Defending Liberalism, Promoting Capitalism: Fukuyama’s Scylla and Charybdis

This latest book by Francis Fukuyama (2022) is significant in one way, and one way only: it shows not just how its defenders try to legitimize capitalism, but also how weak and unpersuasive the resulting case turns out to be. Because it is ‘under severe threat around the world today’, he announces that his object is to provide ‘a defence of classical liberalism’ (p. vii). The latter is equated by him with a 17th-century doctrine emphasizing the necessity of protecting individual freedoms by placing constitutional or legal constraints on state power. As well as limited government, classical liberalism is a moral project based on law, freedom and equal political rights, embodying values such as tolerance, progress and liberty of the individual; the latter consequently possesses the right to engage in free economic activity and own private property without state interference.1 This defence rests centrally on the proposition that, despite these shortcomings, liberal democracy is in the end worth saving because it – and only it – is the political system that enables the masses to protect their interests via government, and thus accurately reflects any/all desires expressed by ‘those below’. Just as identity politics is regarded by Fukuyama as a leftist cultural ‘deviation’ from authentic classical liberalism, so he is equally adamant that neoliberalism is a right-wing economic and political deviation from the same core doctrine. Each ‘anomaly’ is seen by him as an alien departure from true liberal values, and as such is to be condemned. Discontent stems not from liberalism itself, therefore, but rather only from the way in which ‘sound liberal ideas’ have been misapplied in ways unconnected with the doctrine itself.2 From this is drawn the conclusion that, as liberalism is essentially benign and still relevant, the object ‘is not to abandon liberalism as such, but to moderate it’. This review essay consists of four sections, the first of which looks at what Fukuyama understands by classical liberalism, while the second and third examine how Fukuyama characterizes both neoliberalism and identity politics. His interpretation of liberal ideology about class, the industrial reserve, economic growth and agrarian reform is considered in the fourth section.