What Comes After the End of History? with Francis Fukuyama (Part One)

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This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Welcome to Intelligent Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer, Mia Cerenty. Was Francis Fukuyama wrong about the end of history? Or are we still living through the argument he began? Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with political thinker and author, Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama joined us at Union Chapel in London to discuss the crisis facing liberal democracy and the changing world order. More than three decades after the end of history made him one of the world's most debated political thinkers, Fukuyama reflects on a world increasingly shaped by war, populism, polarization, and authoritarianism. Drawing on his new political memoir in the realm of the last man, he examines what has happened to the liberal democratic order and what Western democracies must do if they are to renew themselves. Let's join our host Martin Wolff now, live at Union Chapel. - So thank you very much for the introduction. Before we start just a layout, what's gonna happen? We're gonna have a discussion between us of Francis Fukuyama's new book, which will last about an hour. Then there will be 30 minutes for questions. I will try to take questions from here and also from the gallery. They'll have to say I'm pretty blinded by the lights. I'll do my best. And when I will set out the ground rules for those Q&A session, we will stop promptly at half past eight. And after that, as being said, you will be able to get Frank, as we know him, to sign your copies, which will no doubt instantly quadruple the value at the very least. Now, I'm delighted to this. I think he's one of the most interesting, I actually think the most interesting public intellectual working broadly in the spheres of political philosophy, political science, development, democracy, political organization and the state, that there is in the world. And he has one virtue which I have come to regard, probably because I've chose some of the same behavior, as the most, the single most powerful indicator of the value of an intellectual, which is he changes his mind. And if anyone who writes as long as he has, or I've done, and never changes his or her mind, you know this person never thinks. And the, so that's something I particularly admire. And we're going to talk about that in the discussion of this new book in the realm of the last man. And we're going to talk about why that title means so much and because Frank has certainly lived in the realm of the last man since he read that very famous book, The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. That was after the essay. So, and he's lived with that and it's a fascinating review. I would just say before we get into it, the book is essentially an account of the intellectual history and life, but very much a life in the public eye of this man. And therefore it's an account not only of the way his ideas have developed, but also of course what's happened to make his ideas change because case you've not been noticing since 1992, the world has changed quite a bit. And that is reflected very well in the book. So I'd like to start with a sort of a few over-view questions and then we'll get to some really central issues you discuss. But the start point is, why do you decide the time has come to write this account of your lifetime of thought? That sort of sounds like the last book. You wanted to make a summation of where you'd got to and why. - Yeah, I tell my family, this is it. No more books after this. So there are a couple of reasons. - That is the promise you made. - Yeah, it is a promise of faith. - Okay, that's quite a bold promise. - Yeah. So one is that there's been such a broad misunderstanding of the end of history that I've made so many attempts to correct the record and it doesn't seem to have any effect. And I figured maybe one last effort to do it in the form of a book might help. Every week I get three or four snarky comments about, well, is this really the end of history, and I have an answer to that. I've been answering that for 35 years, but it doesn't seem to penetrate. So I figured maybe if I did it one more time in a more comprehensive way, people would understand. The answer, by the way, is connected to the title of the memoir. The people that say, well, Mr. End of History, what about Ukraine or what about September 11th didn't actually read the last five chapters of the book, which are the chapters on the last man, where I talk about all the reasons that democracy actually may not sustain itself over a long period of time. So I wanted to get that out. I also wanted to talk about something that I'd never really discussed systematically, which is a kind of cycle of thought that begins with September 11th, the collapse of the states in Afghanistan and Iraq, which then got me thinking about the importance of having a modern state to the problem of development, and then starting thinking about the American state and how it's actually underdeveloped, and not only is it underdeveloped, but under the attack of the opponents of the deep state around Donald Trump, it's actually going backwards. And that strikes me as a big problem for the world as a whole, because America needs a state, and I think the world needs America. So before we get into some of the really big issues, you've addressed here, which