In his 1989 article "The End of History?" Francis Fukuyma seemed to agree with Alexandre Kojeve (in his interpretation of Hegel) that history had reached its end (at the level of ideas) once it became clear that liberal democracy is the only regime in which "all human needs are satisfied." But while the economic liberty provided by modern liberal democracy surely satisfies the economic needs of human beings for a comfortable self-preservation and a life of consumerism, Fukuyama suggested that this would not satisfy the distinctively human need for recognition--the desire to have one's dignity or worth recognized by others, so that one's self-esteem is confirmed by the esteem of others.
In the last paragraph of his article, Fukuyama questioned Kojeve's belief in the goodness of the end of history: "The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. . . . I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. . . . Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again" (18).
Three years after the publication of his article, in his book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama elaborated his questioning of Kojeve's claim that liberal democracy was the most fully satisfying regime by questioning whether it could satisfy the desire for recognition. He also explained the desire for recognition as expressing the part of the human soul that Plato called thymos or "spiritedness."
Fukuyama first learned about thymos as a student at Cornell University in Allan Bloom's seminar on Plato's Republic (Fukuyama 2026: 32-34). This seminar came only about two years after the publication of Bloom's translation of The Republic in 1968. Bloom was a student of Leo Strauss, and Bloom's translation of The Republic as well as his interpretive essay accompanying the translation relied heavily on Strauss's reading of The Republic in Strauss's City and Man (1964).
Under the influence of this Straussian interpretation of The Republic, Fukuyama agrees with Plato's Socrates in distinguishing three parts of the human soul: logos or logismos (reason or calculation), thymos (spiritedness), and epithumia (appetite or desire) (Republic, 435b-445e). Human beings use calculative reasoning (logismos) to devise the best means for satisfying their bodily appetites (epithumia) for the material goods of life. Fukuyama is clear in affirming that a modern liberal social order serves this economic side of human nature, because liberalism promotes the scientific technological conquest of nature and the capitalist economic growth that make it easier for most human beings to secure the bodily comforts of life. But Fukuyama is not so clear as to whether modern liberalism can satisfy the thymotic side of the human soul in its longing for the nonmaterial good of recognition.
Fukuyama explains the relationship between thymos and the desire for recognition:
Thymos is something like an innate human sense of justice: people believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people act as though they are worth less--when they do not recognize their worth at its correct value--then they become angry. . . . Conversely, when other people see that we are not living up to our sense of self-esteem, we feel shame; and when we are evaluated justly (i.e., in proportion to our true worth), we feel pride. . . .
. . . Plato's thymos is therefore nothing other than the psychological seat of Hegel's desire for recognition. . . . It is possible for one to feel thymotic pride in oneself without demanding recognition. But esteem is not a "thing" like an apple or a Porsche: it is a state of consciousness, and to have subjective certainty about one's own sense of worth, it must be recognized by another consciousness. Thus thymos typically, but not inevitably, drives men to seek recognition (1992: 165-66).
I suggest that this desire to feel "one's own sense of worth" corresponds to what Rebecca Goldstein calls "the longing to matter." "We are creatures of matter who long to matter." We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us. And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death. We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives. Without that sense that our life matters, our life is not worth living, which is why people who fall into suicidal depression will say, "I don't matter." We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do. One common way to prove that to ourselves is to be recognized by others as someone who matters, as someone whose life has worth or dignity.
Therefore, if modern liberal social order is to be the most satisfying way of life for most human beings, it must satisfy not only our material needs for physical comfort and pleasure but also our immaterial need to have the moral worth of our lives recognized by others. Moreover, Fukuyama argues, we must understand that this thymotic desire for recognition can take one of two forms. Creating two Greek neologisms, he distinguishes between isothymia--the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people--and megalothymia--the desire to be recognized as superior to other people. Furthermore, megalothymia is Janus-faced or a double-edged sword. The good face is the striving to be better than other people in the human excellences--in the moral and intellectual virtues, in sports, in the arts, in politics, and so on. The bad face is the striving to be better than other people in the exercise of tyrannical domination over them.
This creates three possibilities for how liberal democracy accommodates thymos. Perhaps liberal democracy does not allow for thymos at all. Or liberal democracy could secure isothymia but not megalothymia. Or maybe liberal democracy could have both isothymia and the good form of megalothymia. Fukuyama is confusing in that he seems to affirm all three possibilities.
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WITH NO THYMOS?
