# Identity

Francis Fukuyama

The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state

In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.

Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

Identity is an urgent and necessary book―a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

> For Julia, David, and John

## PREFACE

This book would not have been written had Donald J. Trump not been elected president in November 2016. Like many Americans, I was surprised by this outcome and troubled by its implications for the United States and the world. It was the second major electoral surprise of that year, the first being Britain’s vote to leave the European Union the previous June.

I had spent much of the last couple decades thinking about the development of modern political institutions: how the state, rule of law, and democratic accountability first came into being, how they evolved and interacted, and, finally, how they could decay. Well before Trump’s election, I had written that American institutions were decaying as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups and locked into a rigid structure that was unable to reform itself.

Trump himself was both the product of and a contributor to that decay. The promise of his candidacy was that, as an outsider, he would use his popular mandate to shake up the system and make it functional again. Americans were tired of partisan gridlock and yearning for a strong leader who could unite the country again, breaking through what I labeled vetocracy—the ability of interest groups to block collective action. This kind of populist upsurge was what put Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House in 1932 and reshaped American politics for the next two generations.

The problem with Trump was twofold, having to do with both policy and character. His economic nationalism was likely to make things worse rather than better for the very constituencies that supported him, while his evident preference for authoritarian strongmen over democratic allies promised to destabilize the entire international order. With regard to character, it was hard to imagine an individual less suited to be president of the United States. The virtues that one associates with great leadership—basic honesty, reliability, sound judgment, devotion to public interest, and an underlying moral compass—were totally missing. Trump’s primary focus throughout his career had been on self-promotion, and he was perfectly happy to get around people or rules that stood in his way by any means available.

Trump represented a broader trend in international politics, toward what has been labeled populist nationalism.[1] Populist leaders seek to use the legitimacy conferred by democratic elections to consolidate power. They claim direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are often defined in narrow ethnic terms that exclude big parts of the population. They don’t like institutions and seek to undermine the checks and balances that limit a leader’s personal power in a modern liberal democracy: courts, the legislature, an independent media, and a nonpartisan bureaucracy. Other contemporary leaders who could be put in this category are Vladimir Putin of Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

The global surge toward democracy that began in the mid-1970s has gone into what my colleague Larry Diamond calls a global recession.[2] In 1970, there were only about 35 electoral democracies, a number that steadily increased over the next three decades until it reached nearly 120 by the early 2000s. The greatest acceleration came from 1989 to 1991, when the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union led to a democratic wave throughout that region. Since the mid-2000s, however, the trend has reversed itself, and total numbers have declined. Authoritarian countries, led by China, have meanwhile grown more confident and self-assertive.

It is not surprising that new would-be democracies such as Tunisia, Ukraine, and Myanmar should be struggling to build workable institutions, or that liberal democracy failed to take root in Afghanistan or Iraq after the U.S. interventions in those countries. It is disappointing, though not wholly surprising, that Russia has reverted to authoritarian traditions. What was far more unexpected was that threats to democracy should arise from within established democracies themselves. Hungary had been one of the first countries in Eastern Europe to overthrow its Communist regime. When it entered both NATO and the European Union, it appeared to have rejoined Europe as what political scientists characterized as a “consolidated” liberal democracy. Yet under Orbán and his Fidesz party, it has been leading the way toward what Orbán has labeled “illiberal democracy.” But a far bigger surprise yet were the votes in Britain and the United States for Brexit and Trump, respectively. These were the two leading democracies that had been the architects of the modern liberal international order, countries that led the “neoliberal” revolution under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s. Yet they themselves appeared to be turning away toward a more narrow nationalism.

This brings me to the origins of the present volume. Ever since I published my essay “The End of History?” in mid-1989, and the book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992,[3] I have regularly been asked whether event X didn’t invalidate my thesis. X could be a coup in Peru, war in the Balkans, the September 11 attacks, the global financial crisis, or, most recently, Donald Trump’s election and the wave of populist nationalism described above.

Most of these criticisms were based on a simple misunderstanding of the thesis. I was using the word history in the Hegelian-Marxist sense—that is, the long-term evolutionary story of human institutions that could alternatively be labeled development or modernization. The word end was meant not in the sense of “termination,” but “target” or “objective.” Karl Marx had suggested that the end of history would be a communist utopia, and I was simply suggesting that Hegel’s version, where development resulted in a liberal state linked to a market economy, was the more plausible outcome.[4]

This didn’t mean that my views hadn’t changed over the years. The fullest rethinking I have been able to provide is contained in my two volumes The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, which might collectively be understood as an effort to rewrite The End of History and the Last Man based on what I understand of world politics now.[5] The two most important changes in my thinking concern, first, the difficulty of developing a modern, impersonal state—the problem I referred to as “getting to Denmark”—and second, the possibility of a modern liberal democracy decaying or going backward.

However, my critics missed another point. They did not note that the original essay had a question mark at the end of the title, and they did not read the later chapters of The End of History and the Last Man that focused on the problem of Nietzsche’s Last Man.

In both places I noted that neither nationalism nor religion were about to disappear as forces in world politics. They were not about to disappear because, I argued back then, contemporary liberal democracies had not fully solved the problem of thymos. Thymos is the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity; isothymia is the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people; while megalothymia is the desire to be recognized as superior. Modern liberal democracies promise and largely deliver a minimal degree of equal respect, embodied in individual rights, the rule of law, and the franchise. What this does not guarantee is that people in a democracy will be equally respected in practice, particularly members of groups with a history of marginalization. Entire countries can feel disrespected, which has powered aggressive nationalism, as can religious believers who feel their faith is denigrated. Isothymia will therefore continue to drive demands for equal recognition, which are unlikely to ever be completely fulfilled.

The other big problem is megalothymia. Liberal democracies have been pretty good at providing peace and prosperity (though somewhat less so in recent years). These wealthy, secure societies are the domain of Nietzsche’s Last Man, “men without chests” who spend their lives in the endless pursuit of consumer satisfaction, but who have nothing at their core, no higher goals or ideals for which they are willing to strive and sacrifice. Such a life will not satisfy everyone. Megalothymia thrives on exceptionality: taking big risks, engaging in monumental struggles, seeking large effects, because all of these lead to recognition of oneself as superior to others. In some cases, it can lead to a heroic leader like a Lincoln or a Churchill or a Nelson Mandela. But in other cases, it can lead to tyrants like Caesar or Hitler or Mao who lead their societies into dictatorship and disaster.

Since megalothymia has historically existed in all societies, it cannot be overcome; it can only be channeled or moderated. The question I raised in the final chapter of The End of History and the Last Man was whether the modern system of liberal democracy tied to a market economy would provide sufficient outlets for megalothymia. This problem was fully recognized by the American founding fathers. In their effort to create a republican form of government in North America, they were aware of the history of the fall of the Roman Republic and worried about the problem of Caesarism. Their solution was the constitutional system of checks and balances that would distribute power and block its concentration in a single leader. Back in 1992, I suggested that a market economy also provided outlets for megalothymia. An entrepreneur could become fabulously wealthy while contributing at the same time to general prosperity. Or such individuals could compete in Ironman events or set records for the number of Himalayan peaks climbed or build the world’s most valuable internet company.

I actually mentioned Donald Trump in The End of History as an example of a fantastically ambitious individual whose desire for recognition had been safely channeled into a business (and later an entertainment) career. Little did I suspect back then that, twenty-five years on, he would not be satisfied with business success and celebrity, but would go into politics and get elected president. But it is not at all inconsistent with the general argument I was making about potential future threats to liberal democracy, and the central problem of thymos in a liberal society.[6] Such figures had existed in the past with names such as Caesar or Hitler or Perón, who had led their societies down disastrous paths to war or economic decline. To propel themselves forward, such figures latched onto the resentments of ordinary people who felt that their nation or religion or way of life was being disrespected. Megalothymia and isothymia thus joined hands.

In the present volume I am returning to themes that I began to explore in 1992 and have been writing about ever since: thymos, recognition, dignity, identity, immigration, nationalism, religion, and culture. In particular, it incorporates the Lipset Memorial Lecture on immigration and identity that I gave in 2005, and the Latsis Foundation lecture I delivered in Geneva in 2011 on immigration and European identity.[7] In some places this volume more or less repeats passages from earlier writings. I apologize if any of this seems repetitious, but I’m pretty confident that few people have taken the time to follow this particular string and to see it as a coherent argument relating to developments in the present.

Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. It is not confined to the identity politics practiced on university campuses, or to the white nationalism it has provoked, but extends to broader phenomena such as the upsurge of old-fashioned nationalism and politicized Islam. Much of what passes for economic motivation is, I will argue, actually rooted in the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. This has direct implications for how we should deal with populism in the present.

