Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Chris Hayes mentions Alexandre Kojeve, the Russian-French Hegelian who is a key influence on Francis Fukuyama and his End of History thesis. Fukuyama develops the theoretical side of his argument — that liberal democracy is the fulfillment of human governmental evolution — using Kojeve’s idea that, as Chris puts it, “[the]constitutive feature of what it means to be human is the desire for recognition.” Fukuyama contends that liberal democracy allows the most recognition for individuals, and thus is the natural endpoint for capital H History. And while Fukuyama is very persuasive and presents his point well, the methodology always troubled me.

How do we know that humans desire recognition? Sure Kojeve says so, and Fukuyama is able to construct a plausible historiographical extrapolation of that theory, but besides their assertions, there’s no great way to verify their conception of human nature. Hobbes said that humans desire security, Rousseau said that humans are, as Mark Lilla put it, “theotropic” (desiring religion), Marx thought that man was fundamentally productive and so on and so forth. Some political philosophers just sidestep this debate, or at least don’t make a conception of human nature axiomatic the same way, say, Hobbes does. Rawls’ assumptions about human nature is that in his highly abstract veil of ignorance, people will use maximin reasoning. Nozick just starts out with Lockean natural rights and moves on from there.

But putting aside Rawls and Nozick, how do we sort out these competing claims about human nature? We can look at the societies and political systems based on certain conceptions of human nature. This method is rather imprecise, besides telling us that Marx probably was wrong, it’s really hard to say which conception of human nature any given country lends validity to or falsifies. Is the United States evidence for a Lockean, Hobbesian or Rousseaun view? What about Sweden, Canada or Singapore? Clearly, if you’re going to put claims of human nature at the center of your political philosophy, you need to provide a good method to inspect their validity, or at least a traceable claim to show where you got your conception of human nature from. So, how does one do this?

For the time being, it looks like Evolutionary Psychology is the way to go.  So from now on, if you have a political theory that’s based around a specific conception of human nature, you must talk about alleles.  Peter Singer agrees, and Robert Wright has gotten the closest to using evolutionary psychology and theory as a basis for large scale political and social thought.  Kojeve and Fukuyama, haven’t really managed this feat, and so I’m forced to put their theory of politics and history into the “sounds interesting, but not really verifiable in a systemic way” pile.