Social Evolution and Philosophies of History
That History Doesn’t Have an End Doesn’t Mean that Anything Goes
In his recent book The New Leviathans,[1] John Gray argues against the kind of philosophies of history developed by liberal authors such as Francis Fukuyama.[2] As it is well-known, Fukuyama contends that the fall of Soviet communism marks the “end of History,” in the sense that there is nothing beyond the principles and institutions of liberal democracy. Small-h-history will not end because conflicts will never disappear and the implementation of the principles of liberal democracy will continue to be a source of disagreement and imperfections. But capital-H-history is meant to stop because humans will cease to argue about ideologies and principles that may replace liberal democracy. Gray comments:[3]
“Here Fukuyama departs from the most important discovery in modern science. As understood by Charles Darwin, evolution has no destination. Humankind is not the endpoint of natural selection, which may well result in its extinction. As Darwin wrote in his autobiography, ‘There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course of which the wind blows.’…
If there is evolution in society it is like Darwin’s wind. Natural selection of genes is a purposeless process that is going nowhere. Theories of social evolution, on the other hand, invariably come with a destination, which almost always embodies the values of the theorist… For Marx, who disliked Darwin’s theory but believed society does evolve, it was communism. For Fukuyama, it was democratic capitalism… There is no arc of history, short or long.
Once such fanciful notions are set aside, there is no reason to expect one mode of governance to displace all others. There will be monarchies and republics, nations and empires, tyrannies and theocracies, along with many mixed regimes and stateless zones where there is no government at all…
The seeming triumph of liberalism and the free market was not an evolutionary trend but a political experiment, which has run its course. The result has been to empower regimes in which market forces are instruments of the state.”
I’ve quoted at length because there are many interesting claims, some of them dubious. Let me mention quickly the fact that it is a somehow unfair criticism of Fukuyama who is actually far more prudent in his prediction than critics, including Gray, tend to acknowledge. Fukuyama does indeed identify two general mechanisms steering history toward capitalism and liberal democracy. On the one hand, natural sciences give a great advantage to civilizations able to master technology and encourage innovations. On the other hand, the Hegelian mechanism of recognition pushes “slaves” to become the equal of “masters”. The former mechanism favors the emergence and dominance of capitalist economies. The latter supports the evolution of democratic equality and freedom. However, Fukuyama also notes that – especially with respect to the second mechanism – there is no certainty that the “last man” of democratic societies will prevail, as counter tendencies may also favor the return of some forms of authoritarian regimes. Contrary to what Gray suggests, this actually protects Fukuyama’s thesis from any direct falsification, a characteristic it shares will all other major philosophies of history. Also, it is clear that Fukuyama was talking about human History, not about the natural history of planet Earth or the Universe. That the Universe will continue to evolve long after the last human has disappeared is no news, not even for Fukuyama
.There are other claims in this quote that are more interesting. In essence, Gray is asserting that a correct understanding of the Darwinian account of (natural) evolution implies that the future is fully open. Everything can and will happen. There is an implicit point on which Gray is obviously correct. The Darwinian account comes with a definitive rejection of any teleological understanding of evolution. This is indeed the crucial feature that distinguishes Darwinism from the Lamarckian account of evolution. Evolution does not tend toward any endpoint, any final state that must necessarily be the outcome of the evolutionary process. Maybe more controversially, on the Darwinian account, evolution does not imply progress of any form.[4]
Behind this point on which everyone can agree, two or three complexities are however hiding. First, evolution is not a fully random process. Evolution is governed by evolutionary mechanisms. It is in this sense the product of the conjunction of chance and necessity. The Darwinian account typically identifies three such mechanisms: natural section, variations, and heritability. While the latter two are open to randomness (though not necessarily full randomness), the first is in some way completely deterministic. The genes of an organism whose fitness is higher than the fitness of other organisms will spread faster in the population. This statement is tautological only in appearance, at least as long as we have independent ways to measure fitness (i.e., not in terms of reproduction rate). Other evolutionary mechanisms, such as genetic drift, complete the Darwinian tryptic. The knowledge of these mechanisms, combined with complete information about the physical characteristics of organisms and their environment, would make it possible to make probabilistic predictions about the path of evolution.
This leads to a second remark. Evolution is a process of non-intentional design that is characterized by the existence of what Daniel Dennett calls “forced moves.”[5] Forced moves are obvious solutions to most general evolutionary problems such that it is highly likely that, given enough time, natural selection will find them under most circumstances. The independent evolution of vision in a large number of evolutionary histories of organisms populating our planet is the most obvious case of forced moves. The existence of evolutionary forced moves reinforces our ability to make predictions about the evolutionary trajectory of populations of organisms in a large variety of environments, including – why not – on other planets as ours.