According to Hegel, human history was driven by a struggle for recognition. He argued that the only rational solution to the desire for recognition was universal recognition, in which the dignity of every human being was recognized. Universal recognition has been challenged ever since by other partial forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, or by individuals wanting to be recognized as superior. The rise of identity politics in modern liberal democracies is one of the chief threats that they face, and unless we can work our way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

* * *

I would like to thank a number of friends and colleagues for providing comments on this manuscript: Sheri Berman, Gerhard Casper, Patrick Chamorel, Mark Cordover, Katherine Cramer, Larry Diamond, Bob Faulkner, Jim Fearon, David Fukuyama, Sam Gill, Anna Gryzmala-Busse, Margaret Levi, Mark Lilla, Kate McNamara, Yascha Mounk, Marc Plattner, Lee Ross, Susan Shell, Steve Stedman, and Kathryn Stoner.

Special thanks are due to Eric Chinski, my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who has worked tirelessly with me on several books now. His sense of logic and language and his wide knowledge of substantive issues have been of enormous benefit to the current volume. I am also thankful for the support given me by Andrew Franklin at Profile Books for this and all previous volumes.

As always, I am grateful to my literary agents, Esther Newberg at International Creative Management and Sophie Baker at Curtis Brown, as well as to all the other people who support them. They have done amazing work in getting my books published in the United States and all over the world.

I would also like to thank my research assistants Ana Urgiles, Eric Gilliam, Russell Clarida, and Nicole Southard, who were invaluable in providing materials on which the book is based.

I’m grateful for the support of my family and especially my wife, Laura, who has been a careful reader and critic of all my books.

> Palo Alto and Carmel-by-the-Sea, California

## 1. THE POLITICS OF DIGNITY

Sometime in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, world politics changed dramatically.

The period from the early 1970s through the mid-2000s witnessed what Samuel Huntington labeled the “third wave” of democratization as the number of countries that could be classified as electoral democracies increased from about 35 to more than 110. In this period, liberal democracy became the default form of government for much of the world, at least in aspiration if not in practice.[1]

In parallel to this shift in political institutions was a corresponding growth of economic interdependence among nations, or what we call globalization. The latter was underpinned by liberal economic institutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization. These were supplemented by regional trade agreements such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Throughout this period, the rate of growth in international trade and investment outpaced global GDP growth and was widely seen as the major driver of prosperity. Between 1970 and 2008, the world’s output of goods and services quadrupled and growth extended to virtually all regions of the world, while the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries dropped from 42 percent of the total population in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011. The percentage of children dying before their fifth birthdays declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.[2]

This liberal world order did not, however, benefit everyone. In many countries around the world, and particularly in developed democracies, inequality increased dramatically, such that many of the benefits of growth flowed primarily to an elite defined primarily by education.[3] Since growth was related to the increasing volume of goods, money, and people moving from one place to another, there was a huge amount of disruptive social change. In developing countries, villagers who previously had no access to electricity suddenly found themselves living in large cities, watching TV or connected to the internet via ubiquitous cell phones. Labor markets adjusted to new conditions by driving tens of millions of people across international borders in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families, or else seeking to escape intolerable conditions at home. Huge new middle classes arose in countries such as China and India, but the work they did replaced work that had been done by older middle classes in the developed world. Manufacturing moved steadily from Europe and the United States to East Asia and other low-labor-cost regions. At the same time, women were displacing men in an increasingly service-dominated new economy, and low-skilled workers were being replaced by smart machines.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the momentum toward an increasingly open and liberal world order began to falter, then went into reverse. This shift coincided with two financial crises, the first originating in the U.S. subprime market in 2008 that led to the subsequent Great Recession, and the second emerging over the threat to the euro and the European Union posed by Greece’s insolvency. In both cases, elite policies produced huge recessions, high levels of unemployment, and falling incomes for millions of ordinary workers around the world. Since the United States and the EU were the leading exemplars, these crises damaged the reputation of liberal democracy as a whole.

The democracy scholar Larry Diamond has characterized the years after the crises as ones of a “democratic recession,” in which the aggregate number of democracies fell from their peak in virtually all regions of the world.[4] A number of authoritarian countries, led by China and Russia, became much more self-confident and assertive: China began promoting its “China model” as a path to development and wealth that was distinctly undemocratic, while Russia attacked the liberal decadence of the European Union and the United States. A number of countries that had seemed to be successful liberal democracies during the 1990s slid backward toward more authoritarian government, including Hungary, Turkey, Thailand, and Poland. The Arab Spring of 2011 disrupted dictatorships throughout the Middle East, but then profoundly disappointed hopes for greater democracy in the region as Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria descended into civil war. The terrorist upsurge that produced the September 11 attacks was not defeated by the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather, it mutated into the Islamic State, which emerged as a beacon for profoundly illiberal and violent Islamists around the world. What was as remarkable as ISIS’s resilience was that so many young Muslims left lives of comparative safety elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe to travel to Syria to fight on its behalf.

More surprising and perhaps even more significant were the two big electoral surprises of 2016, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States. In both cases, voters were concerned with economic issues, particularly those in the working class who had been exposed to job loss and deindustrialization. But just as important was opposition to continued large-scale immigration, which was seen as taking jobs from native-born workers and eroding long-established cultural identities. Anti-immigrant and anti-EU parties gained strength in many other developed countries, most notably the National Front in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Alternative for Germany, and the Freedom Party in Austria. Across the Continent there were both fears of Islamist terrorism and controversies over bans on expressions of Muslim identity such as the burka, niqab, and burkini.

Twentieth-century politics had been organized along a left–right spectrum defined by economic issues, the left wanting more equality and the right demanding greater freedom. Progressive politics centered around workers, their trade unions, and social democratic parties that sought better social protections and economic redistribution. The right by contrast was primarily interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, that spectrum appears to be giving way in many regions to one defined by identity. The left has focused less on broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized—blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees, and the like. The right, meanwhile, is redefining itself as patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

A long tradition dating back at least as far as Karl Marx sees political struggles as a reflection of economic conflicts, essentially as fights over shares of the pie. Indeed, this is part of the story of the 2010s, with globalization producing significant populations of people left behind by the overall growth that occurred around the world. Between 2000 and 2016, half of Americans saw no gains to their real incomes; the proportion of national output going to the top 1 percent went from 9 percent of GDP in 1974 to 24 percent in 2008.[5]

But as important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the disparate events of the present. This might be called the politics of resentment. In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

Thus, Russian president Vladimir Putin has talked about the tragedy of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and how Europe and the United States had taken advantage of Russia’s weakness during the 1990s to drive NATO up to its borders. He despises the attitude of moral superiority of Western politicians and wants to see Russia treated not, as President Obama once said, as a weak regional player, but as a great power. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, stated in 2017 that his return to power in 2010 marked the point when “we Hungarians also decided that we wanted to regain our country, we wanted to regain our self-esteem, and we wanted to regain our future.”[6] The Chinese government of Xi Jinping has talked at length about China’s “one hundred years of humiliation,” and how the United States, Japan, and other countries were trying to prevent its return to the great power status it had enjoyed through the past millennia of history. When the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was fourteen, his mother found him fixated on Palestine, “tears streaming down his face as he watched TV from their home in Saudi Arabia.”[7] His anger at the humiliation of Muslims was later echoed by his young coreligionists volunteering to fight in Syria on behalf of a faith they believed had been attacked and oppressed around the world. They hoped to re-create the glories of an earlier Islamic civilization in the Islamic State.

Resentment at indignities was a powerful force in democratic countries as well. The Black Lives Matter movement sprang from a series of well-publicized police killings of African-Americans in Ferguson (Missouri), Baltimore, New York, and other cities and sought to force the outside world to pay attention to the experience of the victims of seemingly casual police violence. On college campuses and in offices around the country, sexual assault and sexual harassment were seen as evidence of men not taking women seriously as equals. Sudden attention was paid to transgender people, who had previously not been recognized as a distinct target of discrimination. And many of those who voted for Donald Trump remembered a better time in the past when their place in their own societies was more secure and hoped through their actions to “make America great again.” While distant in time and place, the feelings among Putin’s supporters over the arrogance and contempt of Western elites were similar to those experienced by rural voters in the United States who felt that the urban bicoastal elites and their media allies were similarly ignoring them and their problems.

The practitioners of the politics of resentment recognize one another. The sympathy that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have for each other is not just personal, but rooted in their common nationalism. Viktor Orbán explained, “Certain theories describe the changes now taking place in the Western world and the emergence on the stage of a U.S. president as a struggle in the world political arena between the transnational elite—referred to as ‘global’—and patriotic national elites,” of which he was an early exemplar.[8]

In all cases a group, whether a great power such as Russia or China or voters in the United States or Britain, believes that it has an identity that is not being given adequate recognition—either by the outside world, in the case of a nation, or by other members of the same society. Those identities can be and are incredibly varied, based on nation, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender. They are all manifestations of a common phenomenon, that of identity politics.

