바보야, 문제는 경제야! ~ 한 '경제 무식자'의 자기 반성... - Pyung-joong Yoon | Facebook

바보야, 문제는 경제야! ~ 한 '경제 무식자'의 자기 반성... - Pyung-joong Yoon | Facebook

Pyung-joong Yoon

16 May

 ·==

시장의 철학 검색

윤평중 (지은이)나남출판2016-02-05

==

바보야, 문제는 경제야!

  ~ 한 '경제 무식자'의 자기 반성

                           윤평중 26. 5.16

   원인 모를 기침감기로 지난 3주 집에서 자진 유폐했다. 친구모임에도 나가지 못했다. 찬란한 봄이 창밖으로 지나가는 것을 흘겨 보았을 뿐이다.

   집앞산엔 몇달만이다. 이 새벽 전망대에 어르신들의 목소리가 익숙하다. 이 분들은 아침 6시면 썰물처럼 하산한다. 그리고 더 젊은 분들이 세대교체한다.

   아침 산길에서 스쳐지나가는 등산객들도 주식 얘기다. 체력단련장 중년 여성들도 'S전자 내일 또 오른다!'며 이야기꽃을 피운다. 가히 광풍이다. 하지만 이분들은 나름 '합리적 투자'를 하고 있는 것이리라.

   유폐돼있는 동안 적지않은 경제자료를 듣고 보았다. 학계와 재야의 고수들 얘기가 많은 도움이 됐다. 

   나는 무려 시장의 본질에 대한 철학적 성찰을 시도한 '시장의 철학'(나남출판사)을 쓴 사람이다. 이른바 '시장질서와 민주질서의 변증법'을 규명하려 한 책이다. 

   현대경제학이 망실해버린 '경세제민의 담론'을 건설해보려 했다. 하지만 책은 초판도 다 나가지 않았다. '출판시장'에서 '패배'한 것이리라. 이후 난 책출판에 신중한 사람이 됐다.

   유폐기간중 불현듯 스스로 '탁상공론의 인간'임을 깨달았다. 다 가난했던 60~70년대를 중산층의 삶으로 통과했음에도 난 이른바 '가진 자'들에 대해 비판적이었다. 개발독재시대엔 부정하게 축재한 졸부들도 워낙 많았으니.

   옛날일이지만 사춘기 딸아이가 부자들을 폄하하는  걸 보고 움찔했던 적이 있다. 알게 모르게 내게서 '감염'됐을 가능성이 컸다. 잘못된 밥상머리 교육이었다.

   이 시절 작은 에피소드 한 가지. 

내가 갓 교수가 된 1980년대 후반이었다.  무슨 모임에서 S대 교수들이 '주말 가족과 스키여행 간다'는 얘기를 하는걸 듣던 내가 불쑥 말했다. '국립대 교수 월급으로 그게 가능해요?' 

   황당해하던 그 분들을 떠올리면 지금도 얼굴이 화끈거린다. 참으로 유치찬란한 망언이었다. 스키를 '호화' 취미로 여긴 '우물안 개구리 선비'의 선을 넘는 참견이었다. 

   골프를 평생 하지않은 것도 내심으론 '이 좁은 땅에서 환경파괴' 운운하는 비판적인 생각이 있어서였다. 그런데 알고보면 이것도 일종의 허위의식일 수 있다. 실상은 내가 여력이 없는데다 운동을 즐기지 않았던 이유가 더 컸을 터이다. 

   이런 찌질한 얘기를 털어놓는 이유는 그 시절 좌파가 아니었음에도 내 '머리'가 얼마나 수준낮게 反자본적이었는지 돌아보기 위해서다. 난 당시 많은 한국인들처럼 20~30대에 아마 재벌망국론에 포획돼 있었던 것 같다.

   내 주위엔 자수성가한 친구들이 많다. 그야말로 무에서 유를 이룬 친구들이다. 수십년간 경제에 관한 그들의 생생한 얘기를 귓전으로 듣고 그냥 흘려보냈을 뿐이었다.

  자수성가한 친구들은 공통점이 있다. 실물경제에 예민하다. 부지런히 경제뉴스를 정독하며 계속 공부한다. 이것저것 돌다리 두드리며 계속 시도한다. 주위 사람들에게 자신의 '노하우'를 전파해준다. 그런데 친구왈, 그런 경제 노하우를 경청해 실행하는 경우는 찾아보기 어렵다는 것이었다.

   나도 예외가 아니었다. 시장이 착취와 소외의 공간임과 동시에 자유와 자생적 창발력, 풍요한 부의 거소임을 '논증'한 시장철학의 저자임에도 난 실물경제엔 철저히 어두웠다. 

   안정돼있지만 항시 빠듯한 월급쟁이와 연금생활자의 삶이 그 결과다. 물론 노인빈곤이 심각한 우리 사회에서 이런 '안정성'도 아주 귀한 것이고 나름 '축복받은'  것임을 잘 알고 있다. 

   부의 본질엔 무수히 많은 땀과 시행착오, 열정과 상상력, 창조력과 욕망이 두루 섞여있다. 사람의 본성과 직결된다. 그리고 실제로 사람들은 실물경제를 가장 중요하게 여긴다. 

  이재명 정부의 지지율 고공행진을 떠받드는 최대 토대는 코리아 디스카운트의 해소와 연계된 주식시장의 경이로운 활황이다. 현재 대한민국 국민 거의 3분의 1이 주식 투자자라는 사실이 정녕 의미심장하다. 

   이재명 정부의 고공행진엔 대중주의적 정념의 양극화 요인 외에도 경제라는 객관적 토대가 엄존하는 셈이다. 이 정부 '정치의 폭주'에 대한 정당한 지적조차 큰 힘을 얻지못하는 가장 큰 이유가 여기에 있다.

   물론 이것도 극소수 반도체산업의 융성으로 인한 착시 현상이라는 비판도 있지만 이 정부가 실행한 상법 개정(주주들에 대한 충실 의무 규정 등)이 막대한 역할을 한 것으로 판단된다. 한국주식시장이 드디어 세계주식시장과 실시간 연동돼는 통로가 열린 것이므로. 

   얼마전 청와대 정책실장의 경솔한 언행이 야기한 평지풍파를 정부가 수습하려 애쓰는 것도 결국 세계자본과 한국자본의 긴밀한 상호환류를  보여준다. 한국 경제는 그만큼 고도화하고 국제화한 것이다.

  마르크스주의자로 보였던 한 제자가 주식으로 용돈을 번다고 해서 '그건 좌파와 안 어울리지않아?'하고 했던 적이 있었는데 내 생각이 짧았다. 마르크스 본인도 주식 투자를 한적이 있을 뿐 아니라 주식회사를 자본의 사회화를 통한 사회주의로 가는 길일 수 있다고 정당화하기도 했고.

   오늘 새벽 산길은 온통 아카시아 꽃길이었다. 난만한 아카시아 향기로 취할 지경이다. 산동네의 위엄이다. 5년전 정년퇴임식에서 '꽃길만 걸으시라!'는 제자들의 축복을 새삼 감사하게 된다.  전망대 의자에 앉아 한달음에 써내려간 '한 경제 무식자'의 반성으로 중요한 깨달음을 안고 내려간다. '바보야, 문제는 경제야!'

  토요일 아침 7시반이 되자 전망대엔 새소리뿐이다.

이제 곧 젊은이들이 몰려오리라. 

드디어 하산할 시간이 됐다.

Pony Park

 ·

저는 교수님과 같은 세대를 살아온 사람으로서

늘 두가지 질문을 갖고있답니다

"자유민주주의 시장경제에서

자유 경쟁이 정말 모두에게 공정한가?

부의 불평등은 어디까지 허용되는가?"

Reply

Edited

Pyung-joong Yoon

 ·

 ·

Author

박영진 공감합니다.

정말 난해하고도 중요한 문제입니다..

Reply

강평기

 ·

박영진 음 저의 짧은 소견으로는 1. "모두에게" 공정하지 않을 수 있습니다. 하지만 우리의 이성이 만들어 놓은 현 체제에서는 권위주의, 전체주의, 사회주의나, 공산주의, 국가 자본주의 등등보다 더 공정하다고 봅니다.

2. 부의 불평등을 어디까지 허용할 것이냐의 문제는 그 공화정, 즉 공동체에서 살고 있는 사람들의 컨센스에 의해 결정하는 것이며, 누군가가 나와서 여기까지 허용해야한다는 말도 맞지 않고 신이 나와서 정확한 허용범위를 해결할 수 있는 문제도 아닙니다.

시대에 따라 저울추처럼 불평등이 줄어들기도하고 커지기도 한다고 봅니다.

무엇보다 중요한 것은 부의 불평등을 무자르듯(많은 사상가나 이념가들이 원하는 일들) 없앨 수 없고 부의 불평등과 동거하면서 각자 세대가 좀 더 약자를 위해 세심하게 도움을 주는 공동체가 더 현명한 공동체라고 봅니다.

