The End of Thinking: 1989–___?

Communism, and the political left in general, had served as a modest constraint on capitalism, by harping on its weaknesses. But as the communist regimes of Eastern Europe began to collapse in 1989, this constraint also collapsed. After all, if governments under communism proved bad, then surely all governments themselves had to be constrained. “Capitalism has triumphed!” declared Western pundits in 1989. They were wrong—dead wrong.

The Berlin Wall was still standing when an article in the American magazine National Interest, under the title “The End of History?” (Fukuyama 1989—without the question mark in his 1992 book), declared capitalism to be not only the best system then, or even the best system ever, but the best system forever.

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. (p. 1)

Karl Marx’s communism was declared dead, so long live Adam Smith’s free markets, at least as depicted in one passage of his 1776 book about an “invisible hand” that drives butchers, brewers, and bakers—free men in the marketplace—to serve society by serving themselves. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Mankind (for all of this was about that “economic man”) had reached perfection, thanks to relentless greed. The floodgates to private power were now wide open.

Never mind that by 1989 Americans were receiving much of their meat, beer, and bread from giant corporations with paramount positions in their marketplaces. Never mind, too, that these corporations were able to exert significant influence over the lives of the many people who butchered, brewed, and baked for them, as well as over these people’s governments. Adam Smith’s world may have long since passed, but not the quaint belief in this one passage of his. It was not history that had ended but thinking, as all we economic men and women were spared the burden of contemplating our future.

Even by the standards of neoconservative America, Fukuyama’s arrogance was monumental. But he was not alone. The moderate economist Paul Krugman, winner of one of those Bank of Sweden Prizes in Economic Sciences (erroneously called Nobel), concurred under the subheading of a Fortune magazine article in 2000 that read, “Economic man is free at last”: “both the American economy and the free-market system it epitomizes seem everywhere triumphant…. [A]ny future claims about a system that trumps the free market are going to face severe skepticism.” Krugman added, all too prophetically:

[P]olicy makers and the public are now willing … to stick with markets even when they misbehave…. [B]asically companies will be allowed to make money as best they can in the belief that the invisible hand will direct them to more or less the right place.

What both Krugman and Fukuyama failed to address is a simple question posed later by John Kay, an economist who kept thinking, “Did Marxism fail because it was the wrong grand design, or because all grand designs for economic systems are misconceived?” (2003: 192). Put differently, might we social people be grander than economic theory?

This book challenges the dogma that sees all of us driven to compete, collect, and consume our way to neurotic oblivion. That some of us choose to do so is indisputable. That many of us doing so poses a threat to our collective survival has likewise become indisputable. In place of this dogma, this book offers an integrating framework, built on our social, political, and economic predispositions, to consider how to restore balance in society.