In some ways, what philosophies of history like Fukuyama’s or Marx’s are doing is trying to identify such forced moves for social evolution. Their mistake is that they overestimate the number and the evolutionary strength of these forced moves. The existence of forced moves indicates that evolution is highly likely to take some routes and highly unlikely to take others. What the Darwinian paradigm indicates is that history is an open-ended realm of probabilistic futures and possibilities where necessity and randomness collide. History is not fully determined, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. If Darwinism says anything about history, it is largely in line with Raymond Aron’s “probabilistic” conception that he developed in his criticism of philosophies of history.[6]
Can we be more specific, however? Social evolution is not natural evolution. It is natural evolution augmented with social/cultural mechanisms. May it be that, because of these additional mechanisms, social evolution has the teleological feature that we have denied to natural evolution? This is highly unlikely for at least two reasons. First, there are solid arguments in favor of the idea that the Darwinian mechanisms of variation, selection, and heredity still operate at the most abstract level in social evolution. This idea has been sometimes labeled “generalized Darwinism,” a label endorsed by Dennett and other philosophers and social scientists. The variation-selection-transmission tryptic also operates for non-genetic “replicators” such as ideas, beliefs, or practices. Second, there is a complex relationship between genetic and cultural evolution, as well as illustrated by the contributions of the “gene-culture coevolution” research program.[7] The general lesson of these contributions is that mechanisms of cultural evolution are biologically biased, such that biological evolution continues to have a significant effect on the cultural path taken by modern societies.
Even if these two points are granted, it can still be argued that social evolution has features that make it more “directed” than natural evolution. Some scholars have for instance suggested that the importance of power relations implies that social evolution has a non-Darwinian nature.[8] We may interpret philosophies of history in this fashion. When Fukuyama argues that Hegelian recognition will steer human societies toward liberal democracy, what he is hinting at is a distinctive social mechanism (eventually rooted in our biology) that makes social evolution more deterministic than natural evolution. Though over the very long run the latter may affect the deterministic character of the former, at the human time scale this is irrelevant because natural evolution is slow to proceed and is largely parametric from our historical point of view.
There are good reasons to reject the idea that such deterministic social mechanisms exist. Human societies are embedded in a natural environment that is not so parametric (to wit, climate change, epidemics) and that can have significant effects with respect to the fitness-induced implications of our institutions and practices. Human societies can also “go backward” by losing the knowledge acquired in the past.[9] They can be stuck with bad, fitness-detrimental, practices,[10] or evolve new bad practices thanks to biased mechanisms of cultural evolution where some behaviors are copied just because they are adopted by prestigious people.[11]
So, Gray is right that History will probably not end in Fukuyama’s sense. Where he is wrong however is to underestimate that not only (natural and social) evolution has forced moves, but it is also path-dependent. There is no certainty that feudalism will not reappear in the Western world. However, what we know about human societies and their history tells us that this is highly unlikely. Our understanding of evolution indicates that the quest for a philosophy of history is vain. But it leaves open a probabilistic understanding of history.
[1] John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (Random House, 2023). See this post for a broader discussion.
[2] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin Books, Limited, 1992 [2012]).
[3] Gray, The New Leviathans, pp. 20-21.
[4] In some way, this is obvious, as the notion of progress is normative. The fact of evolution does not depend on any normative judgment and so, in this sense, evolution cannot logically imply progress. Controversy arises however once we have settled for a specific normative conception of progress. At the extreme, one can conceive a conception of progress such that whatever is selected for is constitutive of progress. The most interesting conceptions of progress (especially moral progress) are not tautological in this sense however, and for them it is open for discussion whether or not evolution is biased toward progress.
[5] Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanins of Life (Simon and Schuster, 1996).
[6] Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire: Essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique (Paris: Gallimard, 1937 [1991]).
[7] Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[8] See for instance Shiping Tang, On Social Evolution: Phenomenon and Paradigm (New York: Routledge, 2020).
[9] Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton University Press, 2015).
[10] Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms (New York, NY: OUP USA, 2016).
[11] Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Great article as typical.
The Fukuyama view appears correct, that there are certain forces which steer societies toward liberal democracies, based on the current cultural convergence we are seeing and the limited range of detours.
The “forced moves” are motivated by reasons for wanting a free society (personal liberties, wealth generation, and desire for political legitimacy). Liberal societies have inherent reasons for being wanted by majorities and will be pushed for in some form, leading to forced moves in favor of their existence.