Capitalism and the Last Man

The book "The End of History and the Last Man" attracted a great deal of media attention around a decade ago. It argues that history has ended in the sense that capitalism has been shown to be the best arrangement of the economy for the greatest happiness of the mass of the population. It has the appeal of a big-picture description of the driving themes of history, and only lasts a few hundred pages.

The economic content of the End of History looks like a claim of classical Pareto optimality at a macroeconomic level, with some empirical evidence. It doesn't seem appealing for a variety of reasons: much of the world is still in a pre-capitalist state, the empirical evidence deals with socialist states observed to date rather than future ones, capitalism may be challenged by non-socialist economic systems, capitalism suffers from many problems macroeconomically, and other criticisms.

The neglected part of the thesis - from a publicity viewpoint - is the Last Man bit of the title. It contends that under capitalism, although the maximum aggregate amount of happiness is created, individuals may be dissatisfied with their lot because they are comparatively constrained in their ability to gain power (this might not be the exact statement; it has been a while since I read the book). Thus, capitalism denies an important part of human nature, and the Last Man is the idealised embodiment of this happy but incomplete individual.

The idea draws from Nietzsche, via Kojeve. Nietzsche's original ideas, in Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, were far more developed, and capitalism may be viewed not as characterising the Last Man, but the people who lived before them. Whereas pre-capitalist morality was dictated by religions and societies tested by trial and error, morality in capitalism is substantially determined by the demands of the economic system. Capitalist morality is not the outcome of the recognition of the origins and operation of the pre-capitalist morality and retention of its moralities whilst rejecting its logic - which would characterise the Last Man - but rather the acceptance of capitalist morality and logic as a partial replacement for traditional morality and its logic. The social awareness without self-acceptance that characterises the Last Man is absent.

Capitalism unlike pre-capitalist systems has had limited historical testing and so its Last Man would adopt a morality which would not necessarily promote the continuation of humanity but solely of capitalism itself. A transition beyond the capitalist last man may be required for such promotion, either to follow Nietzsche's recommendation of asserting the individual's morality rather than the system's, or to become pre-capitalist morality's last man. This transition may be viewed as necessary in view of the pending disaster of global warming, or the millions of children who die needlessly every year through poverty, or (for a vegetarian like me) the enormous suffering of animals in factory farms.