entirely different solutions to the problems of American business. ‘Excellence isn’t,’ he announced in the opening sentences of Thriving on Chaos (1987). ‘There are no excellent companies.’ With his customary impeccable timing the book was published on Black Monday, when the Dow Jones plummeted by 20 per cent – thus apparently confirming his new discovery that the world had spun out of control and ‘no company is safe’.
Or, to quote the unimprovable headline on a despatch from the Agence France Presse news agency in the closing months of the year 2000: ‘Order, Chaos Vie to Shape 21st Century’.
3 It’s the end of the world as we know it
‘Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,’ said Scrooge, ‘answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they the shadows of the things that May be only?’
Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.
‘Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,’ said Scrooge. ‘But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!’
CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
For public intellectuals in the early 1980s, one little prefix was obligatory. Post-modernism, post-feminism, post-Fordism and ‘post-culture’ (a term coined by Professor George Steiner) all joined the lexicon of modish discourse. Within a few years, however, even these concepts had been superseded. When the economist Lester C. Thurow said that ‘the sun is about to set on the post-industrial era’, James Atlas of the New York Times posed the obvious question: ‘What follows post?’
In The Sense of an Ending, the British literary critic Sir Frank Kermode argued that humans require an illusion of order and narrative: ‘To make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.’ With the fin de siècle and indeed the end of the millennium looming, there was a palpable sense of imminent closure and conclusion: the critic Arthur Danto announced ‘the end of art’; the New Yorker writer Bill McKibben was paid a $1 million advance for his book The End of Nature; an editor at the Scientific American, John Horgan, published The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. As Atlas commented, ‘clearly, it’s late in the day’. President Reagan had celebrated the arrival of ‘morning in America’; before most people had even managed to finish their breakfast, however, the shadows of evening were already lengthening, and citizens who had been enchanted by the Gipper’s sunny optimism now seemed to have an almost masochistic yearning for gloomy jeremiads.
One unlikely beneficiary of this new appetite was Paul Kennedy, a bearded, soft-spoken Englishman from the history faculty at Yale University, whose 677-page tome The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 was published by Random House in January 1988, with an initial print-run of 9,000. By mid-February it had sold more than 100,000 copies. Few of these readers, one must assume, were particularly curious about the old imperial powers of China, Spain, Holland or Britain, whose histories comprised most of the book. Nor, one guesses, would Kennedy have been inundated with requests from TV talk shows or invitations to address congressional committees had he stuck to his original plan and ended the narrative in about 1945. Deciding that this would be ‘a cop-out’, he added a speculative final chapter predicting that American hegemony was waning. Simply put, the Kennedy thesis asserted that great empires establish themselves through economic might, but are then obliged to spend an ever larger proportion of their wealth on military prowess with which to protect themselves from upstart rivals. The consequent ‘imperial overstretch’ seals their fate. It happened to the Bourbons and the Habsburgs, and would just as surely happen to the apparently omnipotent United States within a few years.
‘When a serious work of history with more than a thousand footnotes starts selling in Stephen King-like quantities,’ the New Republic commented, ‘you can be sure it has touched something in the popular mood.’ And, sure enough, a great power overburdened with defence commitments duly succumbed to imperial overstretch soon afterwards. Alas for Kennedy, it was not the United States but the Soviet Union, whose speedy and spectacular demise he had quite failed to foresee. Undaunted, he interpreted this unexpected plot-twist as confirmation of his prophecy of American decline, since the end of the Cold War reduced ‘the significance of the one measure of national power in which the United States had a clear advantage over other countries’, that is military strength. (The other measures of American dominance – economic, cultural, technological – were apparently invisible from Professor Kennedy’s study at Yale.) Besides, didn’t the collapse of Soviet Communism, which even many American Cold Warriors had thought impossible, re-emphasise his central point: that nothing lasts for ever? With that, at least, few could take issue – or so it seemed until the summer of 1989, when the National Interest magazine carried a fifteen-page article entitled ‘The End of History?’ Its author was an obscure young official from the policy planning staff of the US State Department, Francis Fukuyama.
Once again, a shy, tweed-jacketed historian woke up to find himself famous. Even those who disagreed with Fukuyama paid tribute to his intellectual audacity, which was further rewarded with book contracts, lecture invitations and a professorship at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. ‘How is it that some people become famous while others do not?’ a jealous rival asked. ‘Of course, it smacks of sour grapes for one of the latter to ask this about one of the former, but Francis Fukuyama’s career begs for the question. How exactly do you get ahead by boldly making one of the worst predictions in social science?’ The question answers itself: if you are going to be wrong, be wrong as ostentatiously and extravagantly as possible. Had Fukuyama confined himself to saying that the end of the Cold War marked a victory for economic and political liberalism, scarcely anyone would have paid attention, since identical observations could be found in newspaper editorials any day of the week. But he understood what was required to titillate the jaded palate of the chattering classes: simplify, then exaggerate. ‘What we are witnessing’, he proclaimed, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or a 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 universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ By the time he had expanded his essay into a book, two years later, even the question-mark in the title had disappeared.
The obvious flaws in this terminalist teleology were magicked away with similar nonchalance. The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who was cited by Fukuyama as his chief inspiration, also believed that we had reached ‘the last stage of history, our world, our own time’ – but dated it to Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Jena in 1806. Some political soothsayers might interpret this precedent as a cautionary tale of reckless complacency, but not Fukuyama. With nimble dialectic – or, if you prefer, shameless chutzpah – he argued that Hegel was right after all, since ‘the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of socio-political organisation have not advanced terribly far since 1806’. Ergo, we had reached the zenith and terminus of political evolution: Nazism and Communism were mere ‘bypaths of history’. (‘How far shall we trust a “Universal History” that relegates the conflagrations of two world wars and the unspeakable tyranny of Hitler and Stalin as “bypaths”?’ the American commentator Roger Kimball asked in a review of Fukuyama’s book. ‘I submit that any theory which regards World War II as a momentary wrinkle on the path of freedom is in need of serious rethinking.’)
History is itself an ambiguous term, of course. It can mean no more than what occurs in the world, or the techniques for finding this out, but it is also the discipline that orders events and experiences into an evolutionary narrative – summarised by the Enlightenment historian Lord Bolingbroke as ‘philosophy teaching by examples’, and later defined by R. G. Collingwood (in The Idea of History) as the reality of the present tempered by the necessity of the past and the