(Ir)religiosity

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The Eschatological Narrative of Empire: The Gospel of Neoliberalism

Though it was published almost a decade before Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man offers perhaps the best description of the eschatological trajectory of Empire.¹ Utilizing Hegel’s dialectic and resurrecting the previously fallen myth of modern progress, Fukuyama claims that with the triumph of liberal-democracy and capitalism over against the Soviet Union history as reached its zenith point and final stage of evolution.  In an article which proved to be the genesis for his book by the same name, Fukuyama states it quite baldly:

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.²

Fukuyama goes on in both the article and the book to praise the advent, triumph, and spread of neoliberalism — that is, of Empire — around the globe as a liberating force for freedom and emancipation.  The only catch, of course, is that this “freedom” has a huge unnamed caveat: that one consigns him or herself in service to the ideological apparatus of the state (which, under the passage that Hardt and Negri describe, is itself in service to the larger superstructure) and thereby to the inertia of global Empire.³ For Fukuyama, the victory of neoliberalism negates the previous epoch of violence and totalitarianism and thus completes the dialectic by ushering in a utopian era of peace and global prosperity as society moves toward its best possible formulation.

This is a weighty and far-reaching thesis.  The victory of global capitalism spells the end of history insofar as history signifies the progression of human society and the evolution of production and emancipation. Put bluntly, there is nothing else for one to look forward to regardless of her status and position in society because we have arrived at the final and highest stage of our humanity.  Fukuyama points to an all encompassing, ahistorical ideal imposed from above, from some other plane outside of history, marking the end of history and the arrival of a new “universal and homogenous state”⁴ which will apparently satisfy the desire of its citizens.  As Hardt and Negri put it, “Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future within its [own] ethical order…as permanent, eternal, and necessary.”⁵ Everything — literally, everything — is subsumed under the transcendence of Empire; its reach and its order have no limits.⁶ Empire, then, operates under what might be called, to the surprise of its neo-liberal apologists, a totalitarian logic.⁷ The twist here is that through the use of ideology and biopower persons are made to believe that they are free, that they have the option to choose within the free-market.  These are the nuts and bolts of capitalism: that consumers can go out into the marketplace and chose between products based on unrestrained competition.  But the chilling reality, the stark truth that the evangelists of Empire always fail to mention, is that persons are only free insofar as they acquiesce to the system.  Options within the system are fabricated, giving one the illusion of freedom while the cold truth is that one has no choice but to participate, to play the game and, as the ominous voice in The Wizard of Oz states, to “never mind the man behind the curtain.”  Empire, in the last instance, is an invisible, all encompassing transcendental reality which perpetuates an ahistorical eschatological narrative with absolutely no basis in the concrete reality of human interactions.

It should be no surprise, then, that Fukuyama uses religious language and eschatological imagery to describe the “end of history” and the reality of the presence of Empire.  In his introduction, Fukuyama equates liberal-democracy — which, for him, is realized on a global scale through the spread of capitalism — with the Exodus narrative, specifically the image of “The Promised Land.”⁸ Indeed, Fukuyama asserts, in a turn of phrase reminiscent of the quintessential evangelical preacher, that the “good news has come”⁹ with the decline totalitarianism in the twentieth-century and the subsequent victory of neoliberal capitalism. Jacques Derrida, in his vitriolic and erudite critique of Fukuyama and other neoliberal evangelists,¹⁰ notes that even when he leaves out the explicit eschatological imagery and quasi-theological language, Fukuyama’s “neo-evangelistic” version of the end of history is reliant upon a “highly Christianized” version of the Hegelian dialectic which is rhetorically structured like a new gospel.¹¹ Like Hardt and Negri, Derrida sees this gospel of global capitalism and rhetoric of the end of history as imbibing an “anhistoric telos” and, in the Kantian sense, an absolute, regulatory “ideal orientation” detached from empirical reality and the normal succession of events.¹² For Derrida, this messianic orientation, as a “telos of progress…would have the form of an ideal finality and everything that appears to contradict it would belong to historical empiricity, however massive and catastrophic and global and multiple it might be.”¹³ There is, therefore, a religious structure at work in Fukuyama’s claims and his faith in neoliberalism.

