This intervention explores the ways in which gendered and racialized constructions of vulnerability and victimhood are politically contested and mobilized in asylum procedures and support. In the context of asylum and migration policy, the concepts of victimhood and vulnerability have been drawn upon by governments and international institutions to construct notions of who should and should not have access to reception support such as housing, food, and mental health care. They feed into narratives surrounding the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, by using the language of “refugees” and “asylum seekers” pitted against “economic migrants.” They draw on racialized and gendered assumptions, often premised on heteronormative understandings of gender that marginalize and silence groups and individuals. They rely on an underlying assumption that frames “womenandchildren” as one homogenous group, standing in contrast to other less deserving groups not genuinely in need of international protection. This can leave under-supported groups such as LGBTQI1 individuals as well as young men traveling alone—who are routinely portrayed as able to game asylum systems—underserved by support organizations or on lengthy waiting lists. Bringing an intersectional lens to bear on the construction of victimhood and vulnerability challenges some of the inherent assumptions present when groups
{"title":"Constructing Vulnerability and Victimhood at the EU Border","authors":"Gemma Bird","doi":"10.1086/721564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721564","url":null,"abstract":"This intervention explores the ways in which gendered and racialized constructions of vulnerability and victimhood are politically contested and mobilized in asylum procedures and support. In the context of asylum and migration policy, the concepts of victimhood and vulnerability have been drawn upon by governments and international institutions to construct notions of who should and should not have access to reception support such as housing, food, and mental health care. They feed into narratives surrounding the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, by using the language of “refugees” and “asylum seekers” pitted against “economic migrants.” They draw on racialized and gendered assumptions, often premised on heteronormative understandings of gender that marginalize and silence groups and individuals. They rely on an underlying assumption that frames “womenandchildren” as one homogenous group, standing in contrast to other less deserving groups not genuinely in need of international protection. This can leave under-supported groups such as LGBTQI1 individuals as well as young men traveling alone—who are routinely portrayed as able to game asylum systems—underserved by support organizations or on lengthy waiting lists. Bringing an intersectional lens to bear on the construction of victimhood and vulnerability challenges some of the inherent assumptions present when groups","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"874 - 881"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44054586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
InSeptember 2018, amemorial to honor women under Tunisia’s pre-revolutionary dictatorship was set up in downtown Tunis at the initiative of an international Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). The memorial exhibited works created jointly by victims and artists, under a particular theme: namely the traditional Tunisian basket. This everyday life item for Tunisians, in the context of the memorial, wasmeant to represent the suffering of female relatives of former political detainees, as they were responsible for bringing food when visiting family members in prison. The choice of such an emblem to represent political violence against women, raises questions on the way in which gender projects are set up in the contexts of political transitions. In the course of its post-revolutionary journey, Tunisia has adopted a transitional justice process. This international label squares with a set of mechanisms to promote the recognition of victims and of the violations committed against them as the bedrock of a free and peaceful society. To that end, Tunisia created a national commission, the Truth and Dignity Commission (2014–2018), and undertook a collaboration with two international organizations and a US-based NGO: respectively the United Nations Development Program, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). Whereas expert literature often presents transitional justice as a highly localized instrument because of the permanent presence of national truth commissions in
