Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Ezra Klein (0:47)

Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay, The End of History, is remembered as this triumphalist argument heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy. After it, anything major that happened in the world, you would get these people saying, well, I guess history didn't really end, did it? I remember this particularly after 9-11. This week, of course, is the 25th anniversary of 9-11.

But this was such a terrible misreading of Fukuyama's argument, because if you actually read his essay, and particularly if you read the book that came out of that essay, he is saying something very different. The book was called The End of History and the Last Man, and it was anything but triumphalist. Liberal democracy might win, Fukuyama thought. It might become the way most states organize themselves, but it might win atop a cramped and partial vision of the human soul. One that believed in our ability to consume, but had little room for our desire for recognition, for greatness, for daring. And no political system without room for those parts of our souls would be stable for very long. You cannot build a good society atop a flawed vision of human nature. My view is that very few books in politics are as insightful or as important for understanding where liberal democracy went wrong, why figures like Donald Trump keep rising, and why the opposition to them seems so wan and uninspiring so often. So this is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin that didn't really commit because it has something to say to us now.

Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University. He's written many books since that one, including a two-volume series on the nature of political orders, a critique of the neoconservative world that he was once part of, and a defense of liberalism from its attackers. But his new book is a memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man. And so I wanted to begin with that idea of the end of history and the last man. I wanted to begin by rediscovering the book that made Fukuyama famous, so we can hear what it has to say about the world we now live in.

Francis Fukuyama, welcome to the show.

Francis Fukuyama (3:01)

Thanks very much for having me.

Ezra Klein (3:03)

So I want to begin the conversation in your most famous book, a book I'm a huge fan of, which is The End of History and the Last Man.

So this is built on an essay that comes out in 1989 It's a few months before the Berlin Wall falls. The book comes out after the fall of the wall. You have this moment where liberal democracy really seems to be triumphing. The end of history has become this highly memed, in many ways simplified concept. So what was it?

Francis Fukuyama (3:32)

Well, this was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel.

And he meant history with a capital H. So we would use the word development or modernization today.

But it's directional. It's progressive. Things are getting better. Human reason is prevailing in structuring societies. And the question of the end of history was not the end of events. It was to what objective does this historical process seem to be leading? The Marxists took that same concept of history. They believed in history also. But they believed that the end was not a liberal society. It was a communist utopia. And that was their guiding star in their political movement. And my observation back in the late 1980s when Gorbachev was in the Soviet Union was that we weren't going to get there. We were going to stop at the penultimate stage, which was some version of liberal democracy and a capitalist economy. And for me, that was the practical end of history that had really emerged.

Ezra Klein (4:37)

So this is more the way to think about the term the end of history is the end of the process of figuring out how to politically organize society.

Francis Fukuyama (4:45)

Or the goal or the objective of that process.

Ezra Klein (4:48)

Why do you think we were going to stop there?

Francis Fukuyama (4:51)

Well, I didn't know that we were going to stop, but all of these big systematic competitors had all either self-destructed or had been rejected by the people that once followed them. And I think the challenge that I was trying to make was to ask people, yeah, can you locate something that's better than this outcome?