David Martin Jones - Historys Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics

HISTORYS FOOLS

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David Martin Jones, 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: David Martin Jones.

Title: Historys Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and theRevenge of Politics

ISBN: 9780197539972 (e-Book)

For J, B, L.

There is some grandiose ludicrousness in the spectacle of these men submitting often from one day to the other, humbly and without so much as a cry of outrage, to the call of historical necessitythey were fooled by history, and they have become the fools of history.

(Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963)

This book arose from a conversation with Michael Dwyer of Hurst in Riyadh in 2017. A visiting Professorship in the War Studies Department, Kings College, London proved a congenial home for writing it and the head of department, Professor Michael Rainsborough, an exceptional host. At Hurst, Lara Weisweiller-Wu, Miah Bains and Daisy Leitch oversaw the books editing and production with efficiency and panache. The project draws upon a number of articles written in International Affairs, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, International Security, Quadrant, The National Interest and The American Interest over the last two decades. Some of these articles were co-authored, several with M.L.R. Smith and one with John Bew. They bear no responsibility for the argument, structure or limitations of the current work. Former students, Lana Starkey in Brisbane and Rhiannon Emm in London, helped with research and the bibliography. My wife, Jo, endured my craft and sullen art and supported the endeavour throughout.

History is being driven in a coherent direction by rational desire and rational recognition, Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1992. He added,liberal democracy in reality constitutes the best possible solution to the human problem.

The end of the Cold War announced a New World Order. For a brief, unipolar moment, liberal democracy flourished and ideological conflict abated. World politics, channelling Francis Fukuyama, embarked on a path leading to the promised land of a secular, cosmopolitan, market-friendly, end of history. Even though civilizations might still clash, political scientists were convinced that the snowballing effect of democracys third wave would prove irresistible. Or so it seemed.

A quarter of a century later, a liberal worldview premised on shared norms, open markets, open borders and an abstract commitment to social justice lay in tatters. The progressive world order that lay before us like a land of dreams, various, beautiful and new, mutated, after 2001, into a darkling plain, where an exhausted West struggled to contend with ignorant armies clashing by night. In 2018, Freedom House and the Economists Intelligence Unit vied with each other to demonstrate the extent of democracys global crisis, whilst Harvard and Oxbridge political scientists speculated about how democracies suffer trauma and die.

How, we might wonder, did an abstract commitment to universal values multiculturalism at home and military intervention abroad, founding a liberal order come, paradoxically, to undermine the progressive faith in an international community? Why did an apparently shared, universal, cosmopolitan ideal inexorably advancing regionalism, international law and human rights come to grief? In the illiberal new world shaped by social media, renewed ideological rivalry and the revenge of revisionist powers that emerged from the liberal end of history cocoon, what, if anything, of its moral legacy, and its political legitimacy survives the wreckage?

In order to explore this Panglossian adventure in political thought and conduct, this book examines how a progressive understanding of a post historical world witnessed liberal scholars of various hues, as well as various congeries of cultural Marxists and post-structuralists, busily constructing and deconstructing the lineaments of the cosmopolitan, post historical, Weltanschauung necessary for the borderless, twenty-first century world that the end of history made possible.

Ultimately, as we shall see, the new, progressive liberalism of the 1990s suffered from a relic of magical thinking concerning conduct. As a post-modern ideology it viewed, in its various manifestations, order, both local and global, as the product of a determinate, independent instrument and contended that the rational way of going about things is to go about them under the sole guidance of this rational progressive instrument. Taking an excessively long view of the future and a short view of the past, the new liberal end of history mentality had the debilitating habit of restricting, and misrepresenting, the Wests actual predicament in a contingent world after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Somewhat problematically,the rest of the world, or the non-Western other, to use the liberal relativists participle of choice, failed to embrace the secular progressive understanding of the historical process. As one of the more sceptical connoisseurs of this style of instrumentalist thought observed, a single homogeneous line of development is to be found in history only if history is made a dummy upon which to practice the skill of a ventriloquist.

Yet the West has been here before. The triumph of the West is invariably accompanied by the fear of impending crisis and doom. Triumph and Decline are enduring themes in the history of western thought. It may be traced to St Augustines commentary on the contrasting fates of The City of God and the city of man.

The problem, as Leo Strauss saw it, at the height of the Cold War, was that the West had once seemed certain of its purpose, a purpose in which all men could be united. The undoing of the assumption of its universal purpose, to bring progress toward a society embracing equally all human beings, then as now, engendered a sense of crisis. To embark on this inquiry into how an all-pervasive, liberal, progressive and ultimately Olympian ideology assumed a seemingly impermeable form, out of various currents of liberal and radical thought flowing through Western universities, we shall first examine its structural preconditions in the apparent triumph of the open market and a borderless world that terminated the Cold War.