Have you been following Francis Fukuyama's rift with the neoconservatives? I have, and up until now I've been a bit dumbstruck.

In the years leading up to the Iraq war, Fukuyama signed numerous public letters calling on the American government to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values," and "have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place."

But now Fukuyama sings from a very different sheet of music. The president's war policies have so alienated Fukuyama that the scholar says that he will not vote for Bush come November. In a recent opinion piece entitled "Shattered Illusions," Fukuyama criticizes the manner in which the Iraq war has been conducted, the notion that democracy in Iraq will take hold anytime soon, and the intelligence failures of the Bush administration.

"The Bush administration went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the post-war situation would be: it thought the reconstruction would be self-financing, that Americans could draw on a lasting well of gratitude for liberating Iraq, and that we could occupy the country with a small force structure and even draw US forces down significantly within a few months," writes Fukuyama. The famed author of The End of History and the Last Man points to the Bush administration's "flawed" judgment on the threat posed by Iraq, which has "created an enormous legitimacy problem for the US, one that will hurt American interests for a long time to come." He cautions the U.S. against "taking on large social engineering projects in parts of the world it doesn't understand very well."

Reality has indeed "shattered illusions" for many who envisioned in Iraq a mini-America rather than America's West Bank. Could it be that the illusions that shattered most dramatically were Fukuyama's own?

Fukie has been having his illusions shattered for a number of years now. His book The Great Disruption was to a large extent a rejection of his End of History book. I wonder if his mentor, the Soviet spy Alexandre Kojeve, would be supportive of his change of mind.

First, how could you be a Soviet spy if you lived in France in the first half of the 20th century? Wouldn't you just be a comrade?

There was never any secret about what Kojeve was doing, and what he hoped to do, I don't think, unlike certain others working in France at the time (at least after the Second WW), who were paid by the CIA to set up left wing opposition (in the form of associations, newspapers, etc.), to the Communists in France.

Frankly, though you might revile him, I would say Kojeve is one of the great minds of the first half of the 20th century, for so thoroughly integrating his political aims and his intellectual ideas, not to mention coming up with a thoroughly original Left-Hegelian reading of the Phenomenology.

We should all be so consistent in our thinking, even though we might not want to be thinking the same thoughts as Kojeve.

PS: I never thought much of Fukuyama's "End of History." His ideas were well-structured like Kojeve's, but too brittle to really accomodate what was actually happening in the world. I would say the work was useful mythology for about the first 10 years after the Berlin Wall came down.

Sure there was an above ground communist party in France but Kojeve wasn't some hack, he was a very high-ranking civil servant and deeply shaped western Europe post-war economic policy. He was a advisor to de Gaulle, for example, and de Gaulle was no friend to the communists or Stalin (Kojeve was a committed Stalinist as well), so his espionage was certainly not in the open. That was only revealed about 5 years ago.

I fail to see what is so admirable in intellectual consistency? I mean it is a really low threshold isn't it? I can agree that one of the only things admirable about his character was his deadly consistency, but that is also a good definition of insanity, consistently holding onto unsound beliefs despite all evidence against them. There are plenty of very bad people who I can find basic things like consistency in them to admire. If you substitute the name Kojeve with any number of 20th century communist tyrants there would be no logical change in your sentence above beginning "Frankly, though you might revile him . . ."

Anyway, all I said in my original post was I wonder what Kojeve would say about Fukie's change of heart. That means I agree with your view that Kojeve was deadly consistent, he was a true believer, which prompted my question about what he would say about the betrayal by his student.