On a recent morning, Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama was sitting in his office in the basement of Stanford University, talking about drones.
Not the ones made in Turkey that are vital to Ukraine’s defense — a cause that Fukuyama, one of the leading voices on US foreign policy, has championed vehemently. The simplest, do-it-yourself ones, which he started building again about six months ago in his home workshop.
He also built land probes and some furniture — a laborious task he chose to devote himself to decades ago, when he decided to turn a walnut tree that had fallen in his backyard into a pair of folding tables; just to dry the wood took three years. “I start projects that are very ambitious, and it’s so exhausting that by the end I’m tired of it,” he explains. “I have many hobbies.”
One thing Fukuyama, 69, hasn’t had enough of is trying to answer the biggest questions about democracy, human nature and the long arc of historical progress. In 1989, he was raised to unlikely fame for his essay “The End of History?”, which claimed that the decline of communism marked the end of the great ideological struggle and the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the ultimate form of human government.” “.
Published months before the fall of the Berlin Wall (and expanded into a blockbuster book in 1992), it was an instant sensation that continued to inspire debate, mockery and memes.
Fukuyama moved on to more earthly themes, writing about social trust, biotechnology, governance, the origins of political order, and the decline (in his view) of the neoconservative movement from which he emerged. But he also continued to refine – and defend – the thesis that made him famous.
She hovers behind his new book, “Liberalism and its Discontents,” a short, staunch defense of classical liberal values against what he sees as threats from both the identitarian left and the nationalist and populist right. more dangerous.
The 1989 Fukuyama saw the end of the great ideological struggle as potentially boring. But the 2022 one takes on a little more passion, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a country he’s been visiting regularly since 2013. In early March, he predicted that Russia was “heading for a complete defeat” that will “revive the spirit of 1989” and “bring us out of our rut about the decaying situation of global democracy”. He has since been inundated with requests for interviews.
“There is a lot of cynicism about the idea of democracy, even in many democratic countries,” he says. “It makes it so clear why it’s better to live in a liberal society.”
Fukuyama grew up in New York City, where his father was a minister and academic. He fell in love with philosophy at Cornell University, where he studied the classics. If “The End of History?” had a beginning, it may have been a seminar on Plato’s “Republic,” in which Socrates begins by debating the nature of justice.
“It marked me in the sense of showing what people should be doing, asking really big questions”, he says. But how he went from there to neocon foreign policy “is a little more complicated.”
After a flirtation with postmodern literary theory at Yale, he transferred to the doctoral program in governance at Harvard, where he wrote a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East. Early in the Reagan administration, his neo-conservative friend and colleague Paul Wolfowitz hired him for the Office of Policy Planning at the State Department.
It was during a later period there, under George HW Bush, that Fukuyama wrote “The End of History?”. Published in The National Interest with comments from half a dozen prominent people, the essay (which was based on a reading of Hegel’s abstruse philosophy of history) dropped like a bomb, “selling more than anything, even pornography,” according to one newsstand owner in Washington.
Fame made him “less dependent on the good opinion of a circle of friends”. In 2004, he broke with fellow neoconservatives over what he saw as their deceptively positive assessment of the Iraq War. In an article in the National Interest, attacked figures such as columnist Charles Krauthammer for promoting an inconsequential nation-building project, disconnected from reality, and betraying neoconservatism’s traditional caution with great social experiments.
Today, Fukuyama calls the resulting schism difficult but liberating. “I could think for myself.”
Jacob Heilbrunn, author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons” (they knew they were right: the rise of neocons) and current editor of the National Interest, says that Fukuyama had a more reality-based perspective than his peers. ex-friends. “Intellectuals have a predilection for radicalism,” he says. “He came from a radical movement, but I think he managed to keep his structures.”
Fukuyama describes this as a matter of correcting his ideas when experience proves them wrong. As for his current politics, he describes himself as “more left-wing” on economics, but center-right on many cultural issues.
In his new book, released on Tuesday (10), Fukuyama says that today liberalism is threatened not by a rival ideology, but by “absolutized” versions of its own principles. On the right, promoters of neoliberal economics have turned the ideal of individual autonomy and the free market into religion, distorting the economy and leading to dangerous systemic instability. And on the left, progressives have abandoned individual autonomy and free expression in favor of group rights claims that threaten national cohesion.
“The answer to these malcontents,” he writes, “is not to abandon liberalism, but to moderate it.”
Fukuyama says Eric Chinski, editor of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, led him to engage with the more serious critics of liberal individualism who do not see racism, such as black philosopher Charles W. Mills. According to Fukuyama, many critical racial theorists in academia “are making serious theses” in response to liberalism’s historical and continuing failure to fully extend equal rights.
He is more radical about “post-liberal” intellectuals on the American right, with his admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, such as legal scholar Adrian Vermeule (who he describes as having “flirted with the idea of an overtly authoritarian government” ) and political scientist Patrick Deneen.
But Fukuyama is less interested in polemics than in practical things. If he emerged in 1989 as something of a prophet, he is now a down-to-earth social scientist, concerned with what it takes to keep systems and structures running.
As part of a class called Real-World Problem Solving, he led more than 20 undergraduate students through a simulation of a real-life anti-corruption campaign in Indonesia. It’s an exercise he has conducted in several countries, including Ukraine, as part of a leadership training program offered by Stanford’s Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, which he directed until last year.
The solutions he offers at the end of his new book can seem technocratic and tedious (“devolving power to the lowest appropriate level of governance”) or abstract (“protecting freedom of expression, with a proper understanding of limits”). And his final sentence — the call to regain “a sense of moderation, both individual and communal — is hardly the sort of thing that brings the populace to the streets.
He says he’s not sure what he’s going to do. “One of the problems of ‘The End of History?’ is that it spawned complacency,” he says. “But you have to be vigilant. And you have to keep fighting.”