{"title":"Gendering Transitional Justice: A Racialized Construction of Victimhood in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia","authors":"Sélima Kebaïli","doi":"10.1086/721561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721561","url":null,"abstract":"InSeptember 2018, amemorial to honor women under Tunisia’s pre-revolutionary dictatorship was set up in downtown Tunis at the initiative of an international Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). The memorial exhibited works created jointly by victims and artists, under a particular theme: namely the traditional Tunisian basket. This everyday life item for Tunisians, in the context of the memorial, wasmeant to represent the suffering of female relatives of former political detainees, as they were responsible for bringing food when visiting family members in prison. The choice of such an emblem to represent political violence against women, raises questions on the way in which gender projects are set up in the contexts of political transitions. In the course of its post-revolutionary journey, Tunisia has adopted a transitional justice process. This international label squares with a set of mechanisms to promote the recognition of victims and of the violations committed against them as the bedrock of a free and peaceful society. To that end, Tunisia created a national commission, the Truth and Dignity Commission (2014–2018), and undertook a collaboration with two international organizations and a US-based NGO: respectively the United Nations Development Program, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). Whereas expert literature often presents transitional justice as a highly localized instrument because of the permanent presence of national truth commissions in","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"849 - 857"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46401324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Questions about who can and cannot be considered a victim permeate almost all efforts to describe, map, legislate, resist, and/or dismantle harms both specific and systemic in nature. Discourses of victimhood inform individual, group, and national identities, shape peacebuilding and transitional justice programmes, and set the boundaries of debate about migration, sex work, crime, empire, and much else besides. These formations are not wholly specific to our present moment, of course: Alyson Cole has described how a “war on welfare” has been underway since the 1990s, which identifies “victimists,” people unwilling or unable to adopt neoliberal postures of self-reliance, and pits them against “anti-victimists,” or conservatives who themselves claimed to be threatened by a feminized system of political correctness. Nevertheless, in recent years victimhood has been prominently
{"title":"Introduction: Constructing and Contesting Victimhood in Global Politics","authors":"C. Eroukhmanoff, A. Wedderburn","doi":"10.1086/721562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721562","url":null,"abstract":"Questions about who can and cannot be considered a victim permeate almost all efforts to describe, map, legislate, resist, and/or dismantle harms both specific and systemic in nature. Discourses of victimhood inform individual, group, and national identities, shape peacebuilding and transitional justice programmes, and set the boundaries of debate about migration, sex work, crime, empire, and much else besides. These formations are not wholly specific to our present moment, of course: Alyson Cole has described how a “war on welfare” has been underway since the 1990s, which identifies “victimists,” people unwilling or unable to adopt neoliberal postures of self-reliance, and pits them against “anti-victimists,” or conservatives who themselves claimed to be threatened by a feminized system of political correctness. Nevertheless, in recent years victimhood has been prominently","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"841 - 848"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46901947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper analyses the deployment of victimhood nationalism towards China by Donald Trump during his two presidential campaigns and presidency. His original campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” aimed to form a sense of collective identity among his supporters by invoking the notion of American decline and projecting grievances onto a number of domestic and foreign actors. China was a recurring feature of this narrative, informed his administration’s policies, and found a home in the broader milieu of US conservatism. Trump blamed China for theUS’s economic problemswith remarks like “we can’t continue to allowChina to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing” from 2016. The sense of anxiety surroundingUS global status in relation toChinawas present again in 2020when he warned that “if I don’t win the election, China will own theUnited States.” This was again re-articulated through the context of the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in January 2020 where he described COVID-19 as the “China virus” to invoke a sense of victimization by China and deflect blame away from his own administration’s failings. Despite the underlying sentiment of who was “weak on China” being an
本文分析了唐纳德·特朗普在其两次总统竞选和总统任期内对中国的受害者民族主义部署。他最初的竞选口号是“让美国再次伟大起来”(Make America Great Again)，目的是在他的支持者中形成一种集体认同感，方法是援引美国衰落的概念，并将不满投射到一些国内外行动者身上。中国是这一叙事中反复出现的一个特征，为美联储的政策提供了信息，并在更广泛的美国保守主义环境中找到了一个家。特朗普将美国的经济问题归咎于中国，从2016年开始，他就说“我们不能继续允许中国强奸我们的国家，这就是他们正在做的事情”。围绕美国与中国的全球地位的焦虑感在2020年再次出现，当时他警告说，“如果我不赢得选举，中国将拥有美国。”在2020年1月开始的新冠肺炎大流行的背景下，他再次重申了这一点，他将新冠肺炎描述为“中国病毒”，以唤起中国的受害感，并将责任转移到自己政府的失败上。尽管潜在的情绪是谁“对中国软弱”是一个问题
{"title":"“We Don’t Win Anymore”: Donald Trump, China, and the Politics of Victimhood Nationalism","authors":"Benjamin Coulson","doi":"10.1086/721557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721557","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyses the deployment of victimhood nationalism towards China by Donald Trump during his two presidential campaigns and presidency. His original campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” aimed to form a sense of collective identity among his supporters by invoking the notion of American decline and projecting grievances onto a number of domestic and foreign actors. China was a recurring feature of this narrative, informed his administration’s policies, and found a home in the broader milieu of US conservatism. Trump blamed China for theUS’s economic problemswith remarks like “we can’t continue to allowChina to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing” from 2016. The sense of anxiety surroundingUS global status in relation toChinawas present again in 2020when he warned that “if I don’t win the election, China will own theUnited States.” This was again re-articulated through the context of the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in January 2020 where he described COVID-19 as the “China virus” to invoke a sense of victimization by China and deflect blame away from his own administration’s failings. Despite the underlying sentiment of who was “weak on China” being an","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"882 - 889"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46462294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One consequence of the success of The End of History was a degree of fame for Professor Fukuyama, and this, one imagines, is what led Slate magazine to invite him to host a well-publicized movie series. Between 2012 and 2019, Fukuyama introduced and screened a series of science fiction dystopias: Blade Runner; Children of Men; District 9; Gattaca; Soylent Green; Total Recall; The Road Warrior. I think that we might shed some new light on The End of History by reading it alongside and against these science fictions, each of which tells the story of a dystopic state that has suffered the catastrophic deterioration or perversion of a democratic-capitalist political system. That is to say, these movies, selected by Fukuyama as of particular significance, are legible from within the framework elaborated in The End of History, an argument I have developed at length elsewhere. Thus Blade Runner, for example, can be read as a dramatization of the Hegelian battle between the “first men,” the replicant “slave,” Roy Batty, challenging the policeman “master,” Rick Deckard. “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?” Batty taunts the policeman as he beats him.Children ofMen becomes legible as the exhausted last gasps of an aging British state, once a center of global capital and now irredeemably insular. If Blade Runner is about the battle between first men, Children of Men can be interpreted as a story about what Fukuyama termed the Last Man, serving out his time in a world with little left to excite him. The Road Warrior shows the devastation of a nuclear war
{"title":"The End of History as Science Fiction","authors":"S. Dyson","doi":"10.1086/721676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721676","url":null,"abstract":"One consequence of the success of The End of History was a degree of fame for Professor Fukuyama, and this, one imagines, is what led Slate magazine to invite him to host a well-publicized movie series. Between 2012 and 2019, Fukuyama introduced and screened a series of science fiction dystopias: Blade Runner; Children of Men; District 9; Gattaca; Soylent Green; Total Recall; The Road Warrior. I think that we might shed some new light on The End of History by reading it alongside and against these science fictions, each of which tells the story of a dystopic state that has suffered the catastrophic deterioration or perversion of a democratic-capitalist political system. That is to say, these movies, selected by Fukuyama as of particular significance, are legible from within the framework elaborated in The End of History, an argument I have developed at length elsewhere. Thus Blade Runner, for example, can be read as a dramatization of the Hegelian battle between the “first men,” the replicant “slave,” Roy Batty, challenging the policeman “master,” Rick Deckard. “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?” Batty taunts the policeman as he beats him.Children ofMen becomes legible as the exhausted last gasps of an aging British state, once a center of global capital and now irredeemably insular. If Blade Runner is about the battle between first men, Children of Men can be interpreted as a story about