1. See Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Lindbloom, Charles, “The Science of Muddling Through,” Public Administration Review 19 (Spring 1959): 79–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Charles W., Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; Fowler, Robert Booth, Enduring Liberalism: American Political Thought Since the Sixties (Lawrence, Kan., 1999).Google Scholar

2. More, Thomas, Utopia (1516), trans. Turner, Paul (Baltimore, 1965), 42.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., 63–64.

4. The “Dialogue of the Counsel” is so elegantly poised between both forms of policy counsel that readers of Utopia sharply disagree about More's own intentions. Is More the frustrated counselor who presents a big theory (in this case, the depiction of a perfect society) as the appropriate mode for evaluating existing policies? Or is More, the advocate of conventional counsel, the hero of the dialogue and Hythloday (“nonsense peddler” in Greek) the misguided big theorist? Dominic Baker-Smith emphasizes the exploration of Aristotelian and Platonic modes of counsel among the participants but tends to identify Hythloday with the authorial More. More's Utopia (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. Berger, Harry takes the position that “Morton is an anti-Hythloday, and More, if anything, is a lesser Morton.” “The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Guess World,” Centennial Review 9 (Winter 1965): 36–77.Google Scholar David Bevington argues that More took no sides in the dialogue, and J. H. Hexter believes that More was a proponent of radical change in 1516 but framed his counsel in “Machiavellian” terms. “The Dialogue in Utopia: Two Sides to the Question,” Studies in Philology 58 (1961): 496–509Google Scholar; idem, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel (New York, 1973).

5. Schuman, Paul, “Nonincremental Policy Making: Notes Toward an Alternative Paradigm,” American Political Science Review 69 (12 1975): 1355.Google Scholar

6. For discussions of the early careers of Burnham and Fukuyama, respectively, see Smart, Kevin J., How Great the Triumph: James Burnham, Anticommunism, and the Conservative Movement (Lanham, Md., 1992), 1–42Google Scholar; Diggins, John P., Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York, 1975), 160–198Google Scholar; and Berman, Paul, A Tale of Two Utopias (New York, 1996), 254–339.Google Scholar

7. Burnham's The Managerial Revolution (1941) was well received by the corporate community and The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950) was sympathetically analyzed by the State and Defense Departments and the CIA. His other works framed foreign policy debates in the presidential elections of 1956, 1960, and 1964. Even critics acknowledged the wide influence of “Burnhamite” views. See Smart, How Great the Triumph, 36–37; Hoopes, Towshend, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston, 1973), 118Google Scholar; and Diggins, Up From Communism, 324–26. Fukuyama's “The End of History?” was perhaps the most widely circulated essay on foreign policy since Kennan's famous article, and his subsequent works continue to intrigue significant figures in the foreign policy establishment and the academy. Bloom, Allan et al. , “Responses to Fukuyama,” National Interest (Summer 1989): 19–35Google Scholar; Fuller, Timothy et al. , “More Responses to Fukuyama,” National Interest (Fall 1989): 93–100Google Scholar; Mansfield, Harvey et al. , “Responses to Fukuyama,” National Interest (Summer 1999): 34–44.Google Scholar

8. Burnham, James, The Machiavellians (1943) (Chicago, 1970), viii.Google Scholar

9. Diggins, John P., Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, 1972).Google Scholar

10. Burnham, The Machiavellians, 277.

11. Francis, Samuel T., Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham (Lanham, Md., 1984)Google Scholar; Cowley, Malcolm, “The Newest Machiavelli,” Nation 108 (17 05 1943), 673–674.Google Scholar

12. Fuller et al., “More Responses,” 99–100, argues that an emphasis on rights, which is the “signal feature of American political theory and practice,” received “negligible inspiration or support” from Hegel. See also the responses of Kristol and Moynihan (Bloom et al., 26–27; 28–29) as representative of liberal and conservative skittishness in regard to Fukuyama's importation of a Big Theorist.