The terms identity and identity politics are of fairly recent provenance, the former having been popularized by the psychologist Erik Erikson during the 1950s, and the latter coming into view only in the cultural politics of the 1980s and ’90s. Identity has a wide number of meanings today, in some cases referring simply to social categories or roles, in others to basic information about oneself (as in “my identity was stolen”). Used in this fashion, identities have always existed.[9]

In this book, I will be using identity in a specific sense that helps us understand why it is so important to contemporary politics. Identity grows, in the first place, out of a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules and norms that does not adequately recognize that inner self’s worth or dignity. Individuals throughout human history have found themselves at odds with their societies. But only in modern times has the view taken hold that the authentic inner self is intrinsically valuable, and the outer society systematically wrong and unfair in its valuation of the former. It is not the inner self that has to be made to conform to society’s rules, but society itself that needs to change.

The inner self is the basis of human dignity, but the nature of that dignity is variable and has changed over time. In many early cultures, dignity is attributed only to a few people, often warriors who are willing to risk their lives in battle. In other societies, dignity is an attribute of all human beings, based on their intrinsic worth as people with agency. And in other cases, dignity is due to one’s membership in a larger group of shared memory and experience.

Finally, the inner sense of dignity seeks recognition. It is not enough that I have a sense of my own worth if other people do not publicly acknowledge it or, worse yet, if they denigrate me or don’t acknowledge my existence. Self-esteem arises out of esteem by others. Because human beings naturally crave recognition, the modern sense of identity evolves quickly into identity politics, in which individuals demand public recognition of their worth. Identity politics thus encompasses a large part of the political struggles of the contemporary world, from democratic revolutions to new social movements, from nationalism and Islamism to the politics on contemporary American university campuses. Indeed, the philosopher Hegel argued that the struggle for recognition was the ultimate driver of human history, a force that was key to understanding the emergence of the modern world.

While the economic inequalities arising from the last fifty or so years of globalization are a major factor explaining contemporary politics, economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect. Indeed, much of what we understand to be economic motivation actually reflects not a straightforward desire for wealth and resources, but the fact that money is perceived to be a marker of status and buys respect. Modern economic theory is built around the assumption that human beings are rational individuals who all want to maximize their “utility”—that is, their material well-being—and that politics is simply an extension of that maximizing behavior. However, if we are ever to properly interpret the behavior of real human beings in the contemporary world, we have to expand our understanding of human motivation beyond this simple economic model that so dominates much of our discourse. No one contests that human beings are capable of rational behavior, or that they are self-interested individuals who seek greater wealth and resources. But human psychology is much more complex than the rather simpleminded economic model suggests. Before we can understand contemporary identity politics, we need to step back and develop a deeper and richer understanding of human motivation and behavior. We need, in other words, a better theory of the human soul.

## 2. THE THIRD PART OF THE SOUL

Theories of politics have typically been built on top of theories of human behavior. Theories tease out regularities in human action from the mass of empirical information we receive about the world around us and hopefully draw causal connections between these actions and the surrounding environment. The ability to theorize is an important factor in the evolutionary success of the human species. Many practical people scorn theories and theorizing, but they act all the time upon unarticulated theories that they simply fail to acknowledge.

Modern economics is based on one such theory, which is that human beings are “rational utility maximizers”: they are individuals who use their formidable cognitive abilities to benefit their self-interest. Embedded in this theory are several further assumptions. One is that the unit of account is an individual, as opposed to a family, a tribe, a nation, or some other type of social group. To the extent that people cooperate with one another, it is because they calculate that cooperation will serve their individual self-interest better than if they act on their own.

The second assumption concerns the nature of “utility,” the individual preferences—for a car, for sexual gratification, for a pleasant vacation—that make up what economists call a person’s “utility function.” Many economists would argue that their science says nothing about the ultimate preferences or utilities that people choose; that’s up to individuals. Economics speaks only to the ways in which preferences are rationally pursued. Thus a hedge fund manager seeking to earn another billion dollars and a soldier who falls on a grenade to save his buddies are both maximizing their different preferences. Presumably, suicide bombers, who have unfortunately become part of the twenty-first-century political landscape, are simply trying to maximize the number of virgins they will meet in heaven.

The problem is that economic theory has little predictive value if preferences are not limited to something like material self-interest, such as the pursuit of income or wealth. If one broadens the notion of utility to include extremes of both selfish and altruistic behavior, one is not saying much more than the tautology that people will pursue whatever it is they pursue. What one really needs is a theory of why some people pursue money and security, while others choose to die for a cause or to give time and money to help other people. To say that Mother Teresa and a Wall Street hedge fund manager are both maximizing their utility misses something important about their motivations.

In practice, most economists indeed assume that utility is based on some form of material self-interest, which will trump other kinds of motivations. This is a view shared by both contemporary free market economists and classical Marxists, the latter of whom maintained that history was shaped by social classes pursuing their economic self-interest. Economics has become a dominant and prestigious social science today because people do much of the time behave according to the economists’ more restrictive version of human motivation. Material incentives matter. In Communist China, agricultural productivity on collective farms was low because peasants were not allowed to keep any surplus they produced; they would shirk rather than work hard. A saying in the former Communist world was that “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” When incentives were changed in the late 1970s to allow peasants to keep their surplus, agricultural output doubled within four years. One of the causes of the 2008 financial crisis was that investment bankers were rewarded for short-term profits and were not punished when their risky investments blew up a few years later. Fixing the problem would require changing those incentives.

But while the standard economic model does explain a good deal of human behavior, it also has a lot of weaknesses. Over the past couple of decades, behavioral economists and psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have attacked the model’s underlying assumptions by showing that people are not rational in practice, that they for example choose default behaviors over more optimal strategies or economize on the hard work of thinking by copying the behavior of others around them.[1]

While behavioral economics has underlined the weaknesses of the existing rational-choice paradigm, it has not posited a clear alternative model of human behavior. In particular, it has not had much to say about the nature of people’s underlying preferences. Economic theory does not satisfactorily explain either the soldier falling on the grenade, or the suicide bomber, or a host of other cases where something other than material self-interest appears to be in play. It is hard to say that we “desire” things that are painful, dangerous, or costly in the same way we desire food or money in the bank. So we need to look to other accounts of human behavior that go beyond the economic ones that are so dominant today. This broader understanding has always existed; the problem is that we often forget things we once knew.

Theories of human behavior are built on theories of human nature: regularities that arise out of a universally shared human biology, as opposed to those that are rooted in the norms or customs of the different communities in which people live. The boundary line between nature and nurture is highly contested today, but few people would deny that the two poles of this dichotomy exist. Fortunately, one does not have to establish the boundary precisely in order to develop a theory that gives us useful insight into human motivation.

Early modern thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau theorized at length about the “state of nature,” a primordial time before the emergence of human society. The state of nature is, however, just a metaphor for human nature; that is, the most basic characteristics of human beings that exist independently of one’s particular society or culture. In the Western philosophical tradition, such discussions of human nature go much further back, at least to Plato’s Republic.

The Republic is a dialogue between the philosopher Socrates and two young aristocratic Athenians, Adeimantus and his brother Glaucon, about the nature of a just city. After debunking several existing theories of justice, such as Thrasymachus’ assertion that justice is nothing more than the self-interest of the strong, Socrates constructs a just city “in speech,” based on an exploration of the nature of the soul. The word soul (Greek psyche) is not much used anymore, but as the etymology suggests, the discipline of psychology essentially studies the same subject.

The key discussion of the nature of the soul takes place in Book IV. Socrates notes that a desiring part seeks, for example, food and water. But at times a thirsty man pulls back from drinking because he knows the water is tainted and could lead to sickness. Socrates asks, “Isn’t there something in their soul bidding them to drink and something forbidding them to do so, something different that masters that which bids?”[2] Adeimantus and Socrates agree that this second, different part of the soul is the calculating part, and that it can operate at cross-purposes from the irrational, desiring part of the soul.

