Revisiting Fukuyama: The End of History, the Clash of Civilizations, and the Age of Empire

Abstract

ion and organization of labor, or the subordination of particular and concrete labor to the universal interests of the State. It is however pertinent to note that Hardt’s conception of civil society is distinct from Hegel-Fukuyama’s, in that the former is more precisely understood as a Foucaultian reformulation of the latter. Foucault’s conception of disciplinary society, according to Hardt, specifically highlights the authoritarian aspect of the Hegelian educative civil society. Hardt notes that the institutions and enclosures (enfermements) of disciplinary civil society (such as the church, the school, the prison, the family, the union, and the party) “produc[e] normalized subjects and thus exer[t] hegemony through consent in a way that is perhaps more subtle but no less authoritarian than the exertion of dictatorship through coercion.” And yet the most pointed distinction between Foucault’s and Hegel’s conceptions of civil society is that the former explicitly reflects the evolutionary trend of progressive immanence. Foucault’s disciplinary society, according to Hardt, is characterized by what Foucault 242 Hardt notes that Kojeve also recognizes the functional importance of labor that, in Kojeve’s words, “labor is what ‘forms or educates’ man, distinguishing him from the animals.” And yet for Kojeve, Hardt further elaborates, the educative laboring process aims at the thymotic recognition of the laborer. By contrast, for Hardt and Hegel, labor is important because it aligns the particular interests of the laborer with the universal interests of the State. Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” 42. 243 Hardt argues that Gramsci, in contrast with Foucault, highlights the democratic potential of the Hegelian civil society. Gramsci posits (as Fukuyama and Tocqueville would argue) that the pluralism of civil institutions, such as interest groups, political parties, church movements, or popular reform movements, constitute the democratic civil sphere. Gramsci, however, departs from Fukuyama’s understanding of the Hegelian civil society by inversing the causal relationship between civil society and the State. For Gramsci, civil society is the cause of the State, not vice versa. The State’s goal is its own collapse, as Hardt quotes Gramsci, “its own disappearance, in other words, the re-absorption of political society within civil society.” Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” 30. Gramscian civil society empowers the revolutionary class, instead of the State, to assimilate and represent all spheres of society. Hardt seems to acknowledge both Foucaultian and Gramscian interpretations of the Hegelian civil society and therefore the duality of civil society as the terrain for both authoritarian discipline and democratic liberation. He notes that “Gramsci and Foucault highlight the two contrasting faces of Hegel’s civil society.” Ibid., 33. Hardt and Negri’s dualism is also reflected in the duality of Empire both as the global exploitative system and as the potential source of the Multitude’s democratic revolution. 244 Ibid., 31.