Reply

Hong Shick Seo

 ·

교수님께서 영화나 역사에 대하여 쓰신글들을 보면서,

(감히 말씀은 못드렸지만)

저런 섬세함과 논리 ,스마트한 분별력으로 산업과 기업을 분석하며 투자를 하셨으면 어땠을까...하는 생각을 종종 했었습니다.^^

Reply

Edited

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시장의 철학 검색

윤평중 (지은이)나남출판2016-02-05

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책소개철학자가 쓰는 새 경제학교과서. 논쟁의 철학자.합리적 보수주의자로 평가받는 저자 윤평중은 '시장'이라는 키워드를 통해 현재 한국 사회에 만연한 갈등과 분열의 해결책을 진단한다. 저자는 '시장'을 정치적.경제적인 논쟁과 혼란 속에서도 '재화와 용역을 생산.분배.소비하는' 자체를 넘어 창조적 파괴가 끊임없이 실현되는 자유민주주의 실천의 현장으로 본다.

이를 바탕으로 오늘날 한국 사회 병폐의 치유법을 찾기 위해 정치적.경제적 울타리를 넘나드는 깊이 있는 고찰과 날카로운 비평을 선사한다. 저자는 "궁극적으로 '시장의 철학'은 21세기 한국 사회가 온몸으로 제기한 도전에 정면으로 맞서는 경세제민의 통합 학문으로 구현된다"고 주장하고 있다. 한국 사회의 문제를 다루는 데 진보적 접근이 주를 이루는 세태 속에서 흔치 않은 보수적 접근이 돋보인다.

목차

머리말: 왜 지금 여기서 ‘시장의 철학’인가? 5

제1장 시장철학 전사(前史): <허생전>과 <베니스의 상인>

경세제민(經世濟民)의 복원 35

<허생전>과 <베니스의 상인>: 시장과 시민정신 44

조선 문명, 중국, 일본: 신뢰의 사회자본과 법 56

직업윤리는 시민정신의 모태(母胎)다 65

제2장 시장의 정치철학

복지와 경제민주화, 21세기 한국의 시대정신이 되다 79

한계에 이른 한국형 발전국가 90

시장철학이 필요한 까닭은 96

제3장 시장질서의 논리와 동학(動學)

시장과 자유민주주의 107

시장철학의 논리와 동학 111

시장철학의 3가지 테제: 시장질서와 민주질서의 변증법 126

자유시장은 민주주의의 적(敵)이 아니다 136

제4장 시장비판론에 대한 반(反)비판

마르크스는 헤겔을 넘어서지 못했다 145

시장을 거부한 현실사회주의 156

북한의 시장화가 어려운 사상적 이유: 정치가 곧 경제인 북한 164

북한 개혁의 정치경제학: 경제는 곧 정치다 188

제5장 시장질서, 정의론, 법치주의

시장질서와 정의론 207

르상티망과 울혈의 사회 215

공공성이 르상티망과 울혈을 치료한다 222

정의론의 계보학: 아리스토텔레스와 롤스 228

공평ㆍ공정ㆍ정의와 대한민국 헌법의 상호 침투 245

법치주의와 반(反)법치적 대항폭력 250

제6장 대중, 공론장, 시민교육

자유시장과 대중의 출현 265

공화사회를 촉진하는 공론장 280

시민적 주체 형성과 교육의 철학 292

서머힐의 진보교육에 대한 비판적 성찰 296

제7장 사실과 숙의(熟議)의 문화

사실 존중이 숙의와 소통을 가능케 한다 315

담론 원리의 철학적 지도 그리기 319

담론은 권력과 지식의 결합체이다 341

사실과 합리성이 소통과 통합의 근본이다 345

참고문헌 353

찾아보기 363

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출판사 제공 책소개

철학자가 쓰는 새 경제학교과서!

논쟁의 철학자·합리적 보수주의자 윤평중,

‘앵그리사회’ 대한민국의 병폐를 진단한다

논쟁의 철학자·합리적 보수주의자로 평가받는 윤평중 한신대 철학과 교수가 낸《시장의 철학》은 ‘시장’(市場)이라는 키워드를 통해 현재 한국 사회에 만연한 갈등과 분열의 해결책을 진단하는 책이다. 저자는 ‘시장’을 정치적·경제적인 논쟁과 혼란 속에서도 ‘재화와 용역을 생산·분배·소비하는’ 자체를 넘어 창조적 파괴가 끊임없이 실현되는 자유민주주의 실천의 현장으로 본다. 이를 바탕으로 오늘날 한국 사회 병폐의 치유법을 찾기 위해 정치적·경제적 울타리를 넘나드는 깊이 있는 고찰과 날카로운 비평을 선사한다. 저자는 “궁극적으로 ‘시장의 철학’은 21세기 한국 사회가 온몸으로 제기한 도전에 정면으로 맞서는 경세제민(經世濟民)의 통합 학문으로 구현된다”고 주장한다.

동·서양 학문을 넘나들며 저자가 찾아낸 ‘시장철학’은

현재 한국 사회의 문제 해결에 유용하다

먼저 이 책은 연암 박지원의〈허생전〉과 셰익스피어의〈베니스의 상인〉에서 시장철학 논쟁에 대한 실마리를 찾는다. 동서양의 모더니즘 학자들을 대비시켜 그들의 작품에서 묘사되는 시장이 단지 경제적 영역에 머무르지 않고 인문학적·사회과학적인 요소로도 해석될 수 있음을 증명한다. 그리고 동서양의 학자들(칼 폴라니, 프리드리히 하이에크, 헤겔, 마르크스 등)의 철학적 편린에서 ‘시장’이라는 키워드를 추출해 시장이라는 공간의 철학적 의미를 증명했다.

시장은 경제적 공간을 넘어선 자유·합리·민주의 공간이다

또한 사실과 합리성을 중시하는 지식 문화가 인간의 소통과 통합을 가능케 하는 강력한 힘이라는 점도 철학적 편린을 통해 논증한다. 즉, 사실과 합리성은 언제든지 경험과 반론에 의해 반증될 수 있다는 믿음에서 비롯된다. 저자는 현재 한국 사회에는 이러한 사실과 합리성이 부족함을 지적하며, 이 역시 한국 사회의 병폐를 치유하는 또 다른 접근법이 되어야 함을 강조한다. 이렇듯, 자유시장이 창출하는 시장은 이 책에서 밝혀진 자유와 공론장, 민주주의와 과학, 사실과 합리성의 문화와 상호 선순환 관계가 실현되는 공간이다. 저자는 시장철학에 대해 다음과 같이 말한다.

시장에는 본질적 문제점과 수많은 약점들이 엄존한다. 하지만 자유시장 없이는 바람직한 ‘현대적 삶’(현대성, 모더니티)도 불가능하다. 세계사적 차원에서뿐만 아니라 현대 한국 사회에서 이 명제가 가진 의의는 참으로 깊고도 넓다. 결국 이 책은 시장의 문제 설정을 다각적으로 조명함으로써 현대 문명과 한국 사회에 대한 이해를 높이고 우리 스스로를 성찰하며, 성숙하고 자율적인 현대적 삶의 가능성을 숙고하는 작업이라 할 수 있다.

-머리말 중에서

한국 사회의 문제를 다루는 데 진보적 접근이 주를 이루는 세태 속에서 흔치 않은 보수적 접근이 돋보이는 이 책은 양 극단을 거부하고 우리에게 중용과 합리적 실천을 강조한다. 합리적 보수주의의 시각으로 보는 ‘시장’을 통해 대한민국 사회를 보는 균형적 시각을 만나보자. 접기

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공감순 

     

합리적인 보수주의자라는 소개의 글이 무색하지 않을 만큼 글들이 정제되어 있으면서 느껴지는 사고의 맥락도 뚜렷하다. 단, 자유시장과 민주주의에 대한 현학적인 시도는 좋았지만 되려 철학의 이론적인 한계에 갇히는 느낌이 들기도했다. 이에대한 진보지식인들의 성찰이 담긴 글들도 나왔으면 한다.  구매

김민준 2016-02-13 공감 (5) 댓글 (0)

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Opinion | Was Francis Fukuyama Right All Along? - The New York Times

Opinion | Was Francis Fukuyama Right All Along? - The New York Times



The Ezra Klein Show

Was Francis Fukuyama Right All Along?
Sept. 11, 2026

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By Ezra Klein

Produced by Jack McCordick



Video



The book was called “The End of History and the Last Man,”


​
39 seconds




The political scientist Francis Fukuyama looks back on his 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” and what it has predicted about the state of liberalism today.CreditCredit...The Ezra Klein Show


Francis Fukuyama on Trump, China and the Legacy of 9/11The political scientist Francis Fukuyama looks back on his 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” and what it has predicted about the state of liberalism today.