Socrates and Adeimantus have at this point described the modern economic model: the desiring part corresponds to individual preferences, while the calculating part is the rational maximizer. While Sigmund Freud is no longer taken as seriously as he once was, this distinction corresponds roughly to his concept of the desiring id and the ego that kept those desires under control, largely the result of social pressures. But Socrates points to another type of behavior by relating the story of the Athenian Leontius, who passes by a pile of corpses left by the public executioner. Leontius wants to look at the corpses, but at the same time tries to avoid doing so; after an internal struggle, he looks, saying, “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”[3] Leontius, while tempted to indulge his desire to see the corpses, knew it was ignoble; that he gave in to his cravings aroused his anger and self-loathing. Socrates asks:

> And in many other places, don’t we… notice that, when desire forces someone contrary to the calculating part, he reproaches himself and his spirit is roused against that in him which is doing the forcing; and, just as though there were two parties at faction, such a man’s spirit becomes the ally of speech?[4]

We could transpose this into a more contemporary example, where a drug addict or alcoholic knows that another hit or drink is bad for him or her, but nonetheless takes it and feels a deep self-loathing for being weak. Socrates uses a new word, spirit, to refer to the part of the soul that is the seat of this anger against oneself, which is a poor translation of the Greek word thymos.

Socrates then asks Adeimantus whether the part of the soul that wanted not to look at the corpses was just another desire or was an aspect of the calculating part, since they both pushed in the same direction. The former view would be the perspective of contemporary economics, where one desire is limited only by the calculation that another, more important desire supersedes it. Socrates asks, is there a third part of the soul?

> What we are now bringing to light about the spirited is the opposite of our recent assertion. Then we supposed it had something to do with the desiring part; but now, far from it, we say that in the faction of the soul it sets its arms on the side of the calculating part.

> Quite so, [Adeimantus] said.

> Is it then different from the calculating part as well, or is it a particular form of it so that there aren’t three forms in the soul but two, the calculating part and the desiring? Or just as there were three classes in the city that held it together, money-making, auxiliary, and deliberative, is there in the soul too this third, the spirited, by nature an auxiliary to the calculating part, if not corrupted by bad rearing?[5]

Adeimantus immediately agrees with Socrates that the spirited part—thymos—is neither just another desire nor an aspect of reason but an independent part of the soul. Thymos is the seat of both anger and pride: Leontius was proud and believed he had a better self that would resist looking at the corpses, and when he gave in to his desires, he became angry at his failure to live up to that standard.

More than two millennia before its advent, Socrates and Adeimantus understood something unrecognized by modern economics. Desire and reason are component parts of the human psyche (soul), but a third part, thymos, acts completely independently of the first two. Thymos is the seat of judgments of worth: Leontius believed he was above staring at corpses, just as a drug addict wants to be a productive employee or a loving mother. Human beings do not just want things that are external to themselves, such as food, drink, Lamborghinis, or that next hit. They also crave positive judgments about their worth or dignity. Those judgments can come from within, as in Leontius’ case, but they are most often made by other people in the society around them who recognize their worth. If they receive that positive judgment, they feel pride, and if they do not receive it, they feel either anger (when they think they are being undervalued) or shame (when they realize that they have not lived up to other people’s standards).

This third part of the soul, thymos, is the seat of today’s identity politics. Political actors do struggle over economic issues: whether taxes should be lower or higher, or how the pie of government revenue will be divided among different claimants in a democracy. But a lot of political life is only weakly related to economic resources.

Take, for example, the gay marriage movement, which has spread like wildfire across the developed world in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This does have an economic aspect, having to do with rights of survivorship, inheritance, and the like for gay or lesbian unions. However, many of those economic issues could have been and were in many cases resolved through new rules about property in civil unions. But a civil union would have had lower status than a marriage: society would be saying that gay people could be together legally, but their bond would be different from that between a man and a woman. This outcome was unacceptable to millions of people who wanted their political systems to explicitly recognize the equal dignity of gays and lesbians; the ability to marry was just a marker of that equal dignity. And those opposed wanted something of the opposite: a clear affirmation of the superior dignity of a heterosexual union and therefore of the traditional family. The emotions expended over gay marriage had much more to do with assertions about dignity than they did with economics.

Similarly, the massive anger of women embodied in the #MeToo movement that emerged in the wake of revelations about the behavior of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was fundamentally about respect. While the way in which powerful men had coerced vulnerable women had an economic dimension, the wrong of valuing a woman for her sexuality or looks alone and not for other characteristics such as competence or character would exist among men and women of equal wealth or power.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves in the story of thymos and identity. Socrates in the Republic does not argue that thymos is a characteristic shared equally among all human beings, nor does he suggest that it makes itself manifest in a variety of forms. It appears as something associated with a particular class of human beings in his imaginary city, the guardians or auxiliaries who would be responsible for defending the city from its enemies. They are warriors, different from shopkeepers, for whom desires and their satisfaction are the chief characteristic, as well as from the deliberative class of leaders, who use their reason to determine what is best for the city. Socrates suggests that the thymotic guardians are typically angry and compares them to dogs who are vicious toward strangers and loyal to their masters. As warriors they must be courageous; they must be willing to risk their lives and undergo hardship in a way that neither the merchant class nor the deliberative class would. Anger and pride rather than reason or desire motivates them to take the risks they do.

In speaking this way, Socrates reflects the reality of the classical world, indeed, the reality of most civilizations around the world that possessed an aristocratic class whose claim to high social status lay in the fact that they, or their ancestors, were warriors. The Greek word for “gentleman” was kaloskagathos, or “beautiful and good,” while the very word aristocracy derives from the Greek term “rule by the best.” These warriors were seen as morally different from shopkeepers because of their virtue: they were willing to risk their lives for the public good. Honor accrued only to people who deliberately rejected rational utility maximization—our modern economic model—in favor of those who were willing to risk the most important utility of all, their lives.

Today, we tend to look back on aristocrats with a great deal of cynicism, regarding them at best as self-important parasites, and at worst as violent predators on the rest of their society. Their descendants are even worse, since they did not themselves earn the status that their families receive, but got it as an accident of birth. We have to recognize, however, that in aristocratic societies there was a deeply rooted belief that honor or esteem was not due to everyone, but only to the class of people who risked their lives. An echo of that feeling still exists in the respect we citizens of modern democratic societies typically pay to soldiers who die for their country, or policemen and firemen who risk their lives in the line of duty. Dignity or esteem is not due to everyone, least of all to businesspeople or workers whose main objective is to maximize their own welfare. Aristocrats thought of themselves as better than other people and possessed what we may call megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior. Predemocratic societies rested on a foundation of social hierarchy, so this belief in the inherent superiority of a certain class of people was fundamental to the maintenance of social order.

The problem with megalothymia is that for every person recognized as superior, far more people are seen as inferior and do not receive any public recognition of their human worth. While Socrates and Adeimantus associate thymos primarily with the class of guardians, they also seem to think that all human beings possess all three parts of the soul. Nonguardians have their pride as well, a pride that is injured when the nobleman slaps them in the face and orders them out of the way, or when a daughter or a wife is taken involuntarily as sexual plaything by her social “betters.” While a certain group of humans always want to be seen as superior, a powerful feeling of resentment arises when one is disrespected. Moreover, while we are willing to laud people with certain kinds of achievement, such as the great athlete or musician, many social honors are rooted not in true superiority, but rather in social convention. We can easily resent people who are recognized for the wrong things, such as exhibitionist socialites or reality-show stars who are no better than us.

So an equally powerful human drive is to be seen as “just as good” as everyone else, something we may label “isothymia.”[6] Megalothymia is what economist Robert Frank labels a “positional good”—something that by its very nature cannot be shared because it is based on one’s position relative to someone else.[7] The rise of modern democracy is the story of the displacement of megalothymia by isothymia: societies that only recognized an elite few were replaced by ones that recognized everyone as inherently equal. In Europe, societies stratified by class began to recognize the rights of ordinary people, and nations that had been submerged in great empires sought a separate and equal status. The great struggles in American political history—over slavery and segregation, workers’ rights, women’s equality—were ultimately demands that the political system expand the circle of individuals it recognized as having equal rights.

Yet the story is more complicated than that. Contemporary identity politics is driven by the quest for equal recognition by groups that have been marginalized by their societies. But that desire for equal recognition can easily slide over into a demand for recognition of the group’s superiority. This is a large part of the story of nationalism and national identity, as well as certain forms of extremist religious politics today.

A further problem with isothymia is that certain human activities will inevitably entail greater respect than others. To deny this is to deny the possibility of human excellences. I cannot play the piano and cannot pretend that I am the equal of Glenn Gould or Arthur Rubinstein in this regard. No community will fail to pay greater honor to the soldier or police officer who risks his or her life for the common good than to the coward who flees at the first sign of danger or, worse yet, betrays the community to outsiders. Recognition of everyone’s equal worth means a failure to recognize the worth of people who are actually superior in some sense.