13. Fuller et al., “More Responses,” 94–95. See also the response of Bloom (1989, 19–20). Callinicos, Alex voices complaints from the Left: “Liberalism, Marxism, and Democracy: A Response to David Held,” Theory and Society 22 (1993): 284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (New York, 1941), 167.Google Scholar

15. Cold War counsel subsumed Burnham's explanation of this unique and unanticipated “social revolution,” but he returned to this account in 1959, when he argued for a resurgence of congressional power as the only check available to restrain managerial elites who had captured both the executive branch and the judiciary. Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago, 1959).Google Scholar

16. Burnham referred to a Communist-led mutiny of Greek sailors as evidence of Communist strategy to overcome the West and hence the start of the Cold War. The actual war, he added, “may begin at any moment, today, tomorrow, it may even begin before these sentences are finished.” The Struggle for the World (New York, 1947).Google Scholar

17. Fukuyama, Francis, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York, 1999), 282.Google Scholar

18. Fukuyama, Francis, “Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle,” National Interest (Summer 1999), 31Google Scholar; Our Posthuman Future (New York, 2002).Google Scholar

19. Burnham in 1941 and even in 1943 was quite certain about the inapplicability of democratic governance. Later, however, he modified or, according to critics, secluded his assessments only to revive them later. Fukuyama has changed his assessments twice in regard to the nature of politics within modern governments. First he suggested an era of discontent in 1989, then offered predictions about the spontaneous regeneration of social capital altering his assessment only to admit his errors in 1999. Francis Fukuyama, “Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle,” 12.

20. In 1994, Fukuyama claimed that critics confused empirical and normative arguments in his theory. “Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later,” in Burns, Timothy, ed., After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics (London, 1994), 240–243Google Scholar. Burnham insisted that his definition of inevitability was predicated on “probable” estimates that could change. Burnham, James, The Coming Defeat of Communism (New York, 1950), 278.Google Scholar

21. Critics of both Big Theories have consistently raised this point. George Orwell argued in 1956 that Burnham's theories are posited on a single trend, designated as inevitable, from which Big Predictions are crafted. “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” in The Orwell Reader (New York, 1956), 335Google Scholar. Samuel Huntington has called Fukuyama's Big Theory, as well as others, an ideology of “endism,” which he defines as predictions based upon “the predictability of history and the permanence of the moment.” “No Exit: The Errors of Endism,” National Interest (Fall 1989), 10.

22. Burnham's definition of liberalism centered upon the contemporary New Deal variation, but his selection of liberal propositions was so broad that it seemed to encompass Enlightenment sensibilities as well. The plasticity of human nature, the belief in progress, and the reliance upon reason constituted a set of beliefs that, while they might not be the source of the decline of Western civilization, “motivates and justifies the contraction, and reconciles us to it.” Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (New York, 1964), 40–42.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., 192.

24. According to Fukuyama, the impulse of isothymia has no boundaries. Liberal societies might revive Aristophanes' plan in Assembly of Women to “force handsome boys to marry ugly women and vice versa.” Animal rights activists would take on more aggressive demands arguing that “man is simply a more organized and rational form of slime.” It was even possible that there would be those who will argue that intestinal parasites and HIV viruses should have “rights equal to human beings.” The End of History and the Last Man, 294, 295, 297.

25. Burnham, James, Containment or Liberation? (New York, 1953), 21–22.Google Scholar

26. Burnham retained liberation as the only viable alternative to “appeasement” throughout the Cold War. During his career, however, he continued to present specific big proposals. After the failed Hungarian revolt, he suggested, much to the consternation of fellow conservatives, the mutual NATO and Soviet withdrawal from Western and Eastern Europe and a unified neutral Germany. He also supported, in the same independent vein, diplomatic recognition of China and the turnover of the Panama Canal. Smart, How Great the Triumph, 69–70; 149–50.

27. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 16–17.

