The scholar unfairly caricatured for announcing “the end of history” 37 years ago now sees a cyclical struggle ahead, not a resolved one
One of the more unexpected things to surface in Francis Fukuyama’s new intellectual memoir is tips on building your own computer, including the trick of properly seating a cooling fan on top of a microprocessor. The reason for that technical self-reliance turns out to be a genuine worry of his: a fear of cascading failures overwhelming a generation that can no longer read a paper map without GPS, or fix a robotaxi the way their fathers once fixed cars. It sounds less like the end of history than something closer to the end of days.
Thirty-seven years have passed since the 1989 essay that made Fukuyama internationally famous and simultaneously saddled him with a four-word phrase he has never quite escaped. To the many readers who, as he points out, never got past the title, he became a kind of scholarly shorthand for naive optimism, someone proclaiming liberal democracy’s total and unchallenged victory.
His new book, made up of 35 short, idiosyncratic chapters titled “In the Realm of the Last Man,” sets out to correct that image. Fukuyama insists he was never the wide-eyed champion of democratic capitalism he’s often taken for, and that he has always been alert to the darker undercurrents of human affairs alongside the hopeful ones. The book also serves as a running list of everything decades of further thinking have given him new reason to worry about, tracking the shift from the confident “New World Order” of the first Bush presidency to what he sees as the disorder of the Trump era.
It’s a natural moment for him to take stock. For all his characteristically measured tone, Fukuyama doesn’t hide his alarm at the direction Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and others are pushing the world. The book opens by accusing America’s 47th president of rupturing 250 years of uneven but real progress toward the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, arguing that Trump is attempting to turn the United States into an authoritarian state. Yet the man once branded history’s great optimist hasn’t become a prophet of doom either: he doesn’t think that attempt will succeed, at least not in the near term. Ahead of the autumn midterms, which some worry could be distorted by interference or intimidation, he tells me he still expects a significant pushback against Republican rule, one he sees as part of a broader backlash against populist nationalism, also visible in Viktor Orbán’s recent defeat in Hungary and Putin’s mounting difficulties on the Ukrainian battlefield.
The Fukuyama of today seems to pair almost every piece of bad news with a silver lining, and vice versa. In Germany, he notes, the far-right AfD may well take power in a state or two, setting an important precedent, but a proportional electoral system will still force it to govern within tight coalition constraints. In France, Marine Le Pen might finally win the presidency next year, only to find herself governing more in the mould of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, within the bounds of the EU and NATO, than in that of a Putin-aligned Orbán. And while he’s not especially worried about this year’s US midterms, he says he is genuinely concerned about the 2028 presidential race, fearing that Democrats out of touch with the wider electorate could nominate a candidate capable of winning New York or San Francisco but nowhere else.
In discussing where the world is headed, Fukuyama treats almost nothing as settled or predetermined, and that stance is as much a matter of will as of analysis. Facing down the current nationalist wave, he argues, requires people to believe change is still possible: nobody mobilizes against a movement they’ve already concluded will win, so the only sensible position is to assume we still have agency to bend history elsewhere.
Two episodes from his own life stood out to me as things that could easily have left him feeling like an outsider, yet somehow didn’t. The first is his father’s family being sent to a Japanese-American internment camp during the Second World War, a purely race-based measure that cost his grandfather the Los Angeles hardware store he’d built his standing on. That story of discrimination had a softer coda: his father escaped the aftermath via a scholarship from a small Nebraska college, something Fukuyama half-jokingly credits to the “bleeding-heart liberals” always ready to help someone being mistreated.
His father went on to a solid academic career, and Fukuyama recalls him saying he couldn’t point to a single moment in his life when his race had actually blocked him from achieving something. What Fukuyama takes from the family history isn’t grievance but evidence that assimilation is possible even against real obstacles, which is also why he considers racial identity politics a mistake: in his view, it traps people in an ethnic enclave instead of letting them simply see themselves as American. Whatever his disagreements with the country’s current government or the long-standing quirks of its political system, his attachment to America itself has never wavered.
The second potential source of alienation was his relationship with that same father, who he says never credited him with the ability to think independently, and assumed he’d been “brainwashed” any time he voiced an opinion his father disliked. It’s easy to imagine how painful that was for a serious-minded young man. As long as his father was alive, Fukuyama avoided reading the classic social theorists his father had studied, Weber, Durkheim, Marx and the rest. Only after his father’s death in 1995 did he finally take them up, and he describes discovering them as one of the great intellectual pleasures of his life. He now contrasts their broad, conceptual style with what he sees as the narrow, data-obsessed habits of contemporary social science, and has tried to model his own work on the older tradition instead.
His first reaction to his father’s dismissiveness, though, was rebellion rather than reflection. As a young man he absorbed his father’s leftist pacifism, and the future computer-builder was tribal enough in his sympathies to look down on engineers, assuming such practical-minded people leaned conservative and backed the Vietnam War. That changed once he left home. While most of his contemporaries arriving on campus in the early 1970s drifted left, Fukuyama moved right after enrolling at Cornell, falling under the sway of the conservative-leaning scholar Allan Bloom. A brief flirtation with fashionable French postmodern theory, which he now dismisses outright, only pushed him further in that direction: he set aside Foucault and Lacan, picked up Churchill’s history of the Second World War, and switched from the humanities to international relations at Harvard. By the late 1970s he had settled comfortably among the Cold War hawks who would later become Washington’s neoconservatives, and he has spent much of the 21st century working his way back out of that camp.
