History Lessons

David Kaiser has a great post about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East being symptomatic of a larger dismantling of world order. Here's a clip:

"Just fifteen years after Hoover, however, the historian Charles A. Beard began his important and neglected work, The Open Door at Home, by stating the obvious: the worldwide depression showed beyond doubt that there were no immutable laws of human development leading inexorably towards progress. [Snip] From this obvious fact Beard drew another important conclusion, that ethics and aesthetics should play a role in designing the particular future that we sought."

Now go read the whole thing! I think by referencing Beard, Kaiser is onto something about the neocon's intellectual framework, i.e.: there neo-Hegelian belief in History as a force to create Freedom. Ironically, given the intense neocon aversion to communism, this is the exact same intellectual basis that Marx employed. This is an irony not lost on one of their former intellectual heavyweights, Francis Fukuyama, who wrote of the neocons:

"[They] believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support."

I suppose the farce thing isn't so, uh, farcical to the thousands of dead and wounded, but Fukuyama makes his point.

Tags: David Kaiser, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Francis Fukuyama.