According to Fukuyama, "Hobbes and Locke, the founders of modern liberalism, sought to eradicate thymos from political life altogether, and to replace it with a combination of reason and desire," which would require "changing human nature itself," by creating "a new type of individual" who would have no thymos in his soul. This new kind of human being would become the bourgeois or Economic Man, "the human being narrowly consumed with his own immediate self-preservation and material well-being, interested in the community around him only to the extent that it fosters or is a means of achieving his private good."
Locke and the other founders of modern liberalism "hoped to overcome megalothymia altogether by pitting, in effect, the interests of the desiring part of human nature against the passions of its thymotic part." This required an assault on the social embodiment of megalothymia--the traditional aristocracy. "The aristocratic warrior did not create wealth, he stole it from other warriors, or more precisely from the peasantry whose surplus he appropriated. . . . War therefore remained central to the aristocratic way of life, and war, as we well know, is 'economically suboptimal.' Much better, then, to convince the aristocratic warrior of the vanity of his ambitions, and to transform him into a peaceful businessman, whose self-enriching activities would serve to enrich those around him as well" (1992: 160, 185).
Against this Lockean liberal attempt to eradicate thymos, Fukuyama argues, Friedrich Nietzsche sought to revive thymos in the modern world.
The greatest and most articulate champion of thymos in modern times, and the prophet of its revival, was Friedrich Nietzsche, the godfather of present-day relativism and nihilism. Nietzsche was once described by a contemporary as an "aristocratic radical," a characterization he did not dispute. Much of his work can be seen, in a certain sense, as a reaction to what he saw as the rise of an entire civilization of 'men without chests,' a society of bourgeois who aspired to nothing more than their own comfortable self-preservation. For Nietzsche, the very essence of man was neither his desire nor his reason, but his thymos: man was above all a valuing creature, the "beast with red cheeks" who found life in his ability to pronounce the words "good" and "evil." . . . Nietzsche's well known doctrine of the "will to power" can be understood as the effort to reassert the primacy of thymos as against desire and reason, and to undo the damage that modern liberalism had done to man's pride and self-assertiveness (1992: 188-89).
Fukuyama has said that Strauss was "clearly one of the most important intellectual influences in my life, despite the fact that I never met him" (2026: 46). And, indeed, we can see Strauss's influence in Fukuyama's interpretation of Locke and Nietzsche, and their contribution to what Strauss called "the crisis of liberal democracy." Strauss interpreted Locke and Lockean liberalism as promoting a degrading conception of life devoted to economic acquisitiveness--the boring life of the bourgeois man who has no moral or intellectual virtues--a life that Strauss called "the joyless quest for joy." Strauss interpreted Nietzsche as offering an irrefutable moral and intellectual critique of liberalism's flattening of human experience, while also proposing the overcoming of liberalism by the will to power of the Ubermensch (the Superman), which made Nietzsche the godfather of fascism and Nazism. That the proponents of liberalism had no good answer to Nietzsche--or to Nietzsche's philosophic followers like Martin Heideggr--is what constituted the "crisis of liberal democracy."
It is regrettable that Fukuyama has not recognized how mistaken Strauss was in all of this. In many previous posts, I have identified Strauss's mistakes. First, Strauss was mistaken in failing to see how Locke and other liberals like Adam Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues. One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy." This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.
But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!). So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78). Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110).
Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe. Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.
Fukuyama recognizes "that Locke gives considerably more scope to pride and spiritedness than is often thought," particularly in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. But Fukuyama hides this point in the endnotes of his first book (1992: 341, n. 3; 367, n. 15).
Strauss was also mistaken about Nietzsche, and his mistake has shaped Fukuyama's assumption that Nietzsche showed that liberal democracy cannot escape the degradation of human experience that comes with the Last Man--the man with no thymos--and thus liberal democracy has no answer for those illiberal political movements that affirm a thymotic "will to power" as the overcoming of the Last Man. Strauss's mistake was in failing to see how the "Darwinian aristocratic liberalism" of Nietzsche's middle writings (such as Human, All Too Human) refuted the "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" of his early and late writings.
The last part of The End of History and the Last Man is entitled "The Last Man." If you look at the endnotes to this part of the book, you will see that Fukuyama cites Nietzsche's early and late writings--such as The Use and Abuse of History, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Will to Power. But you will see no references to Nietzsche's middle writings--such as Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and The Gay Science. What this means is that like Strauss, Fukuyama does not allow his readers to see that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy in the writings of his middle period contradicts the illiberalism in his other writings, and that the liberal political teaching of the middle period is superior--morally, politically, and intellectually--to the illiberal political teaching of the early and late writings, because the teaching of the middle period is rooted in a Darwinian anthropology that supports an aristocratic liberalism that is more defensible than Nietzsche's aristocratic illiberalism.
