What Francis Fukuyama Is Seeing at 'The End of History'

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Joe, both you and I did international relations at university slash college, as you would say.

Joe Weisenthal (0:30)

At college, at uni. And yeah, it helped us a lot. It got us where we are here right now.

Tracy Alloway (0:34)

Yeah, I think today's guest, pretty much anyone who did any sort of political science or IR degree, or maybe even, I don't know, some undergraduate syllabus or something like that. This author, this person was definitely on the syllabus in the early 2000s and probably still is, right?

Joe Weisenthal (0:53)

Almost certainly still is.

I did all the reading back when I was in college. Listen, even though I did get a degree in it, technically by the way, I don't know if I've ever said this, technically in Texas, the degree was called government, which included Poli Sci and IR.

Tracy Alloway (1:07)

You've been lying to me.

Joe Weisenthal (1:08)

It's just a little subtle. I had no choice. That's what it was called.

Tracy Alloway (1:12)

The insight into Joe's upcoming political ambitions.

Joe Weisenthal (1:15)

That's right. But a lot of the stuff, including the work of Our Guest Today, I went back and reread several years ago because I guess at the time, in the early 2000s, it felt a lot like theory. And then suddenly, over the last several years, it's like, oh, this might help explain the world or a thing is going on in the world that I need to revisit and changes are afoot, et cetera. So I revisited the work. And so even though it was a long time ago, it feels fresh in my head.

Tracy Alloway (1:43)

Yeah. So I've already given it away, but today's guest is in fact Francis Fukuyama. He is a professor at Stanford, author of the new book In the Realm of the Last Man and author of famously both an essay and a book called The End of History.

Joe Weisenthal (1:59)

And The Last Man.

Francis Fukuyama (2:00)

And The Last Man. Which is really key. Which is key.

Tracy Alloway (2:02)

Which is key. So a lot of people think about the end of history as this idea that like, well, liberal democracy has won out and we're never gonna have wars or conflicts or struggles ever again. And that wasn't quite the message. And we should talk about why it kind of, I don't know, got framed in that way.

But I think this whole topic clearly is very relevant at the moment because we just had local elections in Germany earlier this month. And it's kind of a reminder that there is this lingering feeling or possibility that maybe people don't actually like the liberal order. Maybe they don't want it.

Joe Weisenthal (2:39)

Totally. It certainly seems you could point to a lot of things. We don't need to go down the list, but various ideologies they would call like illiberalism of some form or other seem to be on the march. There's this sort of anxiety about why and whether the people who have spent a lot of time upholding the various institutions that we associate with Western democracy or liberal democracy, entities like the EU or free trade agreements, the degree to which it feels like people are exhausted, like that there is this effort to hold it up, but there is this sense of exhaustion, maybe resignation and so forth. The one other thing I'll say before we get into it, I remember, I mentioned this once or twice, but this is a thing that sticks out to me. In middle school or maybe my first year of high school, learning about the Cold War, and it was taught in US history classes, and we're talking like 93 here, as if it might as well have been World War I. It was already taught as history. Near window.

Now, from 2026, I was like, that was literally just the day before the fall of the Berlin Wall, et cetera. But already by that point, so many of these global questions were being taught as if they had finally been settled. Clearly, nothing is settled.

Tracy Alloway (3:56)

No, that was the total vibe in the early 2000s at university. It was done, and yet here we are in 2026, and it seems things are very much not finished. So without further ado, we do in fact have the perfect guest, Francis Fukuyama. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Francis Fukuyama (4:12)

Thanks very much for having me.