedly) get sucker-punched by thinkers or doers less shy about taking them at their word.9
Again, the baseline for considering where we now stand is Fukuyama’s declaration in 1989 that Western-style market-based liberal democracy had definitively prevailed over the alternatives. Friedrich Nietzsche may have been right or wrong in considering this epoch of hegemonic liberalism and individualism as a triumph of “the last man,” but whether blessing or curse, the liberal dispensation is our fate, or so the end-of-history thesis had assured us. Such a pronouncement looks, today, very foolish indeed. To be sure, it can be perilous to make grand historical judgments from up close. We probably need a vantage point of decades or longer to really know whether Western liberal democracy is truly in crisis. But in 2017 it certainly looks as if a crisis (or interconnected series of crises) of fairly large proportions has begun or is at least on the horizon: Brexit in England; Trumpism in the US; Putinism in Russia and Orbánism in Hungary; Erdoğanism in Turkey; a real crisis of identity and purpose with respect to the whole EU project; the rise of a hypernationalist far right in various parts of Europe; a huge migrant crisis as a result of the chaos in the Middle East; a broad revolt against globalization; the challenge of militant Islamism, including a relentless stream of terrorist episodes, with escalating effects on all the other crises or perceived crises; and so on. No “end of history” in any of this! In a prescient July 2016 op-ed entitled “This Is Why Democrats Are Still Struggling,” New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “Over the past few years, economic and social anxiety has metastasized into something spiritual and existential.” I think that’s right. (Brooks was talking about the US specifically, but I think his point can be generalized to liberal societies more broadly.)10
John Gray, in the essay I’ve already cited, rightly argues that for liberals, peace, freedom, and prosperity are self-evidently the natural aspirations of all human beings; therefore, liberals get utterly bewildered when individuals or societies have the opportunity to choose these liberal ideals and instead unaccountably opt for antiliberal visions of life. According to Gray, we see this today quite clearly in Putin’s Russia, where his authoritarianism and his reassertion of “the claims of geopolitics, ethnicity and empire” enjoy the strong support of millions of Russians.11 As Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov put it in an interview with the Globe and Mail shortly before he was assassinated, “The most difficult question for Russia is what kind of revolution you will get—orange or brown or red. There is a very big danger for Russians and for the world because, unfortunately, nationalists and fascists are very popular in this country.” This makes no sense to those for whom liberal ideals are the default aspiration of humanity. As we should have been taught by the catastrophes of the twentieth century, a cultural-economic-political crisis of the kind that we’re currently experiencing provides the perfect opening for demagogues and lunatics who can exploit these crises in order to turn the whole world upside down. As a result, as Gray again points out, “across Europe, there has been a resurgence of the far right and the politics of hate”;12 and indeed there has. We are learning anew that fascism (including its theocratic versions), with its brown uniforms and black flags, has a romance that we liberals underestimate at our peril. Similar wisdom can be drawn from George Orwell as quoted by Graeme Wood in a powerful essay on the rise of ISIS written for The Atlantic: fascism is “psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.” Socialism and capitalism convey the following message: “I offer you a good time”; Hitler’s message, by contrast, is “I offer you struggle, danger, and death.” “We ought not to underrate [the latter’s] emotional appeal.”13 As goes without saying, the relevance of this warning is not limited to the allure of ISIS.
It should seem obvious that the twentieth century is not something that any of us would want to replay in the twenty-first century. Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, predicted in 1888 that the century to come would see “upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. There will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth.” And so it came to pass! Why would any sane person want to do it all over again—namely, seeing the world convulsed by totalitarian ideologies, genocide, and apocalyptic wars? How can this prospect possibly be attractive in the eyes of contemporary adherents of the far right? Can human beings really be so blind and misguided as to have learned nothing from the twentieth century at its worst?
My bottom-line suggestion is that “we liberals” are in trouble if we take for granted that egalitarian liberalism is the final moral dispensation and hence spare ourselves the exertion of entering into dialogue with grand normative alternatives to twentieth- and twenty-first-century liberalism. We’ll get blindsided by some radically nonliberal view of life because it turns out to have far more human appeal than we liberals have assumed or persuaded ourselves that it could have. As we’ve seen, that’s already happening to us today! Author Damon Linker has put the key point quite well: “At both the academic (= Rawls) and public-intellectual (= Fukuyama) levels, discussion and thinking in the West has been dominated by centrist liberal managerialism for the past several decades. Now that’s being challenged by virulent anti-liberals.” So centrist liberal managerialism is unsatisfying. It’s not inspiring enough. It doesn’t move the soul. It’s banal; it’s a politics for the last man. Fine. And with what do we undertake to replace it? A regime of warriors and priests? A return from Enlightenment to magic? An appeal to the depths of the Volk (or Nietzsche’s Pan-European successor to the Volk, whatever that might be)? Why be satisfied with what David Hume called “the calm sunshine of the mind” (which for him characterized the experience of Enlightenment morality) if we can insist upon a more bracing vision of life where the stakes are authentically life-and-death ones? Or where the unflinching confrontation with death promises a better-than-bourgeois authenticity, à la Heidegger? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (“Zarathustra’s Prologue,” § 4), Nietzsche wrote, “I love the great despisers because they are the great reverers and arrows of longing for the other shore.” Well, “the other shore” sounds good because, by definition, we have no idea what life will be like there. In the meantime, we are urged to put lots of energy into despising what perhaps doesn’t meet Nietzsche’s standards of grandeur yet almost certainly deserves more respect than it receives from him or those swayed by his rhetoric.
Nietzsche’s formula of the death of God and Heidegger’s formula of the forgetfulness of Being are two ways of articulating a shared intuition—namely, that there is a spiritual void at the heart of modernity. Needless to say, we don’t want to deny ourselves the possible avenues of cultural self-reflection and self-criticism that are opened up by both diagnoses (or both versions of a shared diagnosis). But it is one thing to avail oneself of Nietzschean or Heideggerian insights into the spiritual deficiencies of modernity in a context where a commitment to liberal democracy is reasonably secure. It’s something quite different to turn to Nietzsche or Heidegger for philosophical or cultural guidance in a context where that commitment is not fully secure or is actively insecure. The profound worry that has animated this book is the possibility that the context in which we currently find ourselves is the latter one.
As theorists, we must continually come back to Kant’s immortal line: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing can ever be made straight.” This is, alas, relevant to our vocation as theorists. If it is indeed true that human nature is permanently warped—a proposition for which there is vastly more historical evidence than we would care to acknowledge—then it follows that translations from theory to practice are more likely to be realizations of bad (or even evil) theory than of good theory.14 Jason Jorjani, in a September 20, 2017, blog post explaining why he broke with Richard Spencer in the days following Charlottesville, lamented that the alt-right, which (in Jorjani’s mind) was meant to be a grand project for a reborn aristocratic Aryan empire, had been turned by Spencer into “a magnet for white trash.” Well, what on earth did he expect? Nietzsche might have voiced a version of the same risible complaint had he witnessed what the vulgar mob did with his idea of groβe Politik thirty-three years after his death. Again, I don’t rule out the possibility that Nietzsche and Heidegger successfully articulate aspects of spiritual or cultural vacuity in the liberal-egalitarian dispensation that defines modernity.15 But what they offer by way of new dispensations to supplant spiritless modernity is far worse. One has to ask, Who ever gave us a guarantee that the problem of the human condition admits of a solution?