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The End of History? by Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama  is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. He is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.

Read this article which is based on a lecture he presented at the University of Chicago.

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affair’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in. the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”

Sociology For The South, Fitzhugh

Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1854) was George Fitzhugh’s most powerful attack on the philosophical foundations of free society. In it, he took on not only Adam Smith, the foundational thinker of capitalism, but also John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and the entire liberal tradition. He argued that free labor and free markets enriched the strong while crushing the weak. What society needed, he wrote, was slavery, not just for blacks, but for whites as well. “Slavery,” he wrote, “is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.”

Read Fitzhugh’s attempt at an intellectual argument in support of slavery.

Lazar Lecture: Summary of the Fitzhugh Hypothesis

Portraits of Civil War Soldiers

The photos are rich, the facial hair is awesome,  and the commentary, provided by David Plotz, is thoughtful and good humored.

Here’s an FYI: “Facial hair was associated with a few things: It was associated with a new idea of manliness. It was associated with new ideas about religion, a new passion for Old Testament religion and a sense that you were stepping back into the righteous days of the Hebrew prophets. It was associated also with militarism, because it really became popular in Anglo-American culture after the Crimean War. And finally, and I think most interestingly, it was identified with radical nationalist politics in Europe. Beards really took off in places like France, Italy, and Austria, that were undergoing liberal revolutions. I think it bespeaks a sense that both the Union and Confederate soldiers felt that they were nationalist revolutionaries.”

Amazing Photos from the Battle of the Bulge

From Dec. 16, 1944 to Jan. 25, 1945, American, British, Canadian, Belgian, and French forces fought to stop the final major German offensive of World War II: The Battle of the Bulge was launched in the heavily forested Ardennes Mountains of Belgium. While Allied forces ultimately triumphed, the bitter victory left tens of thousands dead on both sides. Here, in a series of rare photos from LIFE.com, is a look back at the pivotal, brutal, seven-week struggle known as the Battle of the Bulge.

A Fiery Gospel: How the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” changed America

The “Battle Hymn” became the leading anthem of the Union cause and would emerge as one of the most enduring works of art of the Civil War years. Meanwhile, the tale of the poem’s composition—one of the great creation stories in American letters—became nearly as famous as the poem itself; it became, in a sense, an inextricable part of the poem. The millennial meanings attached to the hymn, with its portrayal of Union forces—God’s “terrible swift sword”—as apocalyptic agents, and the account of the hymn’s origins fed off each other. Together, they encouraged a sense of providential national identity deeply seductive to American audiences—then and now.

Interpreting The Constitution In The Digital Era

GPS monitors can track your every movement. Brain scans can now see lies forming in your brain. And advancements in genetic engineering may soon allow parents to engineer what their children will look and be like.

These new technologies are “challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways,” says George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. “And what’s so striking is that none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we’re having today.”

Listen to this episode of Fresh Air, where Rosen, the co-editor of the  Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, details how technological changes that were unimaginable at the time of the Founding Fathers are challenging our notions of things like personal vs. private space, freedom of speech and our own individual autonomy.

Protests in Russia, Winter 2011-12

Summary of the 4 December 2011 State Duma election results

 
Parties and alliances Seat composition Popular vote % ± pp
swing
Seats ± %
United Russia 238 decrease77 52.88% 32,379,135 49.32% decrease14.98%
Communist Party 92 increase35 20.46% 12,599,507 19.19% increase7.62%
A Just Russia 64 increase26 14.21% 8,695,522 13.24% increase5.50%
Liberal Democratic Party 56 increase16 12.45% 7,664,570 11.67% increase3.53%
Yabloko 0 steady0 0% 2,252,403 3.43% increase1.84%
Patriots of Russia 0 steady0 0% 639,119 0.97% increase0.08%
Right Cause 0 steady0 0% 392,806 0.60% new party
Total 450 0 100% 64,623,062 100%
Valid ballot papers 64,623,062 98.43%
Invalid ballot papers 1,033,464 1.57%
Eligible voters 109,237,780 Turnout: 60.10%
Source: Summary table of election results – Central Election Commission
Summary of the 4 March 2012 Russian presidential election results
Candidates Nominating parties Votes %
Vladimir Putin United Russia 45,513,001 63.64
Gennady Zyuganov Communist Party 12,288,624 17.18
Mikhail Prokhorov Independent 5,680,558 7.94
Vladimir Zhirinovsky Liberal Democratic Party 4,448,959 6.22
Sergey Mironov A Just Russia 2,755,642 3.85
Valid votes 70,686,784 98.84
Invalid votes 833,191 1.16
Total votes 71,519,975 100.00
Registered voters/turnout 109,610,812 65.25
Source: Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation
  1. Medvedev Responds with Proposals for Systemic Change (NYT Dec 22)
  2. How far can the resistance to Vladimir Putin go? (New Yorker Dec 12)
  3. Is this a Russian Spring? (BBC Dec 7)

Your assignment–Write, and post a 750-1000 word essay which:
1. Cites all three of the above articles (other resources are available below)
2. Synthesizes the given articles with previous lectures, readings, and discussions
3. Is thesis-driven and evidence-based
4. Attempts to pose an original argument
5. Answers these questions:

  • Summarize the 2011 Duma election results. What do these results suggest?
  • What are the causes of post-election political discontent in Russia? To what extent are these grievances valid?
  • According to Remnick’s piece in the New Yorker, how is the suppression of civil society at the heart of the problem in Russia? Do you tend to agree with his assertions? (If you want more scholarly info on civil society in Russia, see the pieces posted below.)
  • Specifically how have Putin, Medvedev, and United Russia responded?
  • Conclude by hazarding a response to these questions: Is this the end of an era in Russia? The beginning of the end? Neither?