Isothymia demands that we recognize the basic equal worth of our fellow human beings. In democratic societies we assert, with the American Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” Yet historically, we have disagreed on who qualifies as “all men.” At the time that the declaration was signed, this circle did not include white men without property, black slaves, indigenous Americans, or women. Moreover, since human beings are so obviously varied in their talents and capacities, we need to understand in what sense we are willing to recognize them as equal for political purposes. The Declaration of Independence says this is “self-evident,” without giving us much guidance on how we are to understand equality.

Thymos is the part of the soul that seeks recognition. In the Republic, only a narrow class of people sought recognition of their dignity, on the basis of their willingness to risk their lives as warriors. Yet the desire for recognition also seems to lie within every human soul. The shopkeepers or artisans or beggars on the street can also feel the pang of disrespect. But that feeling is inchoate, and they do not have a clear sense of why they should be respected. Their society is telling them that they are not worth as much as the aristocrat; why not accept society’s judgment? For much of human history, this was indeed the fate of the great mass of humanity.

But while thymos is a universal aspect of human nature that has always existed, the belief that each of us has an inner self that is worthy of respect, and that the surrounding society may be wrong in not recognizing it, is a more recent phenomenon. So while the concept of identity is rooted in thymos, it emerged only in modern times when it was combined with a notion of an inner and an outer self, and the radical view that the inner self was more valuable than the outer one. This was the product of both a shift in ideas about the self and the realities of societies that started to evolve rapidly under the pressures of economic and technological change.

## 3. INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

Unlike thymos, which is a permanent part of human nature, what was to become the modern concept of identity emerged only as societies started to modernize a few hundred years ago. While it originated in Europe, it has subsequently spread and taken root in virtually all societies around the globe.

The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside. Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society. The modern concept of identity places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of that inner being that is not being allowed to express itself. It is on the side of the inner and not the outer self. Oftentimes an individual may not understand who that inner self really is, but has only the vague feeling that he or she is being forced to live a lie. This can lead to an obsessive focus on the question “Who am I, really?” The search for an answer produces feelings of alienation and anxiety and can only be relieved when one accepts that inner self and receives public recognition for it. And if that outer society is going to properly recognize the inner self, one has to imagine society itself being able to change in fundamental ways.

In the West, the idea of identity was born, in a sense, during the Protestant Reformation, and it was given its initial expression by the Augustinian friar Martin Luther. Luther received a traditional theological education and a professorship at Wittenberg; for ten years, he read, thought, and struggled with his inner self. In the words of one historian, Luther “found himself in a state of despair before God. He wanted the assurance of being acceptable to God, but could discover in himself only the certainty of sin and in God only an inexorable justice which condemned to futility all his efforts at repentance and his search for the divine mercy.”[1] Luther sought the remedies of mortification recommended by the Catholic Church, before realizing that he could do nothing to bribe, cajole, or entreat God. He understood that the Church acted only on the outer person—through confession, penance, alms, worship of saints—none of which could make a difference because grace was bestowed only as a free act of love by God.

Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to articulate and valorize the inner self over the external social being. He argued that man has a twofold nature, an inner spiritual one and an outer bodily being; since “no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom,” only the inner man could be renewed.

> Faith alone can rule only in the inner man, as Romans 10[:10] says, “For man believes with his heart and so is justified,” and since faith alone justifies, it is clear that the inner man cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all, and that these works, whatever their character, have nothing to do with this inner man.[2]

This recognition—central to subsequent Protestant doctrine—that faith alone and not works would justify man in one stroke undercut the raison d’être for the Catholic Church. The Church was an intermediary between man and God, but it could shape only the outer man through its rituals and works. Luther was horrified by the decadence and corruption of the medieval Church, but the more profound insight was that the Church itself was unnecessary and, indeed, blasphemous in its efforts to coerce or bribe God. Luther himself would not be the teenager brought back to obedience by society; rather, society itself would have to adjust to the demands of the inner person. Though it was not Luther’s intention, the Reformation brought about exactly this result: the decline of Rome as the Universal Church, the rise of alternative churches, and a whole series of social changes in which the individual believer was prioritized over prevailing social structures.

Social theorists have long debated whether the monumental changes that took place in Europe following the Reformation—what we call modernization—were the product of material forces or were driven by ideas such as those of Luther. Karl Marx and contemporary neoclassical economists would say that Luther’s ideas were derivative of the material conditions: had there not been widespread economic discontents and divisions among the German princes, his views would never have spread the way they did. On the other hand, the sociologist Max Weber argued for the primacy of ideas: the very material conditions that economists study could only come about because they were legitimated by changes in the way people thought about them; similar conditions in previous times did not produce the same results because the intellectual climate was different.

In my view, both positions capture part of the truth, because causality moves in both directions at once. Material conditions obviously shape people’s receptivity to certain ideas. But ideas have their own inner logic, and without the cognitive framing they provide, people will interpret their material conditions differently. This affects our understanding of the evolution of the concept of identity, since it was driven by both an evolution in thought and the changing conditions of the broader society as Europe began the process of socioeconomic modernization.

On the plane of ideas, we can see that the distinction between inner and outer, and the valorization of the former over the latter, starts in an important sense with Luther.[1] Like many subsequent thinkers struggling with the question of identity, he began with an agonizing quest to understand himself, and the way in which he might be justified before God. This inner man was not good; he was a sinner, but could yet be saved through an inner act of belief that could not be made visible by any external action. Thus Luther is responsible for the notion, central to questions of identity, that the inner self is deep and possesses many layers that can be exposed only through private introspection.

Yet Martin Luther stands far from more modern understandings of identity. He celebrated the freedom of the inner self, but that self had only one dimension: faith, and the acceptance of God’s grace. It was a binary choice: one was free to choose God, or not. One could not choose to be a Hindu or a Buddhist or decide that one’s true identity lay in coming out of the closet as gay or lesbian. Luther was not facing a “crisis of meaning,” something that would have been incomprehensible to him; while he rejected the Universal Church, he accepted completely the underlying truth of Christianity.[3]

The second sense in which Luther had not yet arrived at the modern understanding of identity was that his inner self did not seek public recognition of its newfound freedom. Indeed, he agonized over his own motives: he sought to avoid the taint of self-satisfaction, knowing “himself to be an incorrigible sinner, incapable of escaping what he called concupiscence (the sin of doing the right thing not merely to please God but with an eye to self).”[4] While he received enormous recognition in his lifetime and was capable of monumental bouts of righteous anger, his doctrine of faith was built on the private relationship of man to God and not on any form of public approval.

Nonetheless, the distinction between inner and outer had been established and could be filled with new forms of inner freedom by subsequent thinkers who did not accept Martin Luther’s Christian worldview.

By the late eighteenth century, the idea at the core of modern identity had evolved much further and now took on a secular form. The Canadian political theorist Charles Taylor has written the definitive account of this process, and in it, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau plays a central role.[5] Rousseau was the fundamental source of many ideas that would later be critical to a host of modern trends: democracy, human rights, communism, the discipline of anthropology, and environmentalism. For him, however, the natural goodness of the inner self was a theme that tied together his varied political, social, and personal writings.[6]

Rousseau reversed the Christian moral evaluation of the inner human being. Christians such as Luther believed in original sin: human beings were fallen creatures who could be redeemed only through God’s love. In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau argued that the first human being—man in the state of nature—was not sinful. The characteristics we associate with sin and evil—jealousy, greed, violence, hatred, and the like—did not characterize the earliest humans. In Rousseau’s account, there was no original human society: early people were fearful, isolated creatures with limited needs, for whom sex but not the family was natural. They did not feel greed or envy; their only natural emotion was pity for the suffering of others.

According to Rousseau, human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society. The first humans began their descent into society by mastering animals, which “produced the first movement of pride in him.” They then started to cooperate for mutual protection and advantage; this closer association “engendered in the mind of man perceptions of certain relations… which we express by the words great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and other similar ideas.” The ability to compare, and to evaluate, other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness: “Men no sooner began to set a value upon each other, and know what esteem was, than each laid claim to it, and it was no longer safe for any man to refuse it to another.” Rousseau denounces the shift from amour de soi (love of self) to amour propre (self-love or vanity); simple self-interest is transmuted into feelings of pride and the desire for social recognition.[7]

Rousseau says that private property emerged with the discovery of metallurgy and agriculture; while making humans incomparably richer, the ability to accumulate property also vastly exaggerated natural differences between individuals and raised jealousy, envy, pride, and shame to new heights. Hence Rousseau’s famous injunction at the beginning of the second part of the Discourse:

> The first person who, having enclosed some land, took it upon himself to say “This is mine,” and found people simple-minded enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society… How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Don’t listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth to nobody![8]

Rousseau had two separate prescriptions for walking mankind back out of this catastrophe of inequality and violence. The first was outlined in The Social Contract, a political solution in which citizens return to their natural equality through the emergence of a “general will” that unites them in republican virtue. They cooperate with one another in a political union, but one that brooks no disagreement or pluralism. This solution has been rightly criticized as proto-totalitarian, quashing diversity and requiring strict uniformity of thought.