This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?” is remembered as a triumphalist argument heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy. After it, and anything major that happened in the world, you would get people saying: Well, I guess history didn’t really end, did it?

I remember this particularly after Sept. 11, 2001. This Friday, of course, is its 25th anniversary. But this was such a terrible misreading of Fukuyama’s argument. Because if you actually read his essay, and particularly if you read the book that came out of that essay, he is saying something very different.

The book was called “The End of History and the Last Man,” and it was anything but triumphalist. Liberal democracy might win, Fukuyama thought. It might become the way most states organize themselves.


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But it might win atop a cramped and partial vision of the human soul, one that believes in our ability to consume but has little room for our desire for recognition, for greatness, for daring. And no political system without room for those parts of our soul would be stable for very long. You cannot build a good society atop a flawed vision of human nature.

My view is that very few books in politics are as insightful or as important for understanding where liberal democracy went wrong, why figures like Donald Trump keep rising and why the opposition to them seems so wan and uninspiring so often.

This is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin it didn’t really commit because it has something to say to us now.

Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University. He’s written many books since that one, including a two-volume series on the nature of political orders, a critique of the neoconservative world that he was once part of and a defense of liberalism from its attackers. But his new book is a memoir: “In the Realm of the Last Man.”

So I wanted to begin with the ideas of the end of history and the last man. I wanted to begin by rediscovering the book that made Fukuyama famous — so we can hear what it has to say about the world we now live in.


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Ezra Klein: Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the show.

Francis Fukuyama: Thanks very much for having me.

I want to begin the conversation with your most famous book — a book I’m a huge fan of — which is “The End of History and the Last Man.”

The book is built on an essay that came out in 1989. It’s a few months before the Berlin Wall falls. You have this moment where liberal democracy really seems to be triumphing. The end of history has become this highly memed, and in many ways simplified, concept.

So what was it?

Well, this was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and he meant History with a capital H.

So we would use the words “development” or “modernization” today. But it’s directional, it’s progressive. Things are getting better. Human reason is prevailing in structuring societies. And the question of the end of history was not the end of events, it was: To what objective does this historical process seem to be leading?

The Marxists took that same concept of history. They believed in history, also, but they believed that the end was not a liberal society, it was a Communist utopia. And that was their guiding star in their political movement.


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And my observation back in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev was leading the Soviet Union, was that we weren’t going to get there. We were going to stop at the penultimate stage, which was some version of liberal democracy and a capitalist economy. And for me, that was the practical end of history that had really emerged.

So the way to think about the term “the end of history” is the end of the process of figuring out how to politically organize society.

Yeah, or the goal or the objective of that process.

Why did you think we were going to stop there?

Well, I didn’t know that we were going to stop, but all of these big systematic competitors had all either self-destructed or had been rejected by the people who once followed them. And I think the challenge that I was trying to make was to ask people: Can you locate something that’s better than this outcome?

Not necessarily that our society is perfect. It obviously is not. But is there an alternative form of political and social organization that you think will make people, in the end, happier and lead more fulfilled lives? And I, to this day, have not seen anyone really posit that.

Well, what the Marxists thought — and you talk about this in the book — is that a capitalist system has within it a contradiction that will inevitably lead to its undoing, which is you have this class conflict, and you have a small number of people at the top who are exploiting the great mass of workers beneath them. And that liberal democracy is lying when it says that it equally or even reasonably apportions freedom.


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As the famous line goes: The fact that the rich and the poor men are not free to sleep under the bridge is not an equality of freedom.

So why are you not convinced class is such a dangerous contradiction?

Well, it could be, especially with the rise of technology. But for much of the period after 1945, you didn’t have pure capitalism. You had, basically, in most advanced countries, a form of social democracy.

And I think the democracy part of it was absolutely necessary, because unless you provide certain social protections — unless you do a certain amount of redistribution — the inequality in the society is going to become intolerable.

For most of that period, you actually had rising real incomes for working people. And so even though there was inequality, you had political stability because everybody could buy into it.

Now, I never argued that this would be true for all time. I think that the nature of technology is changing such that the degree of inequality has grown. I think globalization has also contributed to this. Unless you moderate those inequalities through political means, you’re just not going to have a stable democracy.


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One of the things that I think is fascinating about the way you frame this in the book is you try to move the foundation for liberalism off the philosophers we normally give it to — Hobbes and Locke — and onto Hegel.

One of the ways you do that is to say that Hobbes and Locke had this much more narrow vision of what a liberal society, or even a just society, is trying to achieve — which is self-preservation, simply existing at a reasonable level of material well-being.

And you say Hegel understands the human soul better than that, and that the human soul wants more than that. It wants recognition.

The fundamental question for liberal societies — the one that will decide whether they are the end of history — is whether they are actually able to spread recognition around society equally enough. Not just freedom — recognition. Being seen, being valued enough to survive.

So tell me a bit about that move — that it’s actually recognition that is at the center of political life.


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Well, this is an idea that goes all the way back to Plato. Socrates, as Plato writes in “The Republic,” asks: Well, we have reason, we have desire. But isn’t there a third part of the soul?

He calls that thymos, which can be translated as “spiritedness” or “pride.” And it’s a nonmaterial drive that people have — that they want other people to acknowledge their humanity.

So I invented these two Greek words, “isothymia” and “megalothymia.” Isothymia is basically the foundation of a liberal society — that everybody, by virtue of being born as a human being, has a certain base level of dignity that has to be recognized by the rest of society.

We recognize it in a liberal society by giving people rights. And that means that you are seen as a human being who has some share of the power of the community. And that generates a huge amount of resentment if you feel that other people are being recognized in a way that you are not. And that, really, I think, drives a lot of democratic politics.

Just to give you one example: In the gay marriage movement, you could have solved the economic problem of gay couples by giving them inheritance rights and that sort of thing — the ability to pass on property to the children they raise.


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Civil unions.

Yeah, civil unions. But that wasn’t enough, because gay people wanted to have acknowledgment that their unions had just as much dignity and just as much value as that between a man and a woman. And I think that was the fundamental drive that led to the legalization of gay marriage. So that’s just an example.

But, I think, civil rights — Ralph Ellison wrote a novel, “Invisible Man,” back in the 1950s about the experience of African Americans who had moved from the South to the North. You didn’t have official, legally sanctioned segregation — what you had was the invisibility. That’s where the “invisible man” in the title comes from: that white people in the North simply didn’t see a Black person as a fellow human being.

And that was really what I think generated the deep resentment and distrust that existed in Northern cities and in racial politics.

One of the really interesting sections of the book is where you talk about the ways in which material politics and a politics of recognition can blur into each other. That there are many places where people have a level of material wealth that, say, in another country would be amazing, but in the country they’re in, because it puts them further down the scale of recognition, it is, for them, a terrible injury.

You have Adam Smith talking about this, that much of what people want from wealth is to be seen. It isn’t simply to consume.


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So tell me a bit about that side of it. Because I think that also makes sense of some parts of our economic politics, too, where you’ll sometimes have somewhat self-satisfied liberals say: Well, actually, if you look on a chart, people have been getting richer, and it’s better than it was in the past, and we have antibiotics now.

But actually, if you understand that part of what people want from the money they make is to be seen and recognized a certain way in society — that actually contains within it a never enoughness, a constant instability. Because there is always a certain amount of inequality of recognition in society.

Right. Well, to expand a little bit on that Adam Smith section that you referred to, he says: The rich man glories in his wealth, and the poor man is unseen, is invisible to his fellow human beings. That’s really the pain of poverty, this invisibility to other people, and I think that still operates.

And if you think about our politics, a lot of it is about recognition rather than simply the distribution of material resources. A lot of populism today is driven by people who feel they’re invisible — that the world is run by educated elites, and they don’t listen to the concerns of people like them, and they don’t recognize them as being fully equal because they don’t have the education or the sophistication. I think that unequally distributed recognition is actually at the base of a lot of our problems.

I think it’s something you see in some cases on the left — I think wokeness had a lot of this in it — but also, in some cases, on the populist right. It’s a desire to invert status in a society. So a belief that your white privilege, or your wealth and your riches, make you suspect, and you should be treated as suspect until you, say, prove yourself otherwise.


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On the right, this can take the form of attacks on their chosen elites — journalists and cosmopolitans. Populism has a lot of this in it: The people who have been judged excellent or who have attained power — there’s an effort to alter the moral valence of that power and the way society sees them. And I actually see the last couple of years as, in some ways, a fight between these.

Some of the radicalization of the tech right comes from their feeling of: Well, we did what you wanted. We made our money under capitalism. We built these great companies, and now you hate us. And that pushed them into a very, very different and, eventually, quite scary politics.

No, that’s absolutely right.

