It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. