Fukuyama: Leaving Out the Educated Class

but they are the guys that made the modern era

I am reaching the end of Francis Fukuyama’s two volume epic, The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, and I have a question. Whatever happened to the educated class?

For instance, Fukuyama defines the modern state as:

1. The State (sovereign, army, and bureaucracy)

2. Rule of Law

3. Democratic Accountability

As La Wik says, he means that “in an ideal system, a powerful and efficient state is kept in check by the people, and by the law, which can bind the state itself.”

But who is “the people” and who is “the law” and who is “the state?”

So his Story So Far — in Chapter 28 of Political Order and Political Decay — proposes that accountability occurred because of the need for kings to get their tax money through the landed gentry. And the English Civil War was a fight between the king and the gentry. So, back in the day, the gentry were political actors.

But whatabout the American Revolution and the French Revolution? I’d say that the key novelty was the new educated class that was writing books and pamphlets and developing a critique of the ancien régime. Without the educated class, I’d say, you don’t have a revolution, baby.

Whatabout the abortive revolutions of 1848? Fukuyama almost admits it:

The decade of the 1840s saw the organization of what today we would call “civil society” throughout continental Europe… It was these middle-class groups, legal and illegal, that would spearhead the Revolution of 1848.

But the ideas of 1848! Whatabout all the Marxes and Young Hegelians and whatnot arguing in coffee shops all over Europe? The idea of property rights and the franchise didn’t come out of nowhere. They were developed by the educated class, intellectuals and writers, and part of what they wanted was to be the chaps strutting and fretting their hour upon the political stage.

When Louis Napoleon came to power in a coup, he “felt he had to legitimate his rule by staging a plebiscite”. Plebiscite? What ruler in 1700 would have done such a thing? Louis Napoleon did it because the coffee-shop guys had said that elections legitimate rulers.

In the 19th century whose idea was it to have universal education? Chaps like Horace Mann — father of the US “common school” — went to Germany to find out how to do it. OK, so Frederick the Great was the father of German education, but he was an intellectual that liked to chat with Voltaire.

And labor rights and pensions and welfare didn’t come from nowhere. They were developed by Marxists and Social Democrats and Fabians who were all from the educated class of intellectuals.

When FDR announced Social Security in 1935 he got it from his Brain Trust. When LBJ announced the Great Society he didn’t get the idea from the workers; he got it from liberal intellectuals.

But Fukuyama occasionally flirts with the truth. In Chapter 32 he allows that

During the Progressive Era and New Deal, reformers tried to construct a European-style administrative state.

Oh really! And who might those “reformers” be? Noted industrialists? Union workers? Middle-class businessmen? Of course not. They were educated-class intellectuals, pals of William James, philosopher, Herbert Croly, political philosopher and journalist, John Dewey, philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.

So let’s go back to Fukuyama’s definitions of the modern state and critique them.

The State (sovereign, army, and bureaucracy) Typically, your president comes from the intellectual class, and the bureaucracy — hello DEI — gets all its ideas from the intellectuals.

Rule of Law The educated class today owns the law, the lawyers, the law schools and the NGOs that use the legal system to impose their will upon the country.

Democratic Accountability Don’t think you can protest elections and don’t think that your populist reformer will get a fair shake from the educated class. And it’s the educated class that defines what is moderate, sensible politics and what is extremism, racist-sexist-homophobic far-right extremism, and disinformation.

Hey, it’s OK. Francis Fukuyama is a member of the intellectual class and so, like a fish, he doesn’t notice the intellectual water he swims in by choice, and the rest of us are forced to swim in, or else.

But the problem is that he and everyone like him have no idea how the ideas that have been pressed upon us over the last hundred years have not really been discussed and agreed upon.

Of course not. Politics is war upon the enemy, and for at least the last 50 years, US politics has been a war on the ordinary middle class. But the educated class has No Idea. Because, darling, nobody we know has a problem with the current regime.