I think that your judgment of the moral character of the people you don’t like then blends with resentment at the fact that they are unjustly recognized, and that’s really the source of many of the forms of backlash that we see in our society, both on the left and the right. You don’t want to be seen as lesser than other people, and you get very resentful when you’re treated that way.

And the inversion, I think, is simply a demand that stops — that you be recognized at least as an equal. So just because you’ve made a lot of money doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person.

The real anger comes from people who feel that they’re victimized, that they are marginalized as a result of their identities. And that is now something that has occurred to a lot of people who occupied previously privileged positions in the society.


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So you define, there, the version in which recognition is equal. But you said you invented another word. “Megalothymia,” is it?

Yes, megalothymia. So that is the desire to be recognized as greater than other people. And I think that this is obviously a threat in a democracy, because a liberal democracy is based on the premise that all people, all citizens, are essentially equal.

But that’s not enough for a certain group, a certain subset, of human beings. They want to dominate. They want to be more than others. It takes, oftentimes, a very negative form of political domination — so you want to be a dictator, an autocrat.

But it’s also necessary because you can’t have any kind of human excellence if you don’t have the desire to be better than other people. If you want to be a great pianist or a football star or a great artist, I think that’s also driven by a certain kind of desire to be recognized as better than other people.
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So I think that you can’t have a society of perfectly equal recognition. That has to be the basis for social cohesion, but you also can’t have a dynamic society without people who want something more than that.


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I actually wrote about Donald Trump in the original book, “The End of History and the Last Man.”

He comes up a few times.

Yeah. And back then, I thought: Well, one of the virtues of living in a capitalist democracy is that this desire for unequal recognition can be satisfied just by becoming rich. It’s a way of bleeding off that energy.

Little did I know that, 30 years later, that wouldn’t be enough for Donald Trump — that he’d want political power as well as fortune.

So that brings us to the other side of the book, which gets talked about somewhat less. And maybe the way to get into this is simply to say: Who is the last man?

So the last man is the creature that Friedrich Nietzsche, the other great German philosopher of the 19th century, identified as the product of the end of history. A person who was satisfied with the things that liberalism provides — basically peace and prosperity — but had no further aspirations. No desires for a better vision of the world; nothing that they would risk their lives on behalf of.


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And for Nietzsche, it was really that extraordinary ambition that was what made a human being a human being. And instead, in a liberal society, you have this very flat world where everybody has to tolerate everybody else, and nobody wants to think of themselves as better.

So there’s something interesting here.

One of the constant critiques of at least a portion of the right toward liberalism — for that matter, toward socialism — is that it’s fundamentally built on a lie, and that lie is equality.

And the form of equality that is a lie can take different versions. You can have people who see racial equality as a lie, and they get obsessed with race and I.Q. and things of that nature. You can have people who see individual equality as a lie.

Obviously, some people are more morally good than others. Other people are more talented, more capable, they work harder.

But many on the right see it as a dangerous lie that a society could or should be equal, and that the particular danger of that lie is that it blunts ambition. It pulls down those who would strive for excellence.


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And I certainly see in much of the tech right reaction in the last couple of years — in some parts of the new right and how they look at society — a sense that this happened. This is why so many on the right are rediscovering Nietzsche, who is there in your title — the originator of the last man idea.

That’s right. Well, first of all, let me just defend the idea of universal equality, because I do think — ultimately, if you look historically, it derives from a certain Christian interpretation that human beings are fundamentally equal. There’s a passage in Galatians that says:


There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

And that fundamental insight, I think, has a real meaning because there’s a core something — in one of my books I labeled it Factor X — that makes every single human being recognizably human.

So I think that there is something, really, genuinely, to be protected in this idea: That every one of us has a certain moral core that is of great value and needs to be protected by the system.

But it’s also true that it leads to a flattening of our societies, because liberalism is necessarily pluralistic. It’s a recognition of the fact that different people pursue different ends, that they have different visions of the good life.

The reason you created liberalism in the first place in the 17th century was the wars of religion in which people killed themselves over minor theological differences. And there was a deliberate lowering of the human horizon to mean survival — you know: The right to life is superior to the right to the good life.


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But this does take away something. People want to live the good life. They want to have higher aspirations.

If you look at modern America, we don’t ask that much of citizens. You obey the law, you pay your taxes, and that’s fine. You don’t have to sacrifice. You don’t have to take any grave risks on behalf of the society as a whole.

And I think that there is a part of the human psyche that actually wants that kind of life — that feels flattened if they don’t have the ability to, as the Declaration of Independence says, risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for a cause. That’s why I think you get these jokers on Jan. 6 dressed up in camo, pretending that they are these patriots who are nobly defending this way of life.

I think that you have that striving for that degree of sacrifice, and it doesn’t exist in our society, and so you invent a cause.

So why in the original essay do you end on saying the end of history will be a sad time?

Well, I think it would be sad precisely because of that lack of risk and of a vision of a noble future that you are willing to struggle on behalf of.


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I have another line in the original book that said that if you’re living in a society that is peaceful and democratic because of struggles of an earlier generation that were successful, then you’re going to struggle against peace and democracy because what you want to do is struggle for struggle’s sake.

And I think it’s that impulse that really drives a lot of extremist politics and disturbs the potential stability of a liberal society. It’s also a generational thing.

It’s clear that the people who want most desperately to live in a liberal society are people who live in dictatorships. There was genuine joy when Communism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.

You can see this in all the people who get on boats, desperate to get out of a poor, corrupt, destitute country and to get to America or to Europe. And so there is a real enthusiasm for liberalism on the part of people who don’t have it.

And I think that we do go in these generational cycles, where once you have it, you take it for granted, and increasingly you look for something further. And so you’re not living in a dictatorship any longer, so you think Brussels is the dictatorship that you have to struggle against.


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So there may be a rise and fall in the support for liberalism. But in the end, it’s going to be the most stable outcome that a human society can achieve.

You have a quote I often think about where you say:


We inhabitants of liberal democratic countries are by now so used to accounts of current events that reduce motivation to economic causes, so thoroughly bourgeois in our own perceptions, that we are frequently surprised to discover how totally noneconomic most political life is.

And I think that’s a bridge to something worth talking about this week. This is the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11.

I think the first time I remember a lot of people all of a sudden saying: Well, I guess the end of history wasn’t the end — it was actually Sept. 11. It was an attack on America from people coming out of an ideology that was fundamentally noneconomic, that was religious, that was very much concerned with recognition and humiliation — people willing to launch attacks in which they knew they themselves would die.

And one of the things that I think has come since then is that politics has been driven externally and internally by, I think, people whose motivations are much more about recognition.

And liberalism, as you say in the way this quote continues, does not:


… even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts.

So how do you think about that blind spot? And the way maybe Sept. 11 forced the resumption of recognizing that side of politics?


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Well, it certainly forced the recognition that there were other people around the world who were driven by very noneconomic factors. If you’re willing to be a suicide bomber, you obviously feel that there is a completely nonmaterial cause that you’re serving.

I don’t think that it directly challenged liberalism in the way that people thought at the time. I think that radical Islamism is not an ideology that’s going to ever conquer the world — certainly not at this point. It only takes root in relatively poor, disorganized societies that are Muslim to begin with.

So in that sense, it was different from Marxism and Leninism, which genuinely had a kind of universal appeal in many different societies. And so I think the direct threat, that here was an alternative to liberalism that was very powerful, was simply not true. And in fact, in the years since Sept. 11, it has kind of faded.

What I think Sept. 11 triggered was actually the Western reaction, or overreaction, to both Afghanistan and to Iraq, that then set in motion a lot of other, I think, very dangerous trends: militarization of foreign policy, the beginnings of a surveillance state in the United States because of the fear of terrorism, and also — because the wars never resulted in a good outcome in either Afghanistan or Iraq — a great cynicism about American power and the use of American power that led directly to the emergence of people like Donald Trump.

So you were a neoconservative at that time. You signed some of the early letters arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein.


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Then the Iraq war itself led you to break with neoconservatism broadly. Why?

Well, I don’t have a problem with the use of force to get rid of a dictator. I mean, we did that in World War II with Germany and Japan, and that was a very positive outcome.

What I had been spending much of the 1990s studying was actually the use of power in developing countries that were culturally quite different in Central America, in Southeast Asia, in other places. And I was very skeptical as to whether the United States itself had the staying power to really transform a very different society.

In my view, we tried to do this in the Philippines, in Nicaragua, in Vietnam and many other places. And the American public gets tired after about four or five years, and then they give up, and the society is left worse off.

I was very worried that the Bush administration would succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein — but then would be at a loss on how to actually create a stable country in its wake. And it was worse than I anticipated. They were even less prepared for that long-term effort when they did the invasion, and that was the real problem that I had with it.