include, of course, the future of democracy and the subjects you're just talking about, let me just ask you a few things about yourself that are revealed in this book, which really rather interested me. And one thing that wasn't revealed, and it's also very interesting, I share with you the fact that my parents were not born here. In my case, they were refugees from Hitler. And in your case, your parents were immigrants from Japan. And you don't actually write at all about how being a Japanese-American has affected you. But you do make a very moving account of your family's experience with internment in the war, and obviously very powerful influence upon you and your family. So particularly in this time, when there's so much obvious xenophobia in our countries, and certainly in America, what does being a Japanese-American mean to you? Well, that's an important question. I've never thought of myself as a hyphenated American, as a Japanese-American. And I think that that reflects actually when I regard as the big triumph of American national identity. It had been linked to race, to religion, to ethnicity, for generations. The only people who could vote at the time of the ratification, the Constitution, were white men with property. And gradually, that understanding of what it meant to be an American expanded to include African-Americans, Native Americans, women, and then opened up to many other ethnic groups by the time of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. And I always regarded that as a big achievement. And when I was little and I would get teased for being a Chinaman or something of that sort by my classmates, when I asked my father, what am I supposed to say about myself? He'd say, just say that you're an American. That's all you need to say, because what it means to be an American is to believe in certain set of ideals and values. And I guess I continue to think that way. I keep getting asked by taxi drivers from the Horn of Africa, where are you from? And I say, well, I'm from Chicago. Because it does seem to me that as an American, we ought to take pride in the fact that you actually don't have to think about yourself in ethnic or racial terms to think of yourself as an American. And so that's why a Japanese American has never been an important part of the way I think about my identity. I mean, I would say 10 years ago, when the dreamt of asking such a question, you don't feel the slightest need to elaborate further your view of this beyond what you've done. Well, which is in the book, very clearly, what it means to be American, because the way you describe what it means to be American, which, when I lived in the States, as I did in the '70s, was increasingly the view, with often several rights, you don't feel this is now contested territory. Oh, no, it is terribly contested. I take very personally this effort of the Trump administration to revoke birthright citizenship. My mother was on a student visa when she came to the University of Chicago. She met my father. I was born. And under the rules that they want to promulgate, I would not be an American citizen, right? And I think that Japanese Americans, when they were interned, my grandfather lost the hardware store that he had created and invested his life in at the time of the internment, so it was a grave injustice. The US government apologized for that in the Reagan administration. It paid restitution to the Japanese Americans that had been interned. And so I thought that the United States had actually made good on its promise of equality, but we are going backwards. Our Vice President talks about heritage Americans that can trace their ancestry back to at least to the Civil War. And I just think that this is a big regression. And I think that the way that undocumented immigrants to the United States are being treated today is worse than the way that the Japanese were treated during the Second World War. Quite clearly, yeah. And though I don't want to go into this any further, it is not very difficult to see echoes of those ideas across a number of other countries, including this one. Absolutely. So this is a very important moment. The other broad thing I want to discuss is the theme I introduced at the beginning, because it's a very important part of this book is the discussion of how ideas evolve, and particularly in the light ideas which are part of politics, political life. And you discuss one in particular, which, of course, is your move away from what was known as, is known as neo-conservatism, in the 2000s, particularly in response to the Iraq War, and so forth. But we'll discuss that in more detail. But I would be interested in how you think about this inevitable, that seems to be natural way of a mental evolution as a thinker. Because the way I've responded when I'm criticising this is I tried to-- I think there's a distinction between one's views of how the world works and core values. But that may not work for you. How do you think about yourself when you look back on the Frank Fukuyama of 2000? Was this a very might misguided fool? Or did he need the-- I mean, is this question of consistency of a view, whatever happens, an issue at all for you? So obviously, my views have changed about, let's say, American foreign policy since that time. But I do think that a lot of the core values that I started with in my-- I was, I think, very lucky to have the mentors and the teachers that I did. My first teacher was Alan Bloom, the political theorist. And I became