Political system

Civilization is not a unique, exotic plant, the product of culture, of a chosen people, but a cluster of varied flowers, grown on varied soils, and the most modest of them are not the least hardy nor the least beautiful.

From the standpoint of human progress, the existence of small states, contributing to that progress, has justified itself as essential to the needs of mankind.

Some have been fruitful fields for experiment in the introducing or the improving of various social or political systems.

Others have outstripped nations far larger than themselves in the universal realm of literature and the fine arts, others on the broad path of industrial competition.

In these and other domains, how many deathless glories can one of them show on the long and illustrious scroll of its history! The political necessity for the existence of small states, as factors of peace, is no less imperative.

But a very powerful brand of thinking about history, indelibly associated with the name of Hegel, the German philosopher of the late 18th, early 19th century, the period of Napoleon, the late Enlightenment romanticism, is that history is, if you like, the working through of a problem, and namely it's about the question of freedom and how it works its way out into human institutions, how you might be able to bring together the logic of commercial society from 18th century Adam Smith-type diagnosis, the logic of Enlightenment thinking, which reaches its climax in...

Kant for German idealists and the classical images of stability and political order that we associate with classical Greece and the polis and how under these modern circumstances you could get back there is one way of thinking of Hegel's problem.

And Hegel thinks of history as working its way towards a resolution of that question.

And Fukuyama owns that and says, right, this, I think, is the best way to think about historical development as the working through of problems.

And in his essays in 89 and the book in early 90s, he said, look, I think we should face the fact that under any reasonable construction of human nature, and this is an element that he adds, which is not as powerful in thinkers like Hegel, but in anthropomorphized you know, human-like readings of Hegel, because Hegel can have a very unhuman feel, like you can project the story of the development of a human personality into Hegel, and the great Russian interpreter of Hegel, Konstantin Kozhev, did this in a famous lecture series in the 30s that Fukuyama picks up on.

Anyway, long backstory, if that is your view of the development of humanity through history, you might say that a rule-bound, law-bound, participatory, if not democratic, market economy with a free movement of ideas and the free unfolding of science is the answer to this question of how we reconcile enlightenment, commercial society, political order in the best possible way.

And so the argument is not that other things don't happen in the world and that there are other places which aren't on this timeline.

But the argument was that there are certain places which have converged to a stable set of answers to these questions.