His first public break with the neocons came over the second Iraq war, though not, to his lasting regret, during the run-up to it. He recalls with embarrassment casually signing one of the open letters then circulating among his circle calling for Saddam Hussein’s removal. He didn’t break ranks when the war began in 2003, nor even that summer as the first signs of civil war appeared, but only in 2004. That war trampled the very principle of state sovereignty that had supposedly justified the first Gulf War in 1990, and Washington’s public case for it, as British intelligence reportedly told Tony Blair, rested on facts being fitted around a policy already decided. Even now, Fukuyama rejects conspiratorial readings of the Iraq war and accusations of bad faith, blaming instead a practical failure to think through the consequences of using force, the same mistake he now sees Trump repeating over Iran. He says he understood even in 2003 that the intervention was likely to produce serious unintended consequences, and describes the real obstacle at the time as psychological: with figures like Paul Wolfowitz, whom he deferred to as one of the smartest people he’d ever met, busy rationalizing the war, he found himself mentally blocked from concluding his own circle was wrong. Only once the scale of the disaster became undeniable did he accept that even highly intelligent people can talk themselves into believing something implausible.
Eventually he made the break, enduring being frozen out by former friends at Washington parties as a result, but he says the split ultimately proved liberating, freeing him to question other assumptions common among enthusiasts for American military power, including unregulated finance and a general disdain for the state’s role.
As he rethought his views in middle age, Fukuyama drew on the philosophical grounding he’d gotten early on from Bloom, and indirectly from Bloom’s own teacher, Leo Strauss, rooted in the fundamental questions that have occupied philosophers since Socrates: what makes for a good life, or a just society. The sharpest moments in his new book come in short bursts where he steps back from scholarly detail to make bigger claims, such as his observation that Machiavelli was the first to shift politics’ central concern from cultivating the good life to merely preserving life itself, opening the door for Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, each of whom built distinct philosophies on differing assumptions about human nature. He credits all three for at least attempting to grapple with what people are actually like, unlike Kant and later figures such as John Rawls, whom he accuses of reducing human beings to bloodless reasoning machines.
He levels a similar charge at mainstream economics, dismissing the popular idea that bolting concepts like altruism or habit onto otherwise atomistic models can meaningfully fix them. Once it’s accepted that people can want things for others just as readily as for themselves, he argues, outcomes become genuinely unpredictable, and standard economic models inevitably struggle to forecast much of anything.
He makes a parallel accusation against hardline realism in international relations, which treats states as opaque objects colliding with one another with no interest in their internal workings. Just as economists reduce people to pursuers of utility, he argues, realists reduce governments to pursuers of an ill-defined national interest, without asking how domestic politics actually shapes what that interest is understood to be. In both economics and international politics, he suggests, real life resists this kind of tidy modeling.
Which brings the conversation back to the “end of history” itself. Fukuyama’s original 1989 thesis borrowed and reworked an idea from lectures the Russian-born philosopher Alexandre Kojève gave in 1930s Paris, in which Kojève had somewhat playfully argued that history effectively ended in 1806, when Napoleon defeated the old Prussian aristocratic order and sealed the victory of the French Revolution on the battlefield. Kojève knew perfectly well that wars, revolutions and colonial conflicts would continue regardless; his point, as Fukuyama explains it, was that once the idea of universal freedom had been unleashed, its eventual triumph everywhere was only a matter of time, since no one had produced, or was likely to produce, a better foundation for society than equal freedom and equal dignity. In the realm of ideas, older appeals to hierarchy and domination no longer had any real competitor.
There were obvious oddities in the argument, not least that Kojève himself later turned out to have been a KGB agent, making him in some sense a man of the Russian rather than the French revolution. Still, 1989 proved a fitting moment for Fukuyama to revive and update the idea: with communism collapsing, the countries it had governed seemed headed toward convergence with the Western model. His memoir is careful to note, though, that even then his tone wasn’t triumphalist; his original essay described the end of history as “a very sad time,” one in which daring, courage, imagination and idealism would become unnecessary in a future defined by peace, prosperity and stable liberal democracy.
By 1992 he had expanded the argument into a full book, adding chapters inspired by Nietzsche’s mocking portrait of the passive, contented “last man,” left with nothing to strive for once conflict disappeared. Fukuyama was already concerned that a human appetite for dominance, or simple boredom, might eventually turn people against liberal democracy itself, and he now views the populist surge of recent years as vindication of that worry.
What has genuinely shifted his thinking, somewhat surprisingly, isn’t decades of wage stagnation and inequality across Western economies. Taking the long view, he still maintains that liberal democracy provides objective material conditions better than at any point in history. His real concern now is generational: since one of the strongest drivers of belief in liberalism is direct experience of living without it, a rising generation in a country like Poland, with no memory of life under dictatorship, can convince itself that Brussels represents the real tyranny.
As he sums it up, the end of history may ultimately prove to be a cyclical process, in which societies periodically experiment with illiberal alternatives, learn firsthand how badly they work, and then return to accepting liberal democracy. It’s a compelling thought, even if it isn’t, in any conventional sense, an ending at all.
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