Unreconciled: American Power and the End of History, 1945–1992
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Cleary, Joe
Abstract
When Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of history” in 1989, he provoked an avalanche of objections. Yet one in particular stood out then and has dominated the discussion ever since: the charge that he was reformulating one of America’s founding myths—and reinforcing its imperial self-conception. But how accurate is this charge? And in any case, how true is the suggestion that ideologues and intellectuals in the United States have long justified liberal capitalism at home and supremacy abroad by insinuating that America embodies the end of history? In this dissertation, I address these questions by narrating the adventures of the concept of “the end of history” during the period of American hegemony, from 1945 to the early twenty-first century. Broadly speaking, recent scholarship offers two answers to these questions. According to the first body of scholarship, the US has always thought of itself in exceptionalist and universalist terms, leading prophets and pundits alike to proclaim the end of history at virtually every significant turning point in its history. According the second body of scholarship, belief in the end of history was a byproduct of the unipolar moment that followed the end of the Cold War, when triumphalism tempted American elites to entertain illusions of permanence and to pursue a grand project of liberal hegemony. In contrast to both intellectual paradigms, this dissertation demonstrates how and why a set of ideas about history that initially emerged in Western Europe during the age of catastrophe (1914–1945) migrated to postwar America, where they were debated and criticized—but ultimately taken back up in 1989, when the European discourse of post-history and the American ideology of manifest destiny appeared to coincide. Part One returns to the 1930s and 1940s to explain how intellectuals responded to the transition from the age of catastrophe to the postwar American ascendancy. After considering why many intellectuals abandoned nineteenth-century notions of historical teleology in these years, it turns to Alexandre Kojève and Leo Strauss, two philosophers who, despite profound differences, agreed that most forms of contemporary thought culminated in relativism, which they saw as a source of the “crisis of the West.” To overcome relativism, as I show in Chapter One, Koève posited an end of history, which he located first in Soviet socialism and later in “the American way of life.” In contrast, as I show in Chapter Two, Strauss pursued a tentative return to natural right. In Chapter Three, I explain how both ideas were used by their students to remake American conservatism. Part Two explores three loosely related attempts to challenge the ideas of Kojève and Strauss—and to challenge the Cold War assumption that America embodied the end of history. Chapter Four considers how American Trotskyists and ex-Trotskyists repudiated the choice between US capitalism and Soviet socialism while rethinking Marx’s theory of history. Chapter Five examines the work of critical theorists like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who seemed simultaneously to offer a dark inversion of the end-of-history thesis in their descriptions of postwar state capitalism and to reject all gestures of Hegelian reconciliation. Chapter Six examines the idiosyncratic work of Hannah Arendt, who developed an original interpretation of the American founding and used it as the basis for a series of polemics against liberals, conservatives, and the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when, in her view, American power began to decline. Part Three asks why the ideas of Kojève and Strauss were revived in the 1990s. In Chapter Seven, I acknowledge that, just as in 1945, the idea that America embodied the end of history became plausible again largely due to a reconsolidation of its hegemony. But I also draw attention to the fact that Fukuyama and other American conservatives were concerned about perceived internal threats to the legitimacy of liberal capitalism, including the threat of so-called postmodern relativism. Indeed, I argue that “the end of history” and “natural right” served as tools in the conservative reaction against postmodern relativism, and both were deployed to reinforce the idea that hegemony at home and abroad was founded on universally valid principles. But along with the belief that the world could be remade in America’s image, this idea has faced considerable backlash in recent years. So in the Coda, I consider how the apparent decline of US hegemony, the crisis of liberalism, and the resurgence of “democratic socialism” have reinvigorated the debate about the end of history.
Recommended Citation
Conroy, Peter, "Unreconciled: American Power and the End of History, 1945–1992" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 933.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/933