a classics major as a result of his influence. If you talk about a core value, I think that one of the core values he transmitted was the belief and the possibility of rational discourse about the most important things of life. First seminar I took at Cornell as a freshman from him was a seminar in Plato's Republic, in which Socrates talks with a couple of young Athenians about what is the nature of justice. And I think that that kind of a discussion is extremely important as part of a liberal education. And it's something that has stayed with me that if you don't have a confrontation with these fundamental issues at a certain early point in your education, you'll never get them later. And in a way, this respect for philosophical, rational discourse is one of the things that has stayed with me that whole period. Whether the United States should use military force in the Middle East, that's a very secondary kind of issue compared to, I think, this respect for a certain philosophical tradition that appeared in the West with the ancient Greeks and was developed over the succeeding 2,500 years. So this makes you, of course, in the context of contemporary American university life, and particularly in literature and humanities, a bit of a fossil. You actually believe in rationality, evidence, all these old-fashioned patriarchal, white ideas. How do you survive? Well, I think that the attack on the Western tradition that really got going in the late '70s and 1980s did have a core of truth. So I think that the traditional Quig history that was taught to English schoolboys and then to their American counterparts through most of the 19th century was hostlessly partial. Yeah, I mean, it was very narrow-minded. It was the history of England as a history of mankind. And that is not as sufficiently broad understanding. I think if you don't know something about China, about India, about the Muslim world, you are really being deficient in your knowledge of human civilization. And in my two political order books, I tried to correct that by actually spending a lot of time thinking about alternatives to the Western tradition. But I do believe that if you don't have a firm grounding in that philosophical tradition, you can't understand the modern world because the modern world is really shaped by a set of ideas that start in ancient Athens and are developed through the early modern period Machiavelli Hobbes' lock up until the moderns and then is challenged at the end by people like Nietzsche and Heidegger. And that whole story, I think, is one that you need to understand in order to deal with some of the controversies raised by, you know, let's say, the post-colonial narratives that, you know, became a point of attack on, you know, that whole Western tradition in more recent years. One of the things that impressed me, which I hadn't known, is that how hard you work to educate yourself. And one of the things you did was go to France and get educated by Bart and Dorida, which seems to have had a rather powerful negative effect. Would you tell a little bit about what you took from that? - Well, so my first teachers had been followers of the German-American Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss. But post-modernism hit Cornell like a freight train in the early 1970s. We had a number of professors that had been students of Jacques Lacan, or Derry Daw, Michel Foucault, himself came to Cornell, Julia Tristeva. I remember meeting her in the kitchen of the house I was living in, where she told me that she thought Stalinism had a point. And, you know, when you were 20, 21 years old, you don't know anything about the world. And so this sounded like the sexiest, you know, most cutting-edge form of modern thought there was. And so I spent half a year in Paris studying with the masters, and in the course of that, I decided that there was a lot of BS, basically, that. - I love summer, but I have spent the last few months just gazing into my closet and dreaming of the day that I can layer my fall favorites again. 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I think I'm one of the most fortunate people in the world and the kind of mentors and teachers I've had. So there was Alan Bloom, there was Harvey Mansfield, another Straussian at Harvard, and then there was Samuel Huntington, who actually I didn't actually take a course from him because he was working in the Carter administration when I was in the Harvard government department, but I got to know him quite well after that. He was a comparativist and he really is the one that destroyed modernization theory because he had a theory of political development where basically all good things did not go together the way that the modernizers believed. And then the final one was Seymour Martin-Lipsett, a great both sociologist and political scientist. And it's from him that I learned about comparative politics. He had this saying that he told all of his students that he or she, who knows only one country, knows no countries because if you grew up in that kind of narrow framework without understanding the way comparable societies or organized, you're really not going to understand anything about your own society. And so from all of those, I took away very different kinds of things. In my time, I, of course, read quite a bit by him, but Sam Huntington was, I think it's the only word used notorious for his role in the Vietnam War, but that was before the time, well before the time that you, I met him at Oxford. So