One thing you talk about in the memoir that you’ve released is you describe that as a reckoning with how much of your own thinking can be generated by who you’re around, what social circles you’re moving in. Just tell me about that meta-realization.


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Yeah. Coming out of the Enlightenment, we have a certain view of human cognition that says: Well, human beings take in empirical information, they process it, they draw inferences, and that’s how they end up believing that certain things are true.

Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, wrote a very interesting book about what he called motivated reasoning. He said that’s actually not the way that human reason works — that we start with the conclusions that we want to believe in, and we use our enormous cognitive abilities to marshal the evidence to support those views. And I have to say that Enlightenment view looks less and less true when you watch the politics of the present day.

And it was true for me, as well. I moved in this neoconservative social circle. I wrote a lot for Commentary magazine and other publications in that genre. And my own sense of who I was was very much shaped by the approbation of people who were also in that movement.

That’s what made it hard to break with them — because it means not just changing policies, but it means changing friendships. And that’s what happened.

One thing you saw right after Sept. 11, and in that period of run-up to war in Iraq, particularly, was a huge number of neoconservatives and other cultural commentators celebrating the return of a thymotic, passionate politics — this view that America had become decadent and soft, full of metrosexuals and management consultants. And here, finally, we had a struggle again. A clash of civilizations, a reason we needed this manly Texas rancher as our president.


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Looking back, some of the rhetoric on this has a real quality of the absurd. But one thing I think you also see is that the Iraq war — the highly aggressive reaction America had for a long time afterward — has done very lasting damage to our politics. I see Trump as a direct descendant of it.

Right.

There is this constant belief, I think, on the part of some intellectuals, that violent struggle is an ennobling thing for societies. And yet I look at, certainly in more modern times, Vietnam and Iraq, and I see Israel right now, and I think the dangers of having your politics become profoundly oriented around violence, around reprisal, around struggle, around these more warlike virtues, is also very present and visible.

So I’m curious what lessons you take, not just about the question of: In what cases can America export democracy at the point of a gun? But what does it do to a polity when it sometimes gets the wish of people who think that we’ve grown soft and calculating? And all of a sudden, we have this return to the virtues or the vices of war?

Yeah, I actually talked about that in the last few chapters of “The End of History and the Last Man,” that there are certain thinkers, including Hegel, who felt that every now and then you had to have a war to recharge our batteries, so to speak, and to get us serious about things.

The trouble is that technology has moved on, and that’s just impossible. I mean, it’s not just nuclear weapons. You can’t have a little war with nuclear weapons. But conventional weapons have become so destructive that the negative impact of any kind of conflict right now is so potentially devastating that that’s simply not an alternative.


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And so I think for a successful society that wants to bleed off that megalothymia, you need to find peaceful outlets for that kind of ambition.

I want to talk about the politicians who follow this — Barack Obama and Trump. And maybe the place to start, because I think this is almost the more interesting question for liberalism, is Barack Obama.

How in the broad story of America do you now see the Obama presidency?

Well, I think it was well-intentioned, but in a certain way it wasn’t ambitious enough, and I think that’s probably what a lot of his progressive critics think. That he said very soothing things about a post-racial America — just his very presence as president was an affirmation of that — but it didn’t really change any of the underlying social and economic inequalities that were driving the racial divide in the United States.

I think another perfectly just criticism was that he was too bought into what we now call neoliberalism, with the kinds of economic advisers that he surrounded himself with who accepted this new form — or the new evolution — of capitalism that was producing oligarchs and very large wealth inequalities, which you could have addressed through antitrust and through different tax policies.

But under Obama, you saw this problem that I describe in a couple of my books as vitocracy — that we have a very complex constitutional system built around checks and balances.


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The essence of liberalism is the rule of law — that there should be rules that govern and limit executive power. But I think that the American government at that point had become so complex that it became really hard for anybody to do anything, either in a conservative direction, which frustrated Ronald Reagan, but also in a progressive direction.

Issues of climate change really require fairly strong, controversial decisions. You have clashing interests, and somebody has got to resolve those.

And so I think that the underlying institutional problems were really never addressed. Take the filibuster: It’s a completely nonconstitutional limitation of power. You could have gotten rid of the filibuster, but even that relatively low hurdle was not even attempted during that period.

The other thing that I would criticize Obama for was that, in the absence of the ability of the government to take on, frontally, many of these challenges — because it didn’t have the power to do it — you had the flourishing of a certain kind of identity politics in civil society. I don’t think that was the core of his presidency, but it certainly took hold in that period.

I do think it took hold in that period, but I think it took hold for a reason not unrelated to what you’re describing, which is: One of the ways I think about what has gone wrong in liberalism — because I think quite a bit has, and I think liberalism right now, even though I’m a liberal, has a real exhausted feeling to it.


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My one line on this is that, first, liberalism captured the institutions, and then the institutions captured liberalism. And what I mean by that is that liberals, in many cases, built America’s political institutions. Certainly, as liberalism became the reigning ideology of the universities, liberals became the people who staffed these institutions.

And so then liberals became the people who owned their failures, who governed with the horizons of what these institutions could achieve.

Right.

And if you are the defenders of a system that doesn’t work, if your moral ambition is boundaried by what failing institutions can achieve, you’re not going to have a very exciting political philosophy or movement.

Yes, you’re absolutely right about that. I think that at this point, for me, it would be absolutely wrong to think that we need to go back to the pre-2016 world. That world was one in which the government was basically hobbled from doing anything ambitious.

I think what propelled Trump to power was the belief that it was too constraining, and so he simply wanted to become a dictator — to violate all sorts of rules in order to get things done. But you need a little bit of that in order to do progressive things.


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It takes 10 years to get the permitting done to do a transmission line to get power from the middle of the country, where alternative energy is produced, to the West Coast where it’s consumed. And that’s the product of this proceduralism that was ushered in by people basically on the left.

So you’re right that they created this institutional straitjacket, and I think one of the big challenges is how to go back to a stronger government that can actually do good things.

Well, this proceduralism is, I think, a very biting tension right now. Because on the one hand, much of the critique that liberals, even the left, have of Donald Trump is the evisceration of procedure.

Right.

He wants to build a ballroom: He just bulldozes the East Wing.

And it’s true — he is eviscerating procedure. He is firing inspectors general. He is doing all kinds of things that, properly, you are not supposed to be able to do under our system of government.

It is very, very hard, I think, to become very spun up about violations of procedure and not then accidentally wrap yourself as a defender of procedure.


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So if procedure is both the problem, in the sense that it is being ignored, but also a little bit when you’re in power, the problem in the sense it is being overly followed — that doesn’t leave you a very comfortable place to stand.

I think if a Democrat is elected in 2028, they’re going to have a big conundrum, because they’re going to want to do things — especially if they’re a more progressive, left-leaning Democrat — and they’re going to find themselves up against these same procedures that had hobbled Obama and Joe Biden.

Biden wanted to have high-speed internet in rural areas, and he was completely unable to produce that in the three years after the passage of that act. So they’re going to want more authority, and they’re going to have to, in a way, look a little bit more like Trump.

I think the trick is going to be to fundamentally stay within the law, but to modify the law in ways that grant, essentially, more power to the government to do things. And I think that’s going to be a hard thing to sell, because the immediate charge is: Oh, you’re just acting like Donald Trump. But in fact, he was responding to a real problem — this real institutional problem — in the way that American government was operating.

You wrote a book in 2022 that I think introduces an interesting tension into this, which is called “Liberalism and Its Discontents.”


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And that book ends on a call for moderation, a sense of temperance, as the answer for what is ailing liberalism.

Here I ask you what you think of the Obama presidency, and what you fundamentally say to me is: It wasn’t radical enough. I ask you about American institutions and procedures, and you say liberals are going to have to be more like Donald Trump. They’ve got to get rid of the filibuster.

I’ve been arguing for ending the filibuster for a long time. I can tell you with certainty: People do not experience that as moderate. So I’m curious how you think about resolving these.

I guess, Ezra, in the end, you’re right that there is a contradiction there. The same vices that characterize bad dictatorial governments will also come to characterize good progressive ones.

People have been complaining about the Supreme Court overturning Humphrey’s Executor — this rule that allowed Congress to set terms under which a president could or could not fire an executive branch official in a multimember commission.


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Roosevelt wanted to fire this guy, William Humphrey, who had been a commissioner for the F.T.C., because he felt that guy was getting in the way of his New Deal, progressive agenda.

So the very same constraint on executive power that we’re now criticizing a conservative Supreme Court for overturning was something that progressives wanted. I just think that’s built into our politics — that the same set of institutions can either be good or bad depending on the goal that you set.

So you have to have a good set of ends that you’re trying to achieve, but you also need power.

Let’s talk about the man who stepped into some of the failures here, or some of the resentments here, which is Donald Trump.

