Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris, Free Press, 220 pages, $26

ON the merits, this book deserves the buzz that Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” got. But then Fukuyama was telling us what we want to hear; Lee Harris is doing anything but.

Like “End,” “Civilization” got its start as an essay in a conservative journal – Policy Review, this time, rather than The National Interest.

Each work is, in rough, political philosophy for the layman. But where Fukuyama pounced at the Cold War’s end, Harris was compelled to write by 9/11. His goal: to give us the concepts we need to face the present danger – and to explain why those concepts are so hard to come by. Quibbles aside, he does a damn fine job.

Harris begins with the “enemies” of his title, and the near-universal post-9/11 question: Why do they hate us? His answer: They don’t.

Oh, Osama & Co. hate plenty. But what they hate isn’t us; rather, it’s the strawman their ideology instructs them to see. The real people are incidental – indeed, reality is incidental. How else do you slaughter innocents and count yourself a hero?

The full argument explains some puzzling facts. Why didn’t al Qaeda follow up 9/11 at once – when a bomb in Grand Central, for example, might have finished off New York’s bleeding psyche? Because the same “fantasy ideology” that turns horror into heroism also dictated that only an equally spectacular blow would “count.”

Yet such systematic fantasy gives a frightful strength – it empowers those it infects to burst the bounds of civilized behavior in ways that liberal societies are ill-fitted to combat.

Why didn’t Germany’s sane majority stop Hitler before 1933? For much the same reason that Europe’s sane majority didn’t stop Nazi Germany before 1939: failure of the imagination.

That is, those who could have stopped the descent into madness wouldn’t see the madness right before them: They simply refused to grasp that Hitler was not an opponent within the rules of “the game,” but an enemy of the game itself – an enemy of the cooperative competition that defines our civilization.

Righties, swallow your pride – this is our weakness, too, not just that of “Envision world peace” liberals – or even “We all win through global trade” corporate types. Remember, the Reagan administration didn’t just cut a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini – it sent him a Bible and a cake.

Indeed, it was the Bush administration that assumed that, once Saddam was gone, order would break out spontaneously.

Why do civilized men actively resist recognizing the enemy? Because civilization necessarily leads us to need to believe that man is fundamentally decent. (That’s right: Talk of original sin really is déclassé.)

Harris’ argument here is too complex to summarize; it’s an account of liberty’s evolution – of the fits and starts by which our ancestors learned to organize human relations so that individual freedom became the state of the common man.

Along the way, he gets off some fine lines and makes some extremely wise distinctions. An example of the last: A genuine state, one people have actually built among themselves, is a clean different thing from a state by courtesy – one the “international community” simply recognizes into “existence.”

Psuedo-states won’t behave reliably as citizens of the international community; treating them as such is not respecting the rights of a nation, but licensing the depredations of whatever thugs happen to hold power.

Harris gives his readers much more, from a reader-friendly treatment of Hegel to a fair case for America as both the present pinnacle and accepted hegemon of civilization. It’s a serious book for serious times, but not a bitter one. If this review hasn’t scared you off, you should read it.

E-mail: cunningham@ nypost.com