Francis Fukuyama on why history didn’t end

Brian Lehrer (0:05)

From WNYC, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast.

It's Wednesday, October 14th.

In 1989, an epic development in world history was taking place. The Soviet Empire was collapsing country after country, almost entirely without bloodshed. It could have seemed like humanity was marching toward a kind of consensus around democracy and market economies. And that year, a State Department policy planner published an essay called The End of History, with a question mark. Three years later, that essay was expanded and it became the book, The End of History and the Last Man. No question mark. Its author, Francis Fukuyama, had become one of the most cited political thinkers alive. How many of you listening had to read that book, or another by Fukuyama in college? Well, since the publication of that book, the world has seen, I don't have to tell you, right? War in Iraq, the financial crisis, January 6th, Putin's war in Ukraine, a second Trump term, Iran. Fukuyama says he's been asked several times a week for three decades whether he wants to revise his main arguments from that 1992 book. And we'll get into what those arguments were and why he says he was at least somewhat misunderstood. His answer more in full is a new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man.

It sends readers back to the last five chapters of his 1992 book, the ones he says most people never read. Those chapters ask basically what happens when a society gets the freedom and prosperity it wanted and many of its people want something more. So with me now is Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, former State Department official and author of The End of History and the Last Man and now his latest In the Realm of the Last Man, A Memoir. Professor Fukuyama, thank you for joining us with this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Francis Fukuyama (2:09)

Thanks very much for having me.

Brian Lehrer (2:12)

So in 1989, let's do some history. You published The End of History with a question mark, but when the book arrived in 92, there was no question mark in the title. So what was your thesis in 1992, and how do you think people misunderstood it?

Francis Fukuyama (2:30)

Sure. So the word history and the idea of the end of history was not mine. It was out of the German philosopher Hegel, who thought that he was the first major thinker to say that there's a progressive evolution of human societies. They rise from hunter-gatherer to agrarian, to feudal, to industrial.

The question is, where is that historical story aiming for? He believed that it was a liberal state of the sort that had emerged after the French Revolution. The other important thinker that also believed in the idea of history in Hegel's sense was Karl Marx, except that Karl Marx believed that the true end of history would actually be a communist utopia. And so in early 1989, I wrote an article in which I said that it didn't look like we were ever going to get to Karl Marx's end of history. And that if there were an end of history, it would be something like liberal democracy connected to a market economy. And that was the extent of the argument. The question mark, by the way, did not disappear in the book.

The question mark was really contained in the title, The End of History and the Last Man, because in my view, the problem of the last man was one of the reasons that history may not terminate in liberal democracy.

Brian Lehrer (4:12)

It was, as I said in the intro, the last man, rather than end of history, sections of the book that you say a lot of people didn't read, that you maybe want to emphasize right now as kind of a corrective?

Francis Fukuyama (4:29)

No, absolutely. So the problem of the last man came from the other German, great German philosopher of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche hated the idea that history should terminate in a liberal society. He hated English liberalism because he felt that a liberal society basically has to tolerate everything, that you become open to a lot of pluralistic views. There's not a single doctrine that underlies the whole society, but you do have a lot of peace and prosperity. His worry about the last man was that human beings would be satisfied by that. They would be content just to tend their own gardens and look after their families, but they would not have any aspirations towards greatness.

They wouldn't want to be better than other people because we're living in an egalitarian democracy. But that was something that was constitutive of what it means to be a human, this aspiration to be better than other people. You couldn't do away with that. So the problem of the last man is the revolt against the idea of the last man, that people want to prove that they are not last man, that they really do have ideals, they are willing to take risks, that they want to strive for something better. I think that in many ways explains the kind of extremism both on the left and the right that we're seeing in our contemporary politics.