As you mentioned, Trump appears a couple of times in “The End of History and the Last Man.” But when he emerges into politics, he emerges as something other than simply an icon of capitalist success. He emerges as somebody bringing a renewed nationalism, a renewed belief in borders, a belief in maybe more traditional hierarchies in America.

And over time, he emerges in your telling as somebody who is either proposing or modeling a different form of government — a different regime, not just a different leader.


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You’ve described him as repatrimonializing the government. What does that mean?

So let’s begin with another bit of psychology: It’s not natural to favor a well-qualified stranger over your relatives or your friends. It’s a very natural human desire to want to reward friends and family. So most states in human history were patrimonial, meaning they were run for the benefit of the rulers.

It was the ruler’s household, the friends and family of the ruler, who were given privileges and were able to enrich themselves — and the reason you went into politics was to enrich yourself. And I think that every society that has managed to create modern state institutions that are impersonal has had this constant backsliding temptation. Because the rulers themselves would like their friends and family to be favored.

Just one simple historical example: The Ottomans had one of the weirdest ways of getting to a modern state. They literally captured young boys in the Balkans, brought them to Istanbul and trained them to be administrators and generals.

But they couldn’t have families because they didn’t want nepotism, and they couldn’t resist the demand of the Janissaries to have children, to have families. So eventually, a sultan gave in, and you’re back in the whole nepotistic, patrimonial world that the Ottomans had briefly managed to get beyond.

We’re doing that right now. Instead of professional diplomats handling our Middle East policy, you get Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — friends and family of Donald Trump. And you’re paying the price for it. Because a modern state really does need meritocratic, impersonal people running the state apparatus.


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Are you surprised how easy it was for Trump to begin to build or rebuild that structure in a system that seemed just choked with rules and procedures to keep that from happening?

Yeah, I’m totally astounded that the American people don’t seem to really care that much. I mean, maybe in the fullness of time there will be some accountability. But yes, I would not have expected that the degree of corruption that exists in the current administration would have been tolerable to mainstream Republicans, for example.

When Trump roared back in the 2024 election, much more so than in 2016, he ran and assembled a coalition as a candidate of courage and thymos and passions. This really took hold after the nearly successful assassination attempt, with his bloodied fist in the air. You saw a rallying around him as an almost mythic, man-of-history figure.

I think a lot of that has drained out of the system now, as he seems a little bit more ridiculous, dangerous, campy — spending his time on the ballroom.

Yeah.

But is there something to be learned or seen about what at least some people wanted to see in him? What they thought he might represent that felt to them like it was missing?


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Well, I think it’s all about power. I think that many of Trump’s defenders currently would say that the Democrats only produced weak leaders, and we want a strong leader. They’ll excuse the corruption by saying: Well, OK, maybe you’re getting corruption, but that’s the price you have to pay to have somebody who really wanted to close the border and was able to do that.

And they’ll look past all of the other institutional depredations that have happened under him, because they want that strength. It’s something that I wouldn’t have expected in American politics, because our system is really designed to guard against that kind of leader.

There’s a famous letter from Alexander Hamilton that anticipates Trump perfectly. He said: There will be a point in American politics where some person with great oratorical skills will come and rally people again in favor of his own personal power. And that was part of the reason they designed this complex constitutional system.

By the way, I’m not completely pessimistic. I think our institutions actually are going to hold at the end of this story. But we’re being taken for a very dangerous ride in the meantime.

You wrote — I forget when they actually came out — but these two books about the origins of modern political states. The central question in those books was: How do you get to Denmark?


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How do you get from more rudimentary forms of human organization to the advanced, efficient, fair, neutral state both metaphorically and literally represented by Denmark.

I remember reading those books at the time and thinking that statement made sense. And as I was thinking about them again for this conversation, some part of me, when I framed the question: How do you get to Denmark? It no longer felt like the right question. That Denmark does not feel like the future.

I mean, one: Europe itself does not seem all that stable. You just saw the Alternative for Germany Party posting a huge result in a regional German election. You have far-right populism rising all across the continent. But also, there’s the generalized sense that Europe is falling behind, that it is itself being somewhat choked by rules and procedures, that China is roaring forward.

If you were writing those books today — if you were thinking about the formations of states and the pathway they’re traveling — do you still see Denmark as a goal?

No, absolutely. I mean, the reason I liked Denmark was not for the same reason as Bernie Sanders. It’s not because it’s got this huge welfare state. It’s because it’s run competently. And I just don’t see any period in human history in which competence in state administration is not a virtue. And it’s going to be a virtue if your goal is to restrict immigration.


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It’s interesting. Danish politics has been more stable than ours, but they have really closed off immigration, despite the fact that there’s still a coalition with social democrats in it.

And some people — my colleague David Leonhardt, among others — have argued that’s why their politics have been more stable. That they basically merged liberalism with a more closed-border nationalism.

Yeah. But the thing is that they could actually do it competently, and they could actually achieve those goals.

So again, I just don’t see any circumstance in which having a competent, modern public administration isn’t going to be an advantage. That’s how countries get rich in the first place, and that’s how they manage the different crises that hit them at later points, like pandemics and financial crises. If we didn’t have a really competent set of financial managers in 2008, I think we would have been in big trouble.

I’m not saying that we don’t want competent administration. We do. And I’m not saying that isn’t very hard to achieve. It is.


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But I want to try to push you toward the question I’m asking here, which is — again, with your more thymotic hat on — I think the conversation around Europe has changed a lot in the past decade, or two decades. We’ve gone from — I remember the spate of books in the early 2000s about whether the European Union was the future, and now Europe seems very left behind and a lot less stable politically.

And you have this sort of strange competition between an America that is operating in a reckless, chaotic, high-risk way and a China that is showing incredible capacity to build a 21st-century manufacturing and innovation juggernaut that is operating under a much more authoritarian form of politics. It takes risks, but in a very calculated way.

And somehow, the idea that what you’re trying to do is get to where Europe is — I mean, Europe feels a little bit like it’s getting left behind.

No, no. I am not trying to get to where Europe is. If you’re talking about over-procedural, excessive proceduralism, that’s Europe.

Basically, their bureaucrats make so many rules. You have member-state level rules, and then you’ve got the whole Brussels bureaucracy. And anybody operating in Europe will tell you that complying with this mountain of rules that they establish is why they don’t have a big tech industry.


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For example, one of the things that former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi, and countless other reformers, have recommended is: Genuinely get a single market. That was the whole point of the European Community. You can’t have large-scale companies in Europe because every one of the 27 member states has all these niggling little rules. So they’re not there. They’re not a model.

So it’s very hard to sell across the countries in the way it’s very easy to sell in America.

Yeah. And for that reason, they have put limits on their own economic productivity by the fact that they don’t have competent administration that could actually make a uniform playing field for European companies.

OK, but I want to stop here, because I want you to try to resolve this tension more for me.

I remember Tyler Cowen, the economist, saying something of this nature, where he said: Look, you meet people who work in the government in Europe, and on average they are competent, they are cultured, they can say more to you about literature and books and art than the person in the same position in America. And yet the outcomes are not that good — that Europe is struggling.

Why? What is it about these competent governments that is not leading to more competent governance?

Well, that indicates they’re actually not so competent. I don’t think competence is measured by the number of rules that you pile up. At some point, I think competent governments have to cut back on those rules and rely on the common sense and the discretionary judgment of the people running those systems.

So I don’t think that it’s the case that they are actually competent. There’s a point at which you’re trapped in an institutional system that sees legitimacy lying in further rule making. I think legitimacy really comes from outcomes, and they’re at a point where they’re not getting outcomes because they’re choked by this rule-compliance mentality that they’ve developed.


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One thing that I think is shifting the politics of America and Europe simultaneously — China is a little bit of a different case here — is that the platforms on which we politically communicate and the platforms in which we shape what we see politically have changed.

We’ve moved from people maybe read the newspaper in the morning, or they watch some nightly news show, to this much more anarchic, algorithmic, social — and beyond social — media environment. I never think it’s an accident that the populist right began to surge across the world at the time that political communication went algorithmic.

I’m curious how you see this in terms of some of these theories, and particularly the way that social media is a constant measuring of recognition: Are you seeing me? Are you liking me?

And the politicians get this constant feedback. It shifts how they act, how they think, how they generate a sense of how they’re doing.

Where does this fit in, in some of your theories of political orders and the human soul?

Well, ever since 2016, we’ve been having this prolonged debate about where all this populism is coming from, and everybody gives this list of seven or eight things: Economic inequality, globalization, incompetent leadership. And then they say at the end: and also, social media.


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I actually think that technology, exemplified by social media, is really much more important than most of the other explanations — that you can’t explain the timing for the rise of populism — and you can’t explain the particular nature that it has taken on — without social media.

For example, a lot of what it means to be a conservative these days — a populist conservative — is to believe in conspiracy theories. And it is much easier to promulgate — in fact, there are incentives for promulgating conspiracy theories on a completely unregulated internet.

