Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
12 March 2018
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Key Points
• Neoconservatives commonly viewed as ex-liberals and/or
Trotskyites who’ve been “mugged by reality” (I. Kristol)
• A broad “church” covering a wide array of interests and agendas.
Not a coherent movement: no common “manifesto, credo,
religion, flag, anthem or secret handshake” (J.Q. Wilson)
• Shared features: 1) moralist/evangelical disposition; 2)
internationalist foreign policy; 3) belief in democracy at home
and abroad; and 4) belief in military force and its use to achieve
national interests
• However, not true that attributes like: 1) a pro-war stance, 2)
foreign policy hawkishness, 3) an all-Jewish conspiracy, and/or
4) a disillusioned liberalism, are essentially neocon
characteristics, since others share these too (J. Goldberg)
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US Neoconservatism
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Has History Ended? Yes
“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the
willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological
struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be
replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems,
environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the
perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and
see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.
Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the
post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its
inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been
created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps
this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get
history started once again.”
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“The Truman Show” (1998) (Weber 2001)
• Allegory of ideological struggle between
good/Liberalism (Truman) and
evil/Totalitarianism (Christof)
• Truman’s shift from false to true consciousness
via a rash of discrepancies (Marx: capitalism
containing seeds of its own destruction?) and
an emerging awareness of unmet desires
• Truman finally succeeds in breaking out of his
“prison”. He “exits history”, i.e., end of history.
• Outside world is a post-historical, de-
ideological world without internal
contradictions. It’s a world where daily
existence is dull and inhabitants long for the
old days of history and ideology – Fukuyama’s
liberalized world?
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Has History Ended? No
“History has not ended. The world is not one. Civilizations unite and
divide humankind. The forces making for clashes between civilizations can
be contained only if they are recognized. In a ‘world of different
civilizations,’ as my article concluded, each ‘will have to learn to coexist
with the others.’ What ultimately counts for people is not political
ideology or economic interest. Faith and family, blood and belief, are what
people identify with and what they will fight and die for. And that is why
the clash of civilizations is replacing the Cold War as the central
phenomenon of global politics, and why a civilizational paradigm provides,
better than any alternative, a useful starting point for understanding and
coping with the changes going on in the world.”
—S.P. Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What?
Samuel Huntington Responds to His Critics”,
Foreign Affairs (Nov/Dec 1993)
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“Independence Day” (1996) (Weber 2001)
• World’s nations cooperate to defeat new threat – aliens in post-Cold War era
(like other civilizations unlike ours?)
• Morally upright heroes. Assumption of moral goodness of humans not
incongruous with justification to destroy those judged to be morally bad or
weak (so long as they are demonized or dehumanized?)
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Criticisms re Post-9/11 Neoconservatism
• On Iraq War: (1) exaggerated threat assessment of WMD ; (2) indifference to
international public opinion, underestimation of global backlash and detriment
to U.S. interests; (3) over-optimism of U.S. ability to win war, stabilize and
reshape Iraq
• U.S.’s pro-Israel policy
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