what Fukuyama termed the Last Man, serving out his time in a world with little left to excite him. The Road Warrior shows the devastation of a nuclear war","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"764 - 770"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45609514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The fate of sophisticated arguments that become best-selling books seems to be a descent into caricature and cliché. Not simply the nuances, but even the substance and significance of the argument are overwhelmed by its reduction to catch-phrases and soundbites that circulate widely yet convey little of the author’s ideas. This is probably an inevitable consequence of the interaction between intellectual and public culture, but it is nonetheless a rather depressing reality. Few books demonstrate this dynamic as graphically as The End of History and the Last Man. The book has been portrayed as an uncritical paean to liberal democracy; a piece of post-Cold War triumphalism; an ethnocentric condescension, and much more. Most commonly of all, it has been cast as a deeply ideological piece of naivete: “who, at the close of the twentieth century could seriously believe that history has ended? Look, everywhere it is back!” has become a throwaway line for innumerable commentators congratulating themselves at putting so misconceived a piece of hubris firmly in its place. And yet in the face of all this, one is tempted to ask, “who indeed?” Certainly not the author of The End of History and the Last Man. In fact, despite the sunny optimism of which it is often accused, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is its darkness. It is this sense of pessimism and foreboding, I would like to suggest, that is particularly relevant today and that gives the book continuing and disturbing relevance. Although The End of History is famous, its core argument is so frequently misconstrued that it bears restating. Following Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, Fukuyama presents history as a meaningful process driven by the struggle for recognition. The willingness to overcome the natural fear of death in a quintessentially human quest and desire for recognition marks the start of truly “human” history. In its progressive, optimistic mode, history then becomes the story of a
{"title":"The Darkness at the End of History","authors":"Michael C. Williams","doi":"10.1086/721675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721675","url":null,"abstract":"The fate of sophisticated arguments that become best-selling books seems to be a descent into caricature and cliché. Not simply the nuances, but even the substance and significance of the argument are overwhelmed by its reduction to catch-phrases and soundbites that circulate widely yet convey little of the author’s ideas. This is probably an inevitable consequence of the interaction between intellectual and public culture, but it is nonetheless a rather depressing reality. Few books demonstrate this dynamic as graphically as The End of History and the Last Man. The book has been portrayed as an uncritical paean to liberal democracy; a piece of post-Cold War triumphalism; an ethnocentric condescension, and much more. Most commonly of all, it has been cast as a deeply ideological piece of naivete: “who, at the close of the twentieth century could seriously believe that history has ended? Look, everywhere it is back!” has become a throwaway line for innumerable commentators congratulating themselves at putting so misconceived a piece of hubris firmly in its place. And yet in the face of all this, one is tempted to ask, “who indeed?” Certainly not the author of The End of History and the Last Man. In fact, despite the sunny optimism of which it is often accused, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is its darkness. It is this sense of pessimism and foreboding, I would like to suggest, that is particularly relevant today and that gives the book continuing and disturbing relevance. Although The End of History is famous, its core argument is so frequently misconstrued that it bears restating. Following Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, Fukuyama presents history as a meaningful process driven by the struggle for recognition. The willingness to overcome the natural fear of death in a quintessentially human quest and desire for recognition marks the start of truly “human” history. In its progressive, optimistic mode, history then becomes the story of a","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"794 - 801"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44767651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Every once in a while, a well-placed liberal intellectual will articulate a vision of the world that says precisely what the liberal chattering classes want to hear, precisely when they most want to hear it. In 1958, Isaiah Berlin reduced political life to two perennially opposed concepts of freedom, one leading inexorably to totalitarianism. In 1971, John Rawls published a complicated tome with