it was quite, I'm not going to go into that anymore, but one of the interesting things about the life history you dealt, the people you dealt with intellectually and with teachers, these were all embattled people in different ways, and that in a way is not where we are now, is not new. Now tell us very briefly, what made you split from the near-conceptives? Well, it was as much a psychological struggle as an ideological one. I had thought of myself as a conservative in the 1990s during the Cold War. I was on the hawkish side of people that thought that the Soviet Union was still a major threat to democracy around the world. And so I was critical of a lot of the day-taunt and arms control agreements that were being negotiated by Henry Kissinger in that whole period. And following, you know, the collapse of the Soviet Union, I went along with a lot of these hawkish people that then, you know, like Bill Crystal, who helped found the project for the New American Century in a way tried to transfer the conflict with the Soviet Union to China. And at that point, I actually thought that this was really looking for an enemy. And I became a little bit skeptical that, you know, a lot of my friends actually wanted to be hawkish for the sake of being hawkish, even when there wasn't an evident threat, you know, that something I think I once said about Robert Kagan, it's always 1939 for him, right? That there's always this looming, you know, terrible threat. Now it turns out that a stop clock is right twice a day. And so he now thinks it's 1939, and I think it's 1939. But in 1989-- We will come to that in a second. Yeah. But, yeah, so, but I, you know, as we got closer and closer to the actual, after September 11th, and as the Bush administration began making the argument for invading Iraq, I got more and more skeptical because I had spent a lot of time during the 1990s thinking about interventions in developing countries, in Central America, in Vietnam, in many other places in Africa, where the US and other Western powers were really not successful. Because they simply did not understand the local conditions under which they were operating. And I began to think that the Bush administration was expecting something like what happened in Eastern Europe to happen in Iraq, you know, that they would be greeted as liberators that there be flowers, you know, and cheers for, you know, their freedom from Saddam Hussein. And I was more and more skeptical that we could actually manage what would occur in the aftermath of that. And that's really when I, you know, I made the break. But what made it difficult was that, you know, part of the reason you hold the views that you do is that your friends believe that. And you grew up in a certain social, so I think the social psychologist Jonathan Height wrote a very insightful book called The Righteous Mind, in which he said there's a classic model of cognition where you have a rational person they take in, empirical information about the world, they infer patterns and come to conclusions, and that's not the way people think. They actually start with the conclusions that they want. This is called motivated reasoning. And then they use their cognitive powers to gather information that supports their pre-existing, you know, beliefs. And it seemed to me that a lot of that was happening as we moved towards the Iraq war, that people were not actually taking in evidence about Saddam Hussein, about weapons of mass destruction. And that was going to lead to, you know, a big, difficult, which, in fact, it did. And one of the conclusions that this also applies very much in economics, actually, which relates to this, is the objective circumstances of particular policy regimes or actions really matter. And intervening in the former Yugoslavia was, in some fundamental way, different from what was expected in the Iraq, and treating them all as the same thing, which has been, in some way, a characteristic of policy by America, is a pretty gigantic mistake. This is something I try to teach my current policy students that context is everything indeed. And if you don't take the local context into account, you're going to make big, big mistakes. So Condi Rice remains a friend of mine. She's a colleague at Stanford. But, you know, I remember at the time of the Iraq War, she and other people supporting the war would say, you know, it's just prejudice to say that there's something about Muslim or Islamic culture that prevents them from becoming democratic. And there's a certain truth to that because, you know, you do have successful Islamic democracies in Indonesia. It's been reasonably good since the late 1990s. But it's not as if this isn't a big obstacle. You did not have radical Islamist parties or their equivalents in Eastern Europe when it made a transition to democracy. And that was one of those little contextual details that, you know, I think was being overlooked at the time of the Iraq war. So let's get to the meat. You know, this has been very, very important discussion of your ideas and how they've developed. So what was the end of history and the last man really about? So the end of history is really a discussion about history with a capital H, which we would use different terms for today than Hegel did. It's either modernization or development. Sort of the long term evolution of human societies. And the question, you know, so the first question is, is there progress in history? I find it unbelievable that anyone can debate that