Eschatologically, the end of history marks the suspension of material reality and, not unlike the escapist, other-worldly eschatologies at work in some versions of Christianity, assumes a great degree of trust in neoliberal capitalism as “a regulating and tran-historical ideal”¹⁴ which, regardless of the state of affairs in actuality, serves as an invisible transcendental guarantor, subsuming immanent reality underneath its own reach.  In other words, the logic of Empire — that is the end of history under global capitalism — is idealistic and utilitarian.  It does not care about the reality on the ground nor of its effects on the lives of real people (especially those on the margins) because, given its telos, all is guaranteed in the end as long as one as enough “faith” in the superstructure.  As Joerg Rieger puts it, “the transcendence of the market is affirmed…across the board since nothing is allowed to touch on its fundamentals, which are safely stashed away in other-worldly realms.”¹⁵ This toxic eschatology, coupled with the ideological use of biopower outlined above, fabricates a reality within Empire which runs the very serious risk of colonizing the imagination of the masses such that the thought of any sort of alternative is unimaginable.¹⁶ Perhaps this was nowhere more evident than in the response to the economic and financial crisis of 2008-2009.  The question on the minds of many was not “is there a more sustainable, liberative, and just alternative?” but “what must we do to fix the system and what have we done wrong to make it turn on us?”  The overall mindset was that the superstructure was “too big to fail” and that it would “level out on its own over time” — never mind the effects it has on people — especially those that are must vulnerable — economically in the meantime.  The chilling result of all this, then, is that “at present, most people in the United States appear to find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”¹⁷ It seems that the old Thatcher-Reagan doctrine of the 1980s is at work now more than ever: global capitalist Empire is here to stay in all its homogenizing and totalizing force and there is no viable alternative.

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1. After 9/11 and certainly after the financial crisis of 2008-2009 it is very easy and indeed fashionable to point out that Fukuyama’s thesis has been discredited.  However, as Slavoj Žižek has pointed out more than once, while it is easy to do so overtly, under the surface most everyone accepts the ideology of Empire: that global capitalism is here to stay and there is no viable alternative.  See Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 301; In Defense of Lost Causes (New York, New York: Verso, 2008), 421; and First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, passim. [↩]
2. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest no. 16 (1989): 3.  Available online at http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm (accessed 2/28/10). Emphasis mine. [↩]
3. As John Gray puts it (Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals [New York, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007], 110) “We are forced to live as if we are free.” [↩]
4. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 199ff. [↩]
5. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 11. [↩]
6. Ibid., xiv. [↩]
7. Sheldon Wolin calls this a type of inverted totalitarianism.  See his Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008).  See also Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire: Theology and Politics in a New Key (Norwich: SCM Press, 2009), especially the first chapter, “Empire, Religion, and the Political,” 1-25. [↩]
8. Fukuyama, The End of History, xv. Such a comparison is chilling to say the least, not to mention that it runs counter to the perspective of liberation theology (whilst co-opting its tropes), an important voice which speaks from the underside of capitalism and, at least in part, reveals its true, anti-human logic. [↩]
9. Ibid., xiii. [↩]
10. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, New York: Routledge, 1994), 70-95. [↩]
11. Ibid., 74, 77, 70ff. [↩]
12. Ibid., 71. [↩]
13. Ibid. [↩]
14. Ibid., 78.  Derrida drives this point home even further a few pages prior where he unmasks Fukuyama’s “Christian” use of Hegel and his conflation of God and the market: The model of the liberal State to which [Fukuyama] explicitly lays claim is not only that of Hegel, the Hegel of the struggle of recognition, it is that of a Hegel who privileges the “Christian vision.” If “the existence of the State is the coming of God into the world,” as one reads in The Philosophy of Right invoked by Fukuyama, this coming has the sense of a Christian event. […] The end of history is essentially a Christian eschatology (75-76, Emphasis mine). [↩]
15. Rieger,  No Rising Tide, 72. [↩]
16. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 27-28; 77-78. [↩]
17. Rieger, No Rising Tide, 72. Or, as Fredric Jameson puts in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 50, “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” [↩]