a simple message: denizens of “property owning democracies” could theorize justice by retreating behind a veil of ignorance. And in 1989, Francis Fukuyama stepped up with a universal theory of history that ended in liberal democracy. What do these three influential liberal interventions have in common? Each of them emerged at a critical moment in Anglo-American political thought and global history when liberal intellectuals and policy makers could have chosen to reflect upon the longstanding complicity of “liberal democracies” with militarism, settler colonialism, and imperial capitalism, and when they could have opened their minds to the political ideas of others. In each instance, Berlin, Rawls, and Fukuyama gave liberals a reason not to do that. Thus, on the cusp of a world transformed by anti-colonial nationalism, Berlin assured his audience that such movements were mere reflections of positive liberty’s most dangerous expression: the irrational desire to be ruled by one’s “own race or nation” even when those new rulers prove more abusive than the “cautious, just, gentle, well meaning” colonial administrators that preceded them. A decade and a half later, when these now-liberated, post-colonial states were calling for a fairer
{"title":"More Things in Heaven and Earth: Liberal Imperialism and The End of History","authors":"J. Morefield","doi":"10.1086/721672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721672","url":null,"abstract":"Every once in a while, a well-placed liberal intellectual will articulate a vision of the world that says precisely what the liberal chattering classes want to hear, precisely when they most want to hear it. In 1958, Isaiah Berlin reduced political life to two perennially opposed concepts of freedom, one leading inexorably to totalitarianism. In 1971, John Rawls published a complicated tome with a simple message: denizens of “property owning democracies” could theorize justice by retreating behind a veil of ignorance. And in 1989, Francis Fukuyama stepped up with a universal theory of history that ended in liberal democracy. What do these three influential liberal interventions have in common? Each of them emerged at a critical moment in Anglo-American political thought and global history when liberal intellectuals and policy makers could have chosen to reflect upon the longstanding complicity of “liberal democracies” with militarism, settler colonialism, and imperial capitalism, and when they could have opened their minds to the political ideas of others. In each instance, Berlin, Rawls, and Fukuyama gave liberals a reason not to do that. Thus, on the cusp of a world transformed by anti-colonial nationalism, Berlin assured his audience that such movements were mere reflections of positive liberty’s most dangerous expression: the irrational desire to be ruled by one’s “own race or nation” even when those new rulers prove more abusive than the “cautious, just, gentle, well meaning” colonial administrators that preceded them. A decade and a half later, when these now-liberated, post-colonial states were calling for a fairer","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"781 - 793"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45311518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The End of History and the Last Man, I very much appreciate the effort of Polity to collect a series of commentaries reflecting the variety of critiques that have been made of the book. Over these years, I think that I have heard virtually every possible point of view expressed about my work; Polity has done an admirable job selecting authors who have actually read the book and take its arguments seriously enough to engage with them at a high level. It is in that spirit that I will attempt to respond. I want to begin with the comments of Professors Dyson and Myers first on The End of History as science fiction and of the threat of the end of the Anthropocene, since they actually deal with similar subjects. Professor Dyson is correct that I have had a long-standing if not widely known interest in science fiction, and in particular with dystopian science fiction. The latter is an excellent genre for looking at presentday politics, extrapolating current trends, and anticipating the ways in which changes in technology will affect future societies. Aldous Huxley’s Brave NewWorld foresaw CRISPR-Cas9 and today’s genetic engineering capabilities that I discussed inOur Posthuman Future, while GeorgeOrwell’s 1984 envisioned pervasive surveillance through the “telescreen” that has now become a reality thanks to the internet andmodern AI technologies. Neal Stephenson’s 1991 novel Snowcrash, by contrast, saw the United States fall apart into self-regarding “burbclaves” and the federal government retreat into nonexistence as the fulfillment of libertarian fantasies—something that is also not too distant from present American realities. The elephant in the room is of course the one raised by Professor Myers, the threat of human-induced climate change that will have enormous social and political consequences.