The second prescription is not political but plays out on an individual level. In his late work Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau tries to recover the state of consciousness of the first man—that is, humans as they were prior to the discovery of society. In the Discourse on Inequality, he had said that “the first sentiment of Man was that of his existence”; the sentiment de l’existence returns in the Reveries as a feeling of plenitude and happiness that emerges as an individual seeks to uncover the true self hiding beneath the layers of acquired social sensibilities.[9] Rousseau’s sentiment of existence would one day morph into what is now called lived experience, which lies at the root of contemporary identity politics.

Rousseau thus stakes out a distinctive position regarding human nature. He disputes the assertion of Thomas Hobbes that man in the state of nature was violent, cruel, and selfish; Rousseau also disagrees with John Locke that private property was natural to early man. He would also disagree with Socrates and Adeimantus that thymos was a constituent part of the human soul, since Rousseau asserts clearly that the emotion of pride, and hence the desire to be recognized by other people, did not exist for the earliest human beings.

What Rousseau asserts, and what becomes foundational in world politics in the subsequent centuries, is that a thing called society exists outside the individual, a mass of rules, relationships, injunctions, and customs that is itself the chief obstacle to the realization of human potential, and hence of human happiness. This way of thinking has become so instinctive to us now that we are unconscious of it. It is evident in the case of the teenager accused of a crime who raises the defense “Society made me do it,” or of the woman who feels that her potential is being limited by the gendered and sexist society around her. On a larger scale, it is evident in the complaints of a Vladimir Putin who feels the American-led international order wrongly disrespects Russia, and who then seeks to overturn it. While earlier thinkers could critique aspects of existing social rules and customs, few argued that existing society and its rules needed to be abolished en masse and replaced by something better. This is what ultimately links Rousseau to the revolutionary politics of France in 1789, or Russia in 1917, or China in 1949.

Like Luther, Rousseau establishes a sharp distinction between the inner self and the outer society demanding conformity to its rules. Unlike Luther, however, the freedom of that inner individual does not lie only in his or her ability to accept the grace of God; rather, it lies in the natural and universal ability to experience the sentiment de l’existence, free of the layers of accumulated social convention. Rousseau thus secularized and generalized the interiority opened up by Luther, accomplished through an exploration of Rousseau’s innermost feelings that was as anguished and prolonged as that of the Augustinian friar. According to Charles Taylor, “This is part of the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths.”[10]

Rousseau’s secularization of the inner self, and the priority he gives it over social convention, is thus a critical stepping-stone to the modern idea of identity. But Rousseau, as we have seen, did not believe that the desire for recognition was natural to human beings. He argued that the emotion of pride and the proclivity to compare oneself to others did not exist among early human beings, and that their emergence in human history laid the foundation for subsequent human unhappiness. The recovery of the inner self thus required divesting oneself of the need for social recognition; the solitary dreamer does not need anyone’s approval.

We might note how, given our present knowledge of early human societies and of human evolution, Rousseau was profoundly right about certain things, and profoundly wrong about others. He was largely correct in his description of the broad stages of human social evolution, tracing the transitions from what we would now call hunter-gatherer to agrarian and then to commercial societies. He was also correct in his emphasis on the importance of the discovery of agriculture: how it led to the institution of private property, and to agrarian societies that were far more unequal and hierarchical than the hunter-gatherer ones they displaced.[11]

But Rousseau was wrong about some important things, beginning with his assertion that early humans were primordially individualistic. We know he was wrong, first because we see no archaeological or anthropological evidence of presocial human beings, and second because we know with high confidence that the primate ancestors of modern human beings were themselves highly social. Existing primates have complex social structures along with, evidently, the emotional faculties needed to sustain them.[12] Rousseau’s assertion that pride emerged only at a certain stage of social evolution is curious; it begs the question of how such an intrinsic human feeling could spontaneously appear in response to an external stimulus. If pride were socially constructed, young children would have to be somehow trained to experience it, yet we do not observe this happening to our children. Today we know that feelings of pride and self-esteem are related to levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, and that chimpanzees exhibit elevated levels of serotonin when they achieve alpha male status.[13] It seems unlikely that there was ever a moment when behaviorally modern human beings did not compare themselves with one another or feel pride when they received social recognition. In this respect, Plato had a better understanding of human nature than Rousseau.

That the distinction between an inner and an outer self emerged in Europe between the Reformation and the French Revolution was not an accident. European society was undergoing a series of profound economic and social changes that created the material conditions by which such ideas could spread.

All human societies socialize their members to live by common rules; human cooperation, and hence human success as a species, would not be possible otherwise. All societies have had rebellious teenagers and misfits who didn’t want to accept those rules, but in this struggle, society almost always wins out by forcing inner selves to conform to external norms.

Hence the concept of identity as it is now understood would not even arise in most traditional human societies. For much of the last ten thousand years of human history, the vast majority of people lived in settled agrarian communities. In such societies, social roles are both limited and fixed: a strict hierarchy is based on age and gender; everyone has the same occupation (farming or raising children and minding a household); one’s entire life is lived in the same small village with a limited circle of friends and neighbors; one’s religion and beliefs are shared by all; and social mobility—moving away from the village, choosing a different occupation, or marrying someone not chosen by one’s parents—is virtually impossible. Such societies have neither pluralism, nor diversity, nor choice. Given this lack of choice, it did not make sense for an individual to sit around and brood over the question “Who am I, really?” All of the characteristics that make up an inner self are fixed. One could perhaps rebel by running away to another village, but there one would find oneself trapped in an identical limited social space. There was no concept of “society” standing outside the individual, limiting a person’s choices, and no valorization of an inner self over that society.

All of this began to change as a broad modernization took hold in Europe. A commercial revolution was unfolding that vastly expanded trade and began to upend established social hierarchies. Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that “the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market”; as markets grew through technological change, new occupations appeared and different social classes emerged. Cities were growing in power and independence, cities that served as havens for peasants seeking to escape the tyranny of their lords. The Reformation set off a century and a half of religious warfare that scrambled the political map of Europe. It opened up possibilities for religious choice in ways that had not been possible under the medieval Church. Invention of the printing press led to the spread of literacy and the rapid diffusion of new ideas.

These broader social and economic changes meant that individuals suddenly ...

# Footnotes

1

Many centuries before Martin Luther, Augustine went through a similar tortured exploration of his inner self in his Confessions. Unlike Luther, however, his writings did not devalue established social institutions or trigger massive upheavals in the politics and society of his time.

2

Strictly speaking, Luther believed that faith was a gift from God, the result of God’s grace, and was not something that could simply be willed by individuals. The Calvinists carried this doctrine further, believing that individuals were predestined either to be saved or not; they had no agency in the outcome. Nonetheless, under both doctrines faith was a characteristic of the inner self and still enjoined obedience to God’s law, the content of which was not subject to human choice.

3

In the United States there is a great deal of confusion over the term middle class, since a large majority of Americans like to categorize themselves as middle class, even when they are well-to-do elites or people who in Europe would be characterized as working-class or even poor. The most politically relevant group would be those in the third or fourth quintiles of the national income distribution, who are the most vulnerable to stagnation or downward mobility.

4

The Schengen zone overlaps with but does not completely correspond to either the EU or the eurozone; some EU countries such as Ireland and the United Kingdom opted out, while non-EU states such as Iceland and Norway are de facto parts of the zone.

5

As Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”

6

The English language remains an important integrative characteristic of American identity, which is why bi- and multilingual programs in public schools have been controversial.

# NOTES

1

Francis Fukuyama, “The Populist Surge,” The American Interest 13 (4) (2018): 16–18.

2

Larry Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy 26 (1) (2015): 141–55.

3

Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18; The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

4

I am interpreting Hegel through the lens of Alexandre Kojève, who saw the evolving European Economic Community as the embodiment of the end of history.

5

Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

6

I am grateful to those people who actually took the time to read my book. See in particular Paul Sagar, “The Last Hollow Laugh,” Aeon, March 21, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/was-francis-fukuyama-the-first-man-to-see-trump-coming.

Please note that some of the links referenced throughout this work may no longer be active.

7

Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture; see Francis Fukuyama, “Identity, Immigration, and Liberal Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 17 (2) (2006): 5–20; Latsis lecture “European Identity Challenges,” given at the University of Geneva in November 2011, see “The Challenges for European Identity,” Global, January 11, 2012, http://www.theglobaljournal.net/group/francis-fukuyama/article/469/.