The way you get followers, if you’re an internet influencer, is to say more and more outrageous things. Your credibility is not measured by whether you actually have done the fact-checking and have these institutional safeguards for the reliability of your information. It’s how many likes you get. And I think it has absolutely been at the core of a lot of the radicalization of the politics of countries that have gone online in that period.

So something that has been lurking in our conversation is China. You had said at the beginning that the end of history was about this question of: Would we come up with ways of organizing a complex society that was more successful, more desirable, than America?

I’ve seen you in more recent comments and interviews begin to grapple with the possibility that China represents a model that actually is working and could appeal on a wider scale. I think you said something like: We’re a third of the way to that actually being the more successful model.


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So tell me what you think China both represents as a form of political organization — where it differs from liberal democracy — and what you then think that means for it as a possible model of what other countries and societies are going to try.

Sure. Well, I think a liberal democracy is based on having a competent state that is limited both by rule of law and by elections.

And China has the competent state — very competent — but it isn’t limited by either rule of law or elections. Therefore, the quality of governance there depends entirely on the quality of rulers.

One of the things about Chinese civilization is that Confucianism embodies bureaucracy as one of its foundational cultural characteristics: Educated people should be the ones who rule, and to this present day, that’s where Chinese party cadres are recruited from. They’re the best and brightest in society, so they’ve got this tremendously competent state.

It’s not just recently. I’ve thought all along that this is the only alternative political and social system that has a chance of being competitive with liberal democracy, precisely because they can deal with modern technology. They can be at the forefront of technology and, as a result, of economic growth.


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The question is: Is this a sustainable model? And I think that there are reasons to still regard that as an open question, because their economy is based on doubling down on this export-driven model that made them rich in the first place.

That’s not a sustainable model. They’ve got big problems in their property market. They’re going to have huge problems with unemployment. Youth unemployment there is already at extraordinarily high levels. And so I don’t think you can take the sustainability of either their economic or political systems for granted.

The reason I started saying these things about China versus the United States is because the American model has deteriorated.

Right. Yeah, I’m not sure you can take the sustainability of our model for granted any longer.

No, absolutely right. It seems to me we’ve got an administration that is doing everything it can think of to weaken the United States vis-à-vis China: attacking the scientific establishment, attacking allies, being completely capricious and arbitrary in economic policy.

I mean, this is not something that a competent state does.

But maybe, to unite two things we were just talking about in the last couple of minutes: When people talk about our model, they tend to mean in their head, whether it’s America or Europe, a particular form of governance. But something that you gestured at a few times there is that form of governance took hold and flourished in a particular historical context — the postwar context — and a particular technological context.


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The particular way we communicated. It was a period of newspapers and radio and TV.

And I think one of the open questions about us is whether or not these contingencies were fundamental. Whether or not there was something in the way a particular form of government connected to a particular moment in communications technology — a certain level of globalization.

And the question that’s coming, or maybe is already here, is how all of these models operate in a different, particularly technological era — how they adapt or don’t adapt to social and algorithmic media, how they adapt or don’t adapt to A.I., how they adapt or don’t adapt to globalization.

But I’m curious how you bring those things into your framework?

Oh, no — look, I’ve never said that liberal democracy was the best system under all possible technological conditions. I think, in fact, the nature of the technological horizon determines the kind of politics you can have, and I think for that reason, A.I. is going to be very threatening to our democratic system.

I wrote a book in the early 2000s, actually, about biotechnology, where I was arguing that if you could actually — through something like CRISPR-Cas9 — if you could modify the human gene line to modify human nature, you would attack some of the basic premises of modern liberalism. Because you could create different classes of human beings in a way that didn’t exist before.

And now you can combine the biotech with the A.I. and produce these really very science-fiction-like, but entirely conceivable, outcomes that are going to be completely toxic to the maintenance of the kind of egalitarian society that we’ve seen.


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We’ve already seen this extraordinary concentration of wealth in the technology sector, and that by itself is also something that is very difficult for a democracy to deal with. So, yeah, I think that it’s all contingent on the nature of technology at any given point in time.

One way to look at a political system is that it is a collective technology for absorbing and responding to information, and it works better or worse depending on how well it’s able to do that. And I think increasingly, we’re seeing that the way our system is absorbing and responding to information is degrading.

A.I. is very much a system for absorbing, collecting, aggregating and then responding or reacting to information. And I’ve not seen any particularly convincing descriptions of how you might integrate that capacity more fundamentally into a political system.

But it’s a little bit hard for me to imagine there won’t be more profound experimentations around that. That maybe the set of systems we can imagine operating — which were more bound by the way human intelligence worked than the speed of human beings working with each other — is not the boundary.

And the world is going to be opening to stranger things in the next 10 or 20 years than were imagined in our 20th-century political science, if not always in our 20th-century science fiction.


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Yeah. Well, I think that modern government is going to have to rely on A.I. simply to process information. Because there’s too much of it out there, and it’s too hard for human beings to absorb all of the inputs that they need to.

I think the real danger is in agentic A.I., where human beings delegate certain powers to machines that can then operate autonomously. It’s very interesting: At the frontier of computer science these days, they’re more like zoologists who have just discovered a new species, and they’re trying to observe how it behaves under different conditions. But they don’t really know what’s happening on the inside of the machine, even though they’re the ones who built it.

And they’re trying to make that new creature more powerful as fast as they possibly can. Even though they don’t know what that will do.

Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of a crazy race that’s going on right now.

I think that’s really the danger — this likelihood that we will over-delegate, and then the machine will develop values that may not really align with the ones that the creators hoped it would.

I mean, we already had this Hugging Face incident a couple of weeks ago, where a machine did something that was completely supposed to be off-limits. And that’s just the beginning, I think, of more stuff like that to come.


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This is a point others have made, but the fear was always that the A.I.s would take agency from us. What’s obviously happening is we are handing that agency over as fast as we possibly can.

I have talked with people at these labs working on self-improvement. They don’t even necessarily think self-improvement is a good idea. But even if it’s not a good idea, if the other labs or the other countries are going to do it, they want to get there first.

And this is a place where I wonder about your perspective: So much of what we can or can’t do in terms of regulating A.I. is dependent on these, at least perceived, race dynamics between the U.S. and China, between firms and other firms.

This doesn’t feel to me like a problem without human precedent, but it is a problem coming at a time when the government of the U.S. is pretty erratic, and our confidence in our governing capacities is pretty low, where China is trying to catch up with us, where there’s a lot of enmity between the two countries.

I’m curious how you look at this more international-relations-based aspect of it?

Well, just on a domestic level, the state capacity problem comes back because you can’t regulate this technology if you don’t have people in the government who understand it, at least at a level that they can really get a hold of what’s going on and put some controls in place.


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On the international question, obviously, there’s a geopolitics of A.I. that’s driving everybody forward — that they’re too worried about what China is going to do. I think some of that worry is a little bit misplaced because as far as I see it, the Chinese Communist Party is not a bunch of libertarians who say: Oh, great technology. Let’s just let it rip. We’re not going to try to control it.

They’re going to try to control it. If you create a model that is really good at breaking into the most classified computers your government runs, they’re not going to want to see that get out. They’re not going to want to have Chinese citizens having that capability.

So I’m not sure that there’s no basis on which you couldn’t get some ground rules laid down, despite the competition between the United States and China, that put some limits on this. And I think it’s going to be absolutely necessary, because even a big, powerful country like the United States can’t do this simply on its own.

One thing I’ve heard people worry about is whether or not — even if you could imagine a deal, whether or not that kind of deal would be verifiable, trustworthy.

People will say: I agree that China is not going to want a self-improving model able to break into classified computers running wild.


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But at the same time, they’ll say: But China is probably more likely than we are, given the way they can wall off things from their media, etc., to say: That seems like a quite powerful weapon to have. Let’s actually bring the very best scientists into the government. Let’s give them the resources they really need, and let’s have them create something on our behalf that we can use the way we want to use it.

So to the extent this is a powerful weapon, a state that is good at creating things is going to try to create that weapon internally, and so you can’t trust the deal. You have to simply act as if the other partner is untrustworthy. Do you buy that?

I’m afraid that a lot of that logic is inevitable.

Yeah, I do not know whether it’s possible to control this technology. Even a powerful state like China is going to have trouble doing that, and when you have a globally competitive world, there may be certain things that you can’t really get the capacity to deal with.

So yeah, maybe it’s going to be the end of us all.

I want to avoid ending there on whether the A.I.s will kill us all. So I’m curious, given what you’ve seen in the politics of this era, it does not look like Trumpism is a dominant competitor ideology. I don’t think that repatrimonolizing the government is proving to be popular, even if it is not maybe as unpopular as one might have imagined.

So what do you see as an answer to some of these trends?