{"title":"Response to the Polity Collection","authors":"F. Fukuyama","doi":"10.1086/721670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721670","url":null,"abstract":"On the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The End of History and the Last Man, I very much appreciate the effort of Polity to collect a series of commentaries reflecting the variety of critiques that have been made of the book. Over these years, I think that I have heard virtually every possible point of view expressed about my work; Polity has done an admirable job selecting authors who have actually read the book and take its arguments seriously enough to engage with them at a high level. It is in that spirit that I will attempt to respond. I want to begin with the comments of Professors Dyson and Myers first on The End of History as science fiction and of the threat of the end of the Anthropocene, since they actually deal with similar subjects. Professor Dyson is correct that I have had a long-standing if not widely known interest in science fiction, and in particular with dystopian science fiction. The latter is an excellent genre for looking at presentday politics, extrapolating current trends, and anticipating the ways in which changes in technology will affect future societies. Aldous Huxley’s Brave NewWorld foresaw CRISPR-Cas9 and today’s genetic engineering capabilities that I discussed inOur Posthuman Future, while GeorgeOrwell’s 1984 envisioned pervasive surveillance through the “telescreen” that has now become a reality thanks to the internet andmodern AI technologies. Neal Stephenson’s 1991 novel Snowcrash, by contrast, saw the United States fall apart into self-regarding “burbclaves” and the federal government retreat into nonexistence as the fulfillment of libertarian fantasies—something that is also not too distant from present American realities. The elephant in the room is of course the one raised by Professor Myers, the threat of human-induced climate change that will have enormous social and political consequences.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"834 - 840"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46597854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There is a gap between the scholarly salience of works of political theory and their influence and reception outside of academic precincts. It seems that scholarly reputation hardly moves on a par with political import. Consider John Rawls. More has been written in academic journals about the works of the author ofATheory of Justice (1971) than about, say, Hayek, Oakeshott, Schmitt, or Strauss. But while the mountain of paper spent writing on Rawls lords over the rest, neither Rawls, nor any of his disciples, have ever gained any substantial ascendance in the political world, let alone any of the influence in the chancelleries of power the other four have had. Almost the opposite, however, could be said about Francis Fukuyama’s The End of the History and the Last Man (1992). Widely discussed in periodicals and magazines, and translated into more than ten languages, there is nevertheless very little serious writing on it within North-Atlantic academic political theory. But Fukuyama has had a huge audience and influence on policy debates and in governmental circles, in addition to possessing formidable academic credentials that include impressive syntheses of great scope around questions of identity, the making and unmaking of political orders, and the fate of liberal democracy today.
{"title":"Fukuyama’s Universal History","authors":"Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo","doi":"10.1086/721677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721677","url":null,"abstract":"There is a gap between the scholarly salience of works of political theory and their influence and reception outside of academic precincts. It seems that scholarly reputation hardly moves on a par with political import. Consider John Rawls. More has been written in academic journals about the works of the author ofATheory of Justice (1971) than about, say, Hayek, Oakeshott, Schmitt, or Strauss. But while the mountain of paper spent writing on Rawls lords over the rest, neither Rawls, nor any of his disciples, have ever gained any substantial ascendance in the political world, let alone any of the influence in the chancelleries of power the other four have had. Almost the opposite, however, could be said about Francis Fukuyama’s The End of the History and the Last Man (1992). Widely discussed in periodicals and magazines, and translated into more than ten languages, there is nevertheless very little serious writing on it within North-Atlantic academic political theory. But Fukuyama has had a huge audience and influence on policy debates and in governmental circles, in addition to possessing formidable academic credentials that include impressive syntheses of great scope around questions of identity, the making and unmaking of political orders, and the fate of liberal democracy today.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"824 - 833"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41929031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Just as the soil needs cultivators of the soil, the mind needs teachers. But teachers are not as easy to come by as farmers. The teachers themselves are pupils and must be pupils. But there cannot be an infinite regress: ultimately there must be teachers who are not in turn pupils . . . For all practical purposes, pupils, of whatever degree of proficiency, have access to the teachers who are not in turn pupils, to the greatest minds, only through the great books.
{"title":"Is The End of History a Great Book?","authors":"Asad M. Haider","doi":"10.1086/721678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721678","url":null,"abstract":"Just as the soil needs cultivators of the soil, the mind needs teachers. But teachers are not as easy to come by as farmers. The teachers themselves are pupils and must be pupils. But there cannot be an infinite regress: ultimately there must be teachers who are not in turn pupils . . . For all practical purposes, pupils, of whatever degree of proficiency, have access to the teachers who are not in turn pupils, to the greatest minds, only through the great books.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"54 1","pages":"810 - 823"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47946516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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