1

Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

2

Steven Radelet, The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 4.

3

For a comprehensive account of the growth of global inequality, see Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016).

4

Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” 141–55.

5

Ali Alichi, Kory Kantenga, and Juan Solé, “Income Polarization in the United States,” IMF Working Paper WP/16/121 (Washington, DC, 2017); Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (1) (2003): 1–39.

6

Viktor Orbán, “Will Europe Belong to Europeans?,” speech given in Baile Tusnad, Romania, July 22, 2017, Visegrád Post, July 24, 2017, https://visegradpost.com/en/2017/07/24/full-speech-of-v-orban-will-europe-belong-to-europeans/.

7

Rukmini Callimachi, “Terrorist Groups Vow Bloodshed over Jerusalem. ISIS? Less So,” New York Times, December 8, 2017.

8

Orbán, “Will Europe Belong?”

9

James D. Fearon, “What Is Identity (As We Now Use the Word)?,” unpublished paper, November 3, 1999, http://fearonresearch.stanford.edu/53-2.

1

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

2

The Republic of Plato, trans., with notes and an interpretive essay, by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), variorum sec. 439b–c.

3

Ibid., 439e–440a.

4

Ibid., 440a–b.

5

Ibid., 440e–441a.

6

For an account of how isothymia plays out in practice, see Robert W. Fuller, Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2003).

7

Robert H. Frank, Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 7.

1

G. R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517–1559 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 2.

2

Martin Luther, Christian Liberty, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957), 7–8.

3

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 18.

4

Elton, Reformation Europe, 196.

5

See Taylor’s Sources of the Self and Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

6

See Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

7

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 3 (Paris: Éditions de la Pléiade, 1966), 165–66. Author’s translation.

8

Ibid., 165.

9

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1960), 17. Author’s translation.

10

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 26.

11

Rousseau’s belief that sex was natural but not the family does not seem to be true of behaviorally modern human beings. It is true, however, of modern chimpanzees and may well have been true of the presumed chimplike progenitor of modern humans.

12

For a more detailed treatment of this topic, see Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 26–38.

13

Frank, Choosing the Right Pond, 21–25.

1

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1947).

1

Rex Glensy, “The Right to Dignity,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 43 (65) (2011): 65–142.

2

Samuel Moyn, “The Secret History of Constitutional Dignity,” Yale Human Rights and Development Journal 17 (2) (2014): 39–73. The term dignity has entered into arguments over abortion, since the Catholic Church has maintained that human dignity begins at conception and constitutes an inviolable moral status.

3

Glensy (“Right to Dignity,” 77) notes that the word dignity appears in Federalist No. 1 (by Hamilton), but only in conjunction with the status of high officials.

4

Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 29.

5

David F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (London: Chapman Brothers, 1846).

6

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833.

1

Johann Gottfried von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

2

Ibid., 31.

3

Herder was no particular fan of the absolute monarchies of his day and did not believe they were more conducive to human happiness than the stateless societies of North America or Africa. See Johann Gottfried von Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 318–19.

4

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 33, 35.

5

Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of German Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 19–20.

6

Ibid., 35–94 passim.

7

Olivier Roy, “France’s Oedipal Islamist Complex,” Foreign Policy, January 7, 2016; Olivier Roy, “Who Are the New Jihadis?,” Guardian, April 13, 2017.

8

Richard Barrett, Foreign Fighters in Syria (New York: Soufan Group, 2014).

9

See Omer Taspinar, “ISIS Recruitment and the Frustrated Achiever,” Huffington Post, March 25, 2015.

10

Gilles Kepel, Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Robert F. Worth, “The Professor and the Jihadi,” New York Times, April 5, 2017; Robert Zaretsky, “Radicalized Islam, or Islamicized Radicalism?,” Chronicle of Higher Education 62 (37) (2016).

1

Sheri Berman, “The Lost Left,” Journal of Democracy 27 (4) (2016): 69–76. See also “Rose Thou Art Sick,” Economist, April 2, 2016.

2

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 20–25, 170–87.

3

The number of bi-billionaires, that is, individuals with wealth of $2 billion in 2013 dollars, increased fivefold from 1987 to 2013; their combined wealth is more than all of Africa’s. Milanovic, Global Inequality, 41–45.

4

Ibid., 11.

5

Alichi, Kantenga, and Solé, “Income Polarization,” 5.

6

Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 124.

1

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 50–51.

2

Frank, Choosing the Right Pond, 26–30.

3

Ibid., 21–26. See also Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 41–56.

4

Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 283–85.

5

Federico Ferrara, “The Psychology of Thailand’s Domestic Political Conflict: Democracy, Social Identity, and the ‘Struggle for Recognition’” (manuscript presented at the international workshop “Coup, King, Crisis: Thailand’s Political Troubles and the Royal Succession,” Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, January 24–25, 2017).

6

See inter alia William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

7

Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2010); Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).

8

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanics in the Twenty-First Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (49) (December 8, 2015); “Mortality and Morbidity in the Twenty-First Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, March 23–24, 2017.

9

U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey online data tool.

10

Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 61.

11

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016), 127.

12

Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 9.

13

Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 143.

1

The human potential movement was promoted by the Esalen Institute, one of whose early directors was Virginia Satir, to whose memory the California task force’s report is dedicated.

2

Abraham Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation (New York: Start Publishing, 2012).

3

Toward a State of Self-Esteem: The Final Report of the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal Social Responsibility (Sacramento: California State Department of Education, January 1990), 18–19.

4

Ibid., 19, 24. The universal need for self-esteem is also asserted in Robert W. Fuller, Dignity for All: How to Create a World Without Rankism (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008).

5

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 4, 13.

6

For an overview see Katie Wright, The Rise of the Therapeutic Society: Psychological Knowledge and the Contradictions of Cultural Change (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2010), 13–28.

7

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 142.

8

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 10, 13.

9

Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge, 2004), 4–5, 10.

10

Robert H. Schuller, Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (Waco, TX: Waco Books, 1982). Schuller’s books fall in a longer American tradition of self-help literature by authors such as Norman Vincent Peale. See for example Schuller’s Success Is Never Ending, Failure Is Never Final: How to Achieve Lasting Success Even in the Most Difficult Times (New York: Bantam Books, 1990).

11

Bob DeWaay, Redefining Christianity: Understanding the Purpose Driven Movement (Springfield, MO: 21st Century Press, 2006).

12

Andrew J. Polsky, The Rise of the Therapeutic State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 158–64.

13

Ibid., 199–200.

14

Quoted in Herbert Lindenberger, “On the Sacrality of Reading Lists: The Western Culture Debate at Stanford University,” in The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 151.

15

The overall trend of universities undertaking a therapeutic mission is described in Frank Furedi, “The Therapeutic University,” American Interest 13 (1) (2017): 55–62.

1

Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 141–43.

2

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 7–10.

3

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953).

4

Stuart Jeffries, “Are Women Human?” (interview with Catharine MacKinnon), Guardian, April 12, 2006.

5

See Jacob Hoerger, “Lived Experience vs. Experience,” Medium, October 24, 2016, https://medium.com/@jacobhoerger/lived-experience-vs-experience-2e467b6c2229.

6

These points are all made in Hoerger, ibid.

7

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43:1241–99, July 1991.

8

Mathieu Bock-Côté, Le multiculturalisme comme religion politique (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2016), 16–19.

9

Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy (New York: Nation Books, 2017), 23–24.

10

Theo Lochocki, “Germany’s Left Is Committing Suicide by Identity Politics,” Foreign Policy, January 23, 2018.

11

Maximillian Alvarez, “Cogito Zero Sum,” Baffler, August 2, 2017, https://thebaffler.com/the-poverty-of-theory/cogito-zero-sum-alvarez.

12

An example of this is the treatment of Rebecca Tuvel for her article “In Defense of Transracialism,” published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, as described by Kelly Oliver in “If This is Feminism…,” Philosophical Salon, May 8, 2017, http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/if-this-is-feminism-its-been-hijacked-by-the-thought-police/. See also Kelly Oliver, “Education in an Age of Outrage,” New York Times, October 16, 2017.

13

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).

14

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012).

15

Cultural appropriation refers to the efforts of someone of one race, ethnicity, or gender to make use of or profit from the culture of another group. In one notable case, a painting by artist Dana Schutz of Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse led to demands that the painting be destroyed on the grounds that she was a white painter depicting a moment traumatic for black people. In another case an editor was forced to step down from his position at the Canadian Writers Union for a piece defending the right of white authors to create characters from minority or indigenous backgrounds. In both cases the individuals being criticized were themselves liberals trying their best to sympathetically understand the experiences and sufferings of people from minority backgrounds.

