Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

a F t e r w o r d
exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had
to be better than liberal democracy.”
Yet the Stalinist One-State we once knew over there has
since come home to roost here, in the West, in the guise of a new
Washington consensus that lies, cheats, and bullies its way to capitalist
fame and glory. Never has mediocrity reached such dizzy
heights of power and wealth; never has deceit and corruption been
part of its political arsenal. The dogmatism Lévy and Fukuyama
tag on the twentieth-century tradition of socialism pales alongside
the false testimonies and propaganda pervading every aspect of
daily life today. Beset by conflict, crisis, war, terrorist threat, and
fundamentalism of every stripe, the legitimacy of liberal democracy
has never looked so extraordinarily fragile. The tragedy is
palpable. Truth and falsity have degenerated into interchangeable
language games, fair game for the rich and powerful, for those
who control the media. Fukuyama’s belief that liberal democracies
have less incentive for war, and have universally satisfied people’s
need for reciprocal recognition, seems even more ridiculous than
it did a decade ago.
More recently, Fukuyama has been struggling for his own recognition
against a neoconservative backlash, with a few utopian
ideas of its own. 6 The ideological prophet of Poppy Bush’s “New
World Order,” an order that heralded the “last man,” the happy
(mystified?) citizen whose “long-run” interests were apparently
fulfilled, now distances himself from the reality of a state he’d
once affirmed as incarnating universal liberty. Perhaps history has
opened up again? Or maybe George W. is just a historical blip?
But Fukuyama can’t have it both ways in his Bush critique: “In
order to refute my hypothesis,” he wrote in his original National
Interest article, with a typical spirit of mild-mannered closure,
“it is not sufficient to suggest that the future holds in store large
and momentous events. One would have to show that these events
were driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that
165