In his middle writings, Nietzsche sees that a liberal democracy can recognize the equal worth of all men as men while also allowing for the emergence of "free spirits" as "higher men," who constitute a cultural aristocracy. Thus, Nietzsche sees that liberal democracy can recognize both isothymia and megalothymia. In some of his writing, Fukuyama sees that as well.
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WITH ISOTHYMIA BUT WITHOUT MEGALOTHYMIA?
While Fukuyama sometimes says that Lockean liberalism seeks to eradicate the thymotic desire for recognition, at other times he asserts that Lockean liberal democracy satisfies the desire for recognition by allowing people to be recognized as the equals of other people because they are equal in their natural rights. "The rise of modern democracy is incomprehensible apart from the demand for equal recognition that lies at its core. In England, there was a progressive shift in the nature of demands for recognition, from the rights of the tribe or village, to the rights of Englishmen, to Locke's rights of man" (2011: 441).
But then Fukuyama suggests that Nietzsche was right to question the value of the equal recognition of all men as men. "Is recognition that can be universalized worth having in the first place? Is not the quality of recognition far more important than its universality? And does not the goal of universalizing recognition inevitably trivialize and de-value it?" (1992: 301). Even if many people will be satisfied by the equal recognition that comes to them merely by virtue of being human beings, those people who are more more ambitious will want to be recognized as superior human beings. Moreover, this desire to be recognized as better than others is "the precondition for the creation of anything else worth having in life, whether great symphonies, paintings, novels, ethical codes, or political systems." "Thymos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that the self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal. Not all men feel this pull, but for those who do, thymos cannot be satisfied by the knowledge that they are merely equal in worth to all other human beings" (1992: 304).
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WITH ISOTHYMIA AND THE GOOD FORM OF MEGALOTHYMIA?
If I am right about the natural desire for social status, human beings desire to be recognized not only as equal in their human dignity, but also as unequal in those traits or achievements that make them superior to others. This desire for social status is natural because it was formed in the Lockean evolutionary state of nature to become part of the biological nature of human beings. The meritocracy in a Lockean liberal society satisfies that desire for social status by allowing for the expression of both isothymia and megalothymia. At its best, liberal democracy secures the equal opportunity to be unequal. This Lockean liberal meritocracy can also be found in Nietzsche's middle writings--particularly, Human, All Too Human.
Human beings generally desire social status through comparative social ranking. This is a human universal found in all human societies. Human beings' esteem for themselves requires they be esteemed by others whose judgments they respect. Human beings attain high social status through prestige, fame, or honor within the groups to which they belong. And they can be ranked differently in different groups. Although some societies are much less hierarchical than others, all societies rank individuals as higher or lower based on age, sex, kinship, physical formidability, physical attractiveness, social competence, and practical skills.
Individuals become socially dominant through any trait or activity that elicits deference in others. A few charismatic individuals become heroic leaders because of their extraordinary power to win the respect of the people around them.
And yet, subordinate individuals can resist excessive or exploitative dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals. Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy, which checks the tyrannical form of megalothymia.
I have also argued that a Lockean meritocracy at its best should be an open and pluralistic meritocracy rather than closed and monistic. A meritocracy is open when there is no restriction on social mobility up and down the hierarchy, so that the most talented children of lower-class parents are free to rise into the upper ranks of status, wealth, and power, and the less talented children of upper-class parents are allowed to fall into the lower ranks. A meritocracy is closed when upper-class parents, who may have originally earned their high rank, can secure that high rank for their children even when they are less talented, by giving their children privileges that are denied to the talented children in the lower ranks.
So, for example, parents who as children were admitted to Harvard University based on their cognitive ability and academic achievements might then help their children be admitted to Harvard as "legacy" applicants who are the children of Harvard alumni or as applicants on the "dean's list" because the parents are a big donors to the university. A closed meritocracy allows this. An open meritocracy forbids it.
A meritocracy is monistic when merit is measured by only one standard of value. A meritocracy is pluralistic when merit is measured by many standards of value. So, for example, we have a monistic meritocracy when the only standard of merit is abstract cognitive ability of the sort that can be measured by an I.Q. test. We would have a pluralistic meritocracy if we saw merit in many different moral and intellectual virtues and talents.