Well, I think that’s pretty simple. In countries where you can still have free and fair elections, you win elections because that’s the route to political power.


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The model for this was really the Hungarian election last April, where Viktor Orban had been in power for 16 years. He had really turned Hungary into an authoritarian country in the midst of the European Union. But Peter Magyar had the political skill to organize a very broad coalition — to not just squeak out a narrow victory but a massive victory that was a very great repudiation of Orbanism.

I think America has a chance of doing something similar, probably not as decisive. But certainly it could send a very powerful message in the midterm elections that are coming up in November. And if the polls are to be believed, it could really take place.

What is the goal of liberalism? And here I don’t mean classical liberalism and its long history. I mean American liberals — the left-of-center, not quite socialist part of the Democratic Party. What is its moral goal at this point? In what way does it actually want to change society?

I think people look at Trump, and they know what he wants to do. I think they look at Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and they get a sense of where they feel the problem really is.

I’m not sure they could answer that well for your generic mainstream liberal Democrat.

Well, I don’t pretend to speak on behalf of that category of people. I can tell you what my vision of it would be. It really has to do with this whole question that I’ve been quite preoccupied with, which is state capacity.


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I would like to see a government that can actually set generally accepted, not radical, goals — universal health care, building high-speed rail, doing all of these things — and actually being able to accomplish it in a reasonable amount of time.

I got preoccupied with NASA recently because, between John F. Kennedy’s announcement that they were going to go to the moon in 1961 and actually landing on the moon in 1969, was only eight years.

In the 2000s, George W. Bush announced that they were going to go back to the moon. That’s when the whole Artemis program got started. He said they were going to do it by 2015. Here it is, 2026, they finally got a rocket to go around the moon. But it didn’t actually land on the moon, and we’ll be lucky to land another human being there by 2030.

And so something has gone wrong in the ability of the American state to execute on the very good intentions that it announces. And I guess maybe this isn’t a moral vision, but it’s certainly a vision for a different kind of politics.

I would like to see an America that can announce a goal and actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time, at a reasonable cost.


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Well, this is a very core argument of my co-authored book “Abundance,” so I’m thrilled to hear you say some of this. [Laughs.]

I think one thing that struck me about the reaction to “Abundance” and its argument for a much stronger state, was that many people came back to me and said: Well, what is the vision of the good life here? Is it just more stuff?

And I would say: No, no. We want more homes, we want more clean energy, we want more public infrastructure, we want more medical breakthroughs so we can have cures. These are all things that have already been identified as goals. This is what liberalism is already trying to achieve, and I’m saying it should be able to achieve it.

But after hearing again and again about the need for a vision of the good — The Point, which is a philosophical magazine, devoted a whole issue to liberalism and its vision of the good — I began to take more seriously that people felt something was absent and lacking.

The way I take some of the thymotic arguments you’re making in “The End of History and the Last Man” and apply them to modernity is not just that people want to fight in wars. I don’t think most people want to fight in wars. I don’t think most right wingers want to fight in wars. I think this is cosplay.


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We do have wars, and they’re horrible — society is not excited about having a new draft in order to send its young men and women to fight, for instance.

What I do think, though, is that people want to believe they are engaged in some morally ambitious project to change the world in which they live. That is not all people want from politics. Many people just want lower prices.

But there is a level of politics that has an intense energy within it, and that any movement that cannot operate on both — you can have a politics that is all energy but can’t lower prices or achieve anything. Maybe you’d say that’s Donald Trump right now. And that doesn’t work when you try it.

But politics is driven by the people in it with a kind of energy to change things fundamentally. And so if you don’t have some answer for them — some answer for the moral crusade that they are involved in, and that beats in your own heart, too — I think your politics is not going to be successful, particularly in the modern attentional environment where energy and enthusiasm and outrage and inspiration are the coin of the realm.

I’m not so sure that you can’t do that in a liberal society. I mean, if you think about John F. Kennedy himself ——


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Oh, I think you can. I just think you need a liberalism that wants it.

Well, yeah. I mean, it seems to me there are a lot of challenges out there that are achievable within the context of a real liberalism.

I mean, for example, the current distribution of wealth and power in the United States is something that could be changed. You don’t have to have these tech oligarchs running around, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to election campaigns so they can get outcomes favorable to themselves.

Having a state that can actually operate in this very difficult and very threatening technological environment is a plenty ambitious goal. I think it’s just a matter of articulating to people why it’s necessary and how it’s achievable, just in the government being able to master and control A.I. rather than the technology controlling and mastering the government. I mean, that’s a huge challenge that ——

And for that matter, human beings.

Yeah. Right.

So then always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

The first two are ones you’re doubtless familiar with. One is Jennifer Pahlka’s “Recoding America.” I think she is the most insightful, in a way, critic of what’s wrong with the American bureaucracy, but she does it from a sympathetic standpoint. She understands why bureaucracy and government are necessary and how it could actually be reformed to do things better.


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The second one is Marc J. Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works,” where he puts everything in a bigger historical context — a swing between Jeffersonianism, where power is pushed down as far as possible to the people, and a Hamiltonian vision where the government itself is the engine of change. And he argues that we’ve been in a Jeffersonian period ever since the 1960s, and we need to switch to a more Hamiltonian perspective.

The final one was written by an old friend of mine, Robert Wright — “The God Test.” He’s been covering artificial intelligence really since the 1980s. He interviewed Geoffrey Hinton way back then. He’s got the best explanation of how L.L.M.s work for a layperson.

It’s encased in an, ultimately, extremely optimistic, almost metaphysical theory about the progress not just that humans have made but all the way from single cell to multicell to different forms of animal life. But it’s an argument for seeing a broader pattern in the human story that artificial intelligence actually plays a positive role in.

Francis Fukuyama, thank you very much.

Thank you, Ezra.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
More conversations on the state of liberalism

Opinion | Ezra Klein and Marie Cascione
Why Politics Has Become So Frenzied
Sept. 8, 2026

Opinion | Ezra Klein and Annie Galvin
This Is Why People Hate the Government
Aug. 25, 2026

Opinion | Ezra Klein and Jack McCordick
The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism
May 5, 2026


This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones, Aman Sahota and Gautam Sirkishan. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Kristen Williamson, Dani Dillon and Brandon Belk-Yee. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.


Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” and the author of “Why We’re Polarized” and, with Derek Thompson, “Abundance.” Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox. Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.


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중동에 대한 제국주의적 공격 • International Socialism

Interview with Alex Callinicos: the imperial assault on the Middle East • International Socialism

Interview with Alex Callinicos: the imperial assault on the Middle East

Posted on 8th October 2006

Ardeshir Mehrdad

The present interview with Alex Callinicos was performed over several weeks by email spanning late July to mid September. The early questions took place at the start of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. The last five questions were answered in one go in mid September. Because of the lengthiness of the interview it was not possible to pose any further questions arising out of these answers

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Ardeshir Mehrdad: Can we start with the political context. In general terms, how would you describe the current political situation in the Middle East?

Alex Callinicos: The current situation—not only but especially in the Middle East—is defined by the imperialist offensive mounted by the United States and its closest allies (notably Israel and Britain) since 11 September 2001. Carried out under the slogan of the ‘war on terrorism’ the real aim of this offensive is to perpetuate the global domination of US capitalism (hence the title of the neocon ‘Project for the New American Century’). The Middle East – and more generally Western Asia (what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls the ‘the global Balkans’) – is the privileged site of this struggle, both because of its strategic and economic significance and because of the setbacks that the US and its allies have suffered, notably thanks to the effects of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 and of Israel’s disastrous 1982 Lebanon War.

This imperialist offensive suffers three main problems. First and most fundamental, it has evoked powerful resistance, above all in Iraq itself, where the US seems to be bogged down in an unwinnable counter-insurgency war. We now see Israel too beginning to face similar difficulties thanks to Hezbollah’s very effective defence against the Israel Defence Force’s assault on Lebanon. Secondly, compared to the 1991 Gulf War, the current ‘war on terrorism’ lacks international legitimacy thanks to the Bush administration’s unilateralism and its contempt for human rights (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram …). Some commentators, for example Giovanni Arrighi, argue that we are witnessing a broader crisis of US hegemony.

Thirdly, the ideological justification of the imperialist offensive – what Condoleezza Rice calls ‘the birth of a New Middle East’ with the spread of liberal democracy – is rebounding on its authors. This is partly because when given the chance to vote people seem to be backing radical Islamists such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, by giving legitimacy to democratic demands the US threatens to undermine its closest Arab allies, for example, the Saudi autocracy and the Mubarak dynasty in Egypt. Finally, of course, by allowing Israel to destroy Lebanon, Washington is destroying the one clear success for its democracy agenda in the region, the so-called ‘cedar revolution’ thanks to which the US and France forced Syria to pull out of Lebanon.