because our lives in a modern industrialized society are so different from, you know, life in Myanmar or Guatemala or, you know, other countries that are at a different stage of development. And I think it's a kind of blindness of people that live in, you know, successful rich societies to think that somehow, you know, they're not that different from, you know, societies that are not. I mean, just to live in a society where most of your children are going to die, but before their adulthood is a very different kind of world from the one that, you know, we live in. And so, first of all, there is progress. There has been progress over the centuries, not just in terms of economics, not just in terms of technology, but in terms of political institutions. So the question is, how does that ultimately, where does that point in the long run? And I was drawing heavily on the Franco-Russian philosopher, Alexander Kojev, who somewhat playfully said, "Well, history ended in 1806 at the Battle of Yena Arshdat when Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy." So this was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the basic idea was that the French Revolution basically introduced the idea of the equality of dignity, that all human beings were, as human beings, worthy of respect, that needed to be recognized by the fundamental rights of man and citizen of the French Revolution or the rights of the American Revolution. And once that idea was out, it was going to be applied very un-equally, but it would ultimately dominate because there wasn't a superior way of understanding human societies. And I think that he said this in the late 1930s, before the Holocaust, before the Second World War. And yet, people took it seriously, because in the end, I think it is true that that insight about the equality of freedom remains the dominant idea that has characterized government. And so the question about the end of history is, is there a higher stage to which we aspire? The Marxists believed there was, and that would be communism. But it was pretty clear by the late 1980s that we weren't going to get there. So if there was an end of this development process, it was going to look like some form of liberal democracy connected to a market economy. Now, the last man part is the part-- those are the five chapters that nobody read, because the driving force in history, according to Kozev and his interpretation of Hegel, was a struggle for recognition that more than the struggle over material goods people want respect. And that is the essence of a lot of political conflict. The master wants to be recognized as a master by the slave, but that relationship is an unstable one because the master's not being recognized by another human being with dignity. And the only rational solution to this was a system in which you had universal recognition of other people's humanities, which is the basis of a liberal society. And that was the essence. It was that equal recognition that was the core moral insight of liberalism. But the problem was, that wouldn't be enough for many people. Because in addition to wanting equal recognition and being resentful when you don't get equal recognition, there are certain people that want superior recognition. This is the underlying psychology, something I label-- I use the term fumos for, which is a Greek word, meaning spiritiveness or pride. It is a non-material desire for an intersubjective recognition of one's dignity. And some people are happy with equal recognition. But a minority of people want something more. And in fact, you can't have a successful society without this ambition for something more. Friedrich Nietzsche hated the idea of the end of history because he said it's a flattening of all human horizons. Everybody is equal. There's nothing that people strive for anymore. There's nothing worth dying for. And therefore, human beings are not going to be able to fulfill their desire to reach for something higher. And you thought that this was a terrible situation that people were going to reject. And that's really what the last five chapters of the end of history-- that's the last man part of that book-- threats to democracy because people are not happy just with peace and prosperity. They want struggle. I have this one line in the book that said, if people can't struggle for democracy and for equality based on the victory of those principles in an earlier generation, then they're going to struggle against equality and dignity because they want to struggle for the sake of struggle. And I think we see that in the extremist politics that occurs today when the world is actually in pretty good shape. I don't think it's not like the 1930s Germany where you had war, revolution, massive inflation that destroyed everybody's savings. The world was pretty bad in the 1930s. But it's not really terrible in the year 2026. And so why is it that you have people on both the extreme right and the extreme left that say things have never been worse? And I think it really has to do with this unfulfilled desire for struggle, for some superior vision of the future that can be embraced. Thanks for listening to Intelligent Squared. This episode was produced by Jenny Hooker, and it was edited by Marl Roberts. Get a big Mac meal only at McDonald's. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing. Do you hear that? That's sound right. That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon. 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