BRING A PRINT COPY TO CLASS IN ADDITION TO POSTING AS A COMMENT

EXTRA CREDIT: Up to 7 points for offering a substantial (200+ word) and evidence-based refutation of a classmates’ essay. (this is probably the only extra credit for the semester)

“A Balanced Assessment of Russian Civil Society” from Colombia University. More optimisitc than Remnick

Russian Democracy in the Absence of Civil Society. Not so optimistic.

Photo Essay: The Anti-Putin Brigade (Foreign Policy)

Thousands Call on Putin to Go (BBC Dec 25)

Day By Day Summary (Slate Dec 4-12)

2 Minute BBC video

Alexei Mukhin, director of the Center for Politial Information think tank, agreed that Putin is increasingly the target but stressed that the opposition continues to lack a comparable leader figure. “Russia without Putin” is the strongest slogan, but it is at the same time the weakest one,“ Mukhin said in an interview. “Because the answer is: ok, Putin, leaves, and then what? Nothing is being offered instead. There is no strong figure that would be able to compete with Putin. It is the weak point, where the pro-government forces are going to strike.”

How does the Kremlin see all this? Check out the state-owned RIA Novosti covers the 2011 protests. Want a hint? December 29th headline: “Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has blamed the United States for being behind the recent wave of protests in Russia against the outcome of the December 4 parliamentary elections”

Below: Discussion with Anastasia Mirzoyants, the Eurasia Project Manager at Intermedia & ; Jeffrey Mankoff, Associate Director of International Security Studies at Yale University and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

30 minute video: The Stream speaks to Anastasia Mirzoyants, the Eurasia Project Manager at Intermedia, a leading consulting firm; Jeffrey Mankoff, Associate Director of International Security Studies at Yale University, Anatoly Karlin, student at UC Berkeley, gives some context to the numbers in this op-ed for Al Jazeera. Karlin also runs the blog Supreme Oblivion

Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?

We knew, of course, about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. But our general sense of the war was that a horrible tragedy somehow had the magical effect of getting us free. Its legacy belonged not to us, but to those who reveled in the costume and technology of a time when we were property.

Our alienation was neither achieved in independence, nor stumbled upon by accident, but produced by American design. The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.

Ta Nehisi Coates tries to answer this vexing question

Debates on African American Education

“Some one may be tempted to ask, Has not the negro boy or girl as good a right to study a French grammar and instrumental music as the white youth? I answer, Yes, but in the present condition of the negro race in this country there is need of something more…”  Read Washington’s “Awakening of the Negro” from the Atlantic in 1901

“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of Evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what souls I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgrah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”

Read Dubois’ Response to Washinton in “Of the Training of Black Men” from the Atlantic

WEB DuBois on the Freedman's Bureau

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line; the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched south and north in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the deeper cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface, despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth, — What shall be done with slaves? Peremptory military commands, this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and so at last there arose in the South a government of men called the Freedmen’s Bureau, which lasted, legally, from 1865 to 1872, but in a sense from 1861 to 1876, and which sought to settle the Negro problems in the United States of America.

It is the aim of this essay to study the Freedmen’s Bureau (9 pages from 1901)– the occasion of its rise, the character of its work, and its final success and failure–not only as a part of American history, but above all as one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.

Bees to be privatised

BRITAIN’S bees are to be privatised in a bid to reverse their decline.

Image

Bees have been destroyed by communism

The insects have been hit in recent years by a huge drop in productivity, mass redundancies, and the collapse of traditional honeymaking communities, and the move is aimed at getting the ailing bee industry back on track.

Beehives will be rebranded as ‘Apiary Solutions’ and the bees will get a new uniform of regulation grey, updating the traditional yellow and black outfits that bees have worn since the 1950s.
They will also be assessed on aspects of their performance by a new regulatory body, Ofswarm.

Nathan Muir, director of free market think tank Urethra, said: “The traditional neighbourhood bee – buzzing about, collecting honey, occasionally stinging people who threaten the hive, maintaining a crucial balance between plants and animals in a precarious ecosystem – is a hopelessly outdated relic.

“For instance, the idea of a lone bee collecting pollen is absurd. Privatisation will allow us to to glue three or four bees together into one ‘megabee’ that will collect five times the amount of pollen of a 20th Century bee.”

He added: “Privatisation has trasformed so many organisations that barely worked to organisations that are very good at pretending they do.

“The problem with the natural world is, and always has been, that it doesn’t grasp the importance of free markets. Bees are just the start.”

A bee spokesman said ‘bzzzz’ before doing a sad little dance.