American Exception
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Episode 73: Deep Scholasticism
🕑 Added 2022-09-18 18:31:09 +0000 UTCAaron and Ben Norton of Multipolarista discuss Establishment scholar Francis Fukuyama and his strange intervention into deep state discourse.
I am hoping that Fukuyama is just building up to addressing the deep state construct in future installments because he does mention some important aspects of the emergence of the state, even as he leaves out many other angles:
Valuing the Deep State, Part I
Valuing the Deep State Part II: The Origin of States
Special thanks Dana Chavarria for the sound engineering!
Music: “Nine Times” by Mock Orange
Comments
Cultus Daemon
I agree that deep scholasticism is a great term for this. Coincidentally, I just encountered this term in its original medieval context in a book about the history of demonology.
Aaron Good
I don't have high hopes. He did eventually disavow neoconservatism and argue that the US needed to include social democratic perspectives in discourse and policy-making. But like Huntington, he is an Establishment guy to the core. That said, he will hopefully actually deal with some of the scholarship on the deep state just as a matter of academic rigor--for appearance's sake if nothing else. Assuming that the does, his elisions and defaults will be interesting to parse.
Nicholas Levis
Excellent discussion. But I doubt there is a mystery that Part III of the series might illuminate. Fukuyama is a cabinet-level sophist, an opportunist ideologue, a confusionist (the practice of labeling everything the wrong way and making even the simple incomprehensible, leaving only crackpot realism). I expect his invocation of "deep state" will not lead to an analytic intervention in how the actual deep state should be understood. It's no more than a riposte to Trump's use of "deep state" (his definition: the gangsters opposing my own wing of the mob), or Bannon's reference to the regulatory-administrative state, the permanent bureaucracy. They say state bad, Fukuyama say state good, therefore neoliberal management and imperialism good. If it's got to be a revived technocratic surveillance-heavy Keynesianism to shut up the rabble, okay, end of story.
Wiley Michelle B
I like the new music :) So informative as always - Thank you both!
Aaron Good
Thanks!
RT Happe
A scholastic footnote: Fukuyama's end of history updates Alexandre Kojève's political reading of Hegel's philosophy of history by then current events, the demise of the Soviet Union. The Russian émigré philosopher Kojève (who acquainted his French contemporaries with Hegel) had a second career as Brussels bureaucrat with a major impact on the early European Union, by the way.
Aaron Good
Critiques of these two blog posts? Or of his book?
William
Read most of FF's two part history of.. political formation? It kind of fell apart for me when he got to about the cold war era. Are there critiques of this work? I think the first book covered political formation from early humans to 1789 (or whenever the French revolution was)
Ellen Harold
Great show!
Aaron Good
Maybe it seems so in the West, but the Chinese Communist Party would likely dispute that...
NYCM&AHole
All this sweet sweet content on a day I’m stuck in the office
Angleton
In a way Francis Fukuyama is correct the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic notion history did end in 1991. Sure historical events do happen but the changing the modes of production seems to have stopped with Liberal Democracy and Capitalism.