28. Fukuyama has disclaimed, for example, both the significance of the Gulf War and the events of September 11 as anything more than “throwbacks” in the formation of the “New World Order.” The Guardian (London), 7 09 1991Google Scholar; Wall Street Journal, 5 October 2001, 14.

29. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 283.

30. Lake, Anthony, “From Containment to Enlargement,” Vital Speeches (21 09 1993), 17.Google Scholar

31. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for example, who later was sharply critical of Burnham's Big Theory, noted in 1947 that while he might have outlined a “maximum position” of Soviet motives, Burnham's “romantic Machiavellianism” was preferable to the “confused and messy arguments” of policymakers. “World War III,” Nation 164 (5 04 1947), 398Google Scholar. In regard to the same book, George Soule concluded that Burnham's counsel would require domestic concentration camps and the “desirability of a gestapo” to suppress Communism. Soule, George, “First Aid for Communists,” New Republic 116 (24 03 1947), 33Google Scholar. In a similar vein, Stephen Sestanovich concludes that while Fukuyama incorrectly minimizes the resort to violence in international politics, he agrees that it will play “a less pervasive role … and that is a major change. Bloom et al., “Responses,” 34. Others have offered much more negative scenarios. For example, Frank Farudi contends that “The End of History?” reconfirms Western feelings of superiority over the Third World, which is now conceptualized as “mired in history” and thus authorizes widespread use of force in developing states. Furedi, Frank, “The Enthronement of Low Expectations: Fukuyama's Ideological Compromise for Our Time,” in Bertram, Christopher and Chitty, Andrew, eds., Has History Ended? Fukuyama, Marx, Modernity (Aldershot, England; Brookfield, Ver., 1994), 31–45Google Scholar. Less judgmentally, Robert D. Kaplan suggests a “bifurcated world” of the future in which the “Last Man” reigns in developed nations and “Hobbes' First Man” rules in the rest. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post–Cold War (New York, 2000), 24–25.Google Scholar

32. For reviews of policy debates at the onset and end of the Cold War, respectively, see Gaddis, John, The United States and the Origin of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Harris, Owen, “Between Paradigms,” National Interest (Fall 1989), 104–107.Google Scholar

33. For example, for arguments that contend that Fukuyama presents a millenarian theory, see Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx (New York, 1994), 14–15Google Scholar; Marx, Susan, “International Law, Democracy, and the End of History,” in Fox, Gregory H. and Roth, Brad R., eds., Democratic Governance and International Law (Cambridge, 2000), 534–540Google Scholar. Furedi, however, argues that Fukuyama offers a disguised declinist theory. “The Enthronement of Low Expectations,” 38, 43.

34. The charge that liberal societies promote uniformity and are characterized by a diminution of great projects extends from Burke through Carlyle and Tocqueville to Oakeshott and Kirk.

35. David Held, for example, concludes that The End of History and the Last Man offers a “sophisticated justification for many of the commonplaces found among the leading governments of the West in the 1980s, especially those of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan”; and Charles Frankel suggested that The Suicide of the West “is the pure Platonic Form of which Barry Goldwater is only a pale, stammering shadow.” Held, David, “Liberalism, Marxism, and Democracy,” Theory and Society 22 (1993): 357CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frankel, Charles, “A Conservative Autopsy,” New Leader 47 (20 07 1964), 5.Google Scholar

36. Joseph McCartney, for example, complains of Fukuyama's trivialization of inequalities in liberal societies while acknowledging the utility of Hegel as a model for a truly “radical” equalitarianism. “Shaping Ends: Reflections on Fukuyama,” in Bertram and Chitty, eds., Has History Ended? 23–26.

37. See, for example, Tom Darby, “Technology, Christianity, and the Universal and Homogeneous State,” in Burns, ed., After History? 213; Mansfield et al., “Responses,” 35.See also Gertrude Himmelfarb's comments in ibid., 38.