What is Ferguson’s theory of the rise of Western civilization? (cf. the 6 “killer apps” we discussed in the lecture.

The Western civilization rose because it had somehow “uploaded” the 6 “killer apps” – six social institutions: competition, science, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society and work ethics.

Competition, which existed in Europe on several different stages: market, political, diplomatic, and interstate level, – with time revealed the most productive and efficient way to do things in constantly changing world.

Scientific revolution, especially the experimental method, gave the Europeans control over the nature and provided machines for future industrialization. The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there. In fact, they demolish Taqi al-Din's observatory, because it's considered blasphemous to inquire into the mind of God.

Not only the property rights have to be respected. Property needs to be distributed among the majority of population. Fergusson sites example of the Americas: in the North, a person gets 100 acres after 5 years of working, while in the South, the land is distributed among a small elite, descendants of conquistadors. The majority of rural population had their own piece of land in the United States, while almost nobody did in the South America.

Modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people. And this was another killer app — the very opposite of a killer,because it doubled, and then more than doubled, human life expectancy

Consumer society is essential for industrialization of the country, as a product needs to be very demanded to let the factory survive.

The Work Ethic. Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant. He was wrong. Any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work. We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon. In fact, the West has lost its work ethic.

 

How does Ferguson’s theory compare to Fukuyama and Huntington?

Ferguson and Fukuyama converge when talking that there is only one way to do things, but Ferguson does not say anything about the Western culture as dominant in the world. Moreover, he is quite skeptical about the West, who is going to be less powerful than before, losing the Work ethics. Finally, history did not finish by Ferguson, as the killer apps can be uploaded and deleted, so Ferguson contradicts Huntington, who proclaims that every civilization has its own way. Also, Ferguson does not say anything about future conflicts and wars between cultures. At the same time, Ferguson and Huntington converge in prediction that the West loses power.

 

3. Who out of the three (Huntington, Fukuyama, Ferguson) do you think is most convincing?  

Ну тут свои мыслиJ

FUKUYAMA

What does F mean by 'the end of history'?

The end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government

 

Does the continuation of events, wars, conflicts etc since 1990 (when he articulated the theory) prove the theory wrong?

No, as this theory states that the Western liberal democracy is is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run

 

Fascism, communism, nationalism and religious fundamentalism are possible alternative ideologies to liberalism that F considers: in what way does he consider each of them a failure and non-viable? What, in his opinion, is the relationship between religious fundamentalism and liberalism?

Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success. After the ear, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct.

 

Marx, speaking Hegel's language, asserted that liberal society contained fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved within its context, that between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions

 

While they may constitute a source of conflict for liberal societies, this conflict does not arise from liberalism itself so much as from the fact that the liberalism in question is incomplete. Certainly a great deal of the world's ethnic and nationalist tension can be explained in terms of peoples who are forced to live in unrepresentative political systems that they have not chosen.

 

Modern liberalism itself was historically a consequence of the weakness of religiously-based societies which, falling to agree on the nature of the good life, could not provide even the minimal preconditions of peace and stability

 

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