More Things in Heaven and Earth: Liberal Imperialism and The End of History

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