The text of Hannah Black’s letter criticizing Dana Schutz is given at https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/d3p84a/black-artists-urge-the-whitney-biennial-to-remove-painting-of-murdered-black-teenager-emmett-till. See also Kenan Malik, “In Defense of Cultural Appropriation,” New York Times, June 14, 2017; Lionel Shriver, “Lionel Shriver’s Full Speech: ‘I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad,’” Guardian, September 13, 2016.

16

Matthew Taylor, “‘White Europe’: 60,000 Nationalists March on Poland’s Independence Day,” Guardian, November 12, 2017; Anne Applebaum, “Why Neo-Fascists Are Making a Shocking Surge in Poland,” Washington Post, November 13, 2017.

1

See Michela Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower (New York: HarperPerennial, 2010). See also Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, 330–32.

2

Rogers M. Smith, Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

3

For a poignant account of both the richness of pre–World War I Vienna and the tragedy of its collapse, see Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

4

In the wake of President Trump’s embrace of Vladimir Putin, a surprising number of Republicans have developed a favorable view of Russia, with a certain fringe asserting that they would trust Putin more than their fellow Americans who were liberal. Paul Reynolds, a Republican National Committee member from Alabama, was quoted as saying, “If I’ve got a choice of putting my welfare into the hands of Putin or the Washington Post, Putin wins every time.” James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: As Roy Moore Declines to Step Aside, a Tale of Two Republican Parties Emerges,” Washington Post, November 10, 2017; Zack Beauchamp, “Roy Moore Admires Vladimir Putin’s Morality,” Vox, December 8, 2017.

5

The rapidly developing states of East Asia had problems with corruption, but at levels generally lower than in other parts of the world. The elite focus on national development made possible the “developmental state” in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and China. While such states have been said to exist in African countries such as Rwanda or Ethiopia, or in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, these have tended to be the exception rather than the rule. See Stephan Haggard, Developmental States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

6

See Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).

7

Ibid.; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

8

This argument is made in Craig J. Calhoun, “Social Solidarity as a Problem for Cosmopolitan Democracy,” in Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

9

A classic argument for national identity as one of the necessary conditions of modern liberal democracy was made by Dankwart A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2 (1970): 337–63.

10

Zoltan L. Hajnal and Marisa Abrajano, White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

11

Pierre Manent, “Democracy Without Nations?,” Journal of Democracy 8 (1997): 92–102. See also Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, 185–97.

12

On the origin of the Universal Declaration, see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).

13

Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Craig J. Calhoun, “Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere,” Public Culture 13 (1) (2002): 147–71; Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

14

See Stewart Patrick, Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017); Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

1

This is argued in Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

2

This story is told in Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, 322–34.

3

This section is based on my Latsis lecture “European Identity Challenges.”

4

The theory of this view was outlined by Jürgen Habermas; see inter alia Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” Praxis International 12 (1) (1993): 1–19. See also Ghia Nodia, “The End of the Postnational Illusion,” Journal of Democracy 28 (2017): 5–19.

5

On national identity in the EU, see Kathleen R. McNamara, The Politics of Everyday Europe: Constructing Authority in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

6

T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas B. Klusmeyer, eds., From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000), 1–21; Gerhard Casper, “The Concept of National Citizenship in the Contemporary World: Identity or Volition?” (Hamburg, Germany: Bucerius Law School, 2008).

7

Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, From Migrants to Citizens, 32–118.

8

Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

9

Marc Morje Howard, The Politics of Citizenship in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 119–34; Nergis Canefe, “Citizens v. Permanent Guests: Cultural Memory and Citizenship Laws in a Reunified Germany,” Citizenship Studies 2 (3) (1998): 519–44.

10

Chikako Kashiwazaki, “Citizenship in Japan: Legal Practice and Contemporary Development,” in Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, From Migrants to Citizens.

11

Sara W. Goodman, “Fortifying Citizenship: Policy Strategies for Civic Integration in Western Europe,” World Politics 64 (4) (2012): 659–98; Robert Leiken, Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation, repr. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). A number of his conclusions seem a bit dated today in light of recent terrorist attacks in France.

12

“Discussion Guide for the Naturalization Authorities—Status 01.09.2005,” Country Commissioner for Data Protection Baden-Württemberg. September 1, 2005, https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.datenschutz.de/gesprachsleitfaden-fur-die-einburgerungsbehorden-stand-01-09-2005/. See also Simon McMahon, Developments in the Theory and Practice of Citizenship (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 29ff.

13

For empirical evidence of prejudice faced by French Muslims, see David Laitin, Claire L. Adida, and Marie-Anne Valfort, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

14

For a history of UKIP see Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (London: Routledge, 2014).

15

Alan G. R. Smith, The Emergence of a Nation-State: The Commonwealth of England, 1529–1660 (London: Longman, 1984), 89.

16

Tweeted on August 12, 2017.

17

Quoted in Smith, Political Peoplehood, 150, 152.

18

Ibid. Paine quoted in Gerhard Casper, “Forswearing Allegiance,” in Jahrbuch des öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart, ed. Peter Häberle (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 703.

19

See Ramon Lopez, “Answering the Alt-Right,” National Affairs 33 (2017): www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/answering-the-alt-right.

20

William A. Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 39.

21

Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 59.

22

See for example Carlos Lozada, “Samuel Huntington, a Prophet for the Trump Era,” Washington Post, July 18, 2017.

23

According to the OECD, Americans work an average of 34.29 hours per week, compared to an EU average of 33.23, and 39.79 in Korea. However, these averages include part-time workers, of whom there are proportionately more in the United States; average weekly hours for full-time U.S. workers is 47. See OECD (2018), Hours worked (indicator). DOI: 10.1787/47be1c78-en (accessed on February 14, 2018).

1

The U.S. citizenship oath is at https://www.uscis.gov/us-citizenship/naturalization-test/naturalization-oath-allegiance-united-states-america. For a detailed history of the naturalization oath, see Casper, “Forswearing Allegiance,” in Häberle, Jahrbuch. See also T. Alexander Aleinikoff, “Between Principles and Politics: US Citizenship Policy,” in Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, From Migrants to Citizens.

2

Contrary to the oath of naturalization, the United States has come to permit dual citizenship as well. This was not the result of a deliberate act of Congress, but the result of various judicial and administrative decisions driven ultimately by political expediency. See Casper, “Concept of National Citizenship.”

3

Bassam Tibi, “Why Can’t They Be Democratic?,” Journal of Democracy 19 (3) (2008): 43–48.

4

Something similar has happened in other multicultural societies in ways that sometimes get embodied in language. After the Acts of Union in 1707, when Scotland was incorporated into the United Kingdom, people in England began referring to themselves as British instead of English, an identity that included people in Wales, Scotland, and (at the time) Ireland. In the Russian language, the adjective russkiy means ethnic Russian, and the adjective rossiyskiy means a citizen of the Russian Federation, who could be a Muslim Chechen or a Dagestani.

5

“Muslim Identities and the School System in France and Britain: The Impact of the Political and Institutional Configurations on Islam-Related Education Policies,” paper presented for the ECPR General Conference, Pisa, September 2007; Jenny Berglund, Publicly Funded Islamic Education in Europe and the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2015); Marie Parker-Johnson, “Equal Access to State Funding: The Case of Muslim Schools in Britain,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 5 (2010): 273–89.

6

Even in France there are exceptions; the French state supports religious schools in Alsace as one of the complex historical legacies of that contested region.

7

Despite some evidence that Proposition 227 had been followed by an increase in English acquisition by immigrant children, it was repealed by Proposition 58 in 2016. See Edward Sifuentes, “Proposition 227: 10 Years Later,” San Diego Union-Tribune, November 8, 2008.

8

Daniel Jacobson, Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 8–11.

9

This situation changes the moment a foreigner reaches the territory of a given country. In the United States, Europe, and other liberal democracies, domestic law gives rights to noncitizens, including those who are undocumented. This creates strong incentives for migrants to reach the territory of a given country by any means possible, legal or illegal. It also gives states hoping to control their borders incentives to prevent them from doing so, by constructing physical barriers such as walls, interdiction on the high seas, or redirection to offshore jurisdictions where domestic law will not apply. See Casper, “Forswearing Allegiance,” in Häberle, Jahrbuch; Moria Paz, “The Law of Walls,” European Journal of International Law 28 (2) (2017): 601–24.

10

This was the proposed comprehensive immigration reform package suggested by the Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable, “Breaking the Immigration Stalemate: From Deep Disagreements to Constructive Proposals,” October 6, 2009.

11

Vetocracy refers to the way in which the American system of checks and balances permits well-organized minorities to veto decisions that get majority support. See Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, chap. 34, pp. 488–505.

12

See Juan Pablo Cardenal et al., Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence (Washington, DC: National Endowment for Democracy, December 2017).

13

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).