For thirty years we have pictured Nietzsche’s last man as a creature of comfort, blinking contentedly at the end of history. Read the page again and he is doing something else entirely. He is smirking. What if the people who want the least are the proudest people of all?
Why we’re pointing you there
Francis Fukuyama made the last man famous in 1992, and in a new memoir he says we now live in the last man’s world. Michael Cummins agrees about the world and argues that Fukuyama has had the man wrong from the start. Fukuyama imagined someone who had lost the old hunger to be thought better than others. Cummins goes back to Zarathustra and finds a crowd vain about its culture, and a passage in which the small people boast of sitting precisely halfway between the gladiator and the pig. The hunger never left. It learned to pass for modesty.
What we liked most is that the essay won’t let anyone off. It uses Fukuyama’s own pages to explain why a democracy drives ambition into hiding, borrows Kojève’s discovery of Japanese snobbery and turns it inside out, and then gives Nietzsche’s rival snobbery of the heights its due, along with Fukuyama’s warning about the bored crowds of August 1914. It ends at Niagara, with a French acrobat and a chair, and the best last line we have run this year.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