A good argument for a more pluralistic meritocracy has been made recently by David Goodhart in his book Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect (Free Press, 2020). To use his vivid terminology, in recent years, we have given too much prestige and reward to Head (cognitive work) and not enough to Hand (manual work) and Heart (care work). People who excel in manual work or caregiving should derive as much self-esteem and public honor from that as people who excel in knowledge work.
There should be a meritocracy in each of these three spheres of work, which would reflect the diversity of human excellences. This is what Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray had in mind when they said (in The Bell Curve) that in a liberal social order there should be a "place for everyone": everyone should be able to find an honored place for themselves by developing whatever moral or intellectual talents they might have.
In much of his writing, Fukuyama agrees with me about most of this, although he does not see how this can all be rooted in a Lockean or Nietzschean liberal account of human nature. First, what he calls "recognition" is synonymous with what I call "status": "Recognition is the acknowledgement of another human being's dignity or worth, or what is otherwise understood to be status" (2011: 441).
He also agrees that the desire for status is biologically natural for human beings because it was shaped in the evolutionary state of nature in which human nature was formed. He notes that the biological roots for status-seeking behavior extend even to chimpanzees and other primates who compete for alpha male or alpha female status (2011: 26-48, 438-441).
Fukuyama also agrees with my argument that the desire for social status is best satisfied in a meritocracy that is open and pluralistic. He sees that meritocracy in a liberal democracy is pluralistic in the sense that there are many different outlets for megalothymia. He speaks about five arenas for thymotic striving (1992: 315-27). First is entrepreneurship and other forms of economic activity. The most successful businesspeople are not just striving to make a lot of money as a means to acquire goods for their personal consumption, because the money is mostly a symbol of their entrepreneurial ability. They want to be better than their rivals. They are ambitious. They want the glory that comes from managing a successful enterprise. "The classical capitalist entrepreneur described by Joseph Schumpeter is therefore not Nietzsche's last man" (316). Notice here that in recognizing entrepreneurial excellence, Fukuyama contradicts his typically Straussian scorn for the bourgeois life as boring and degraded.
A second domain of life for thymotic striving in a liberal democracy is electoral politics. Politics is an outlet for ambitious people competing for public recognition. On this point, Fukuyama often cites Alexander Hamilton and James Madison writing in The Federalist. They foresaw that American politics would be largely a contest of ambitious men striving for the glory of holding high public office. And so the American presidency, for example, might attract men moved by "the love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds." But they also saw the danger of tyrannical ambition and the need to put institutional checks on power, so that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition." I have written about Abraham Lincoln's ambition and his warning about those with Napoleonic ambition who might become despots who could overthrow the constitutional order.
A third arena for ambitious striving noted by Fukuyama is modern natural science. Most scientists are motivated by their natural desire for an intellectual understanding of nature through science. But they are also moved by a desire to be recognized for their scientific achievements. They want to put their name on a scientific discovery and win a Nobel Prize.
Beyond the economic, political, and scientific realms in which people can compete for recognition, there are many arenas of competition such as games and sports in which people can strive to be recognized as superior. In some of these activities, such as auto racing and Alpine mountain climbing, people will even risk their lives or serious injuries in their striving for distinction in their sport.
Finally, Fukuyama identifies the broadest area of life in a liberal democracy that provides the most important recognition for most people--the associational life of private groups such as business corporations, civic associations, professional organizations, churches, schools, and families (the most basic level of associational life). The recognition of citizens by a liberal democratic state is impersonal. By contrast, the members of a social group or a family are recognized in a personal way for those individual qualities that make them the people they are.
THE END OF HISTORY?
So to the question of whether liberal democracy satisfies the thymotic desire for recognition, Fukuyama gives three different answers. To my mind, his third answer is the most persuasive. Liberal democracy satisfies the natural desire for recognition or status by allowing people to be recognized as equal to others in their human dignity but also as superior to others in being better than others in some domain of life.
But while I agree with Fukuyama that liberal democracy satisfies this natural desire for social status, I see this desire as only one of as many as twenty natural desires. And I see liberal democracy as the only social order that promotes the satisfaction of all of those natural desires, which means that Fukuyama was right in 1989 in arguing that liberal democracy has emerged as the best regime at the end of history.
And yet he was wrong in his Nietzschean suggestion that the "bourgeois society" of the "Last Man" could create "centuries of boredom at the end of history" that could "serve to get history started once again." Here he allowed the illiberalism of Nietzsche's later writings to blind him to the liberalism of Nietzsche's middle writings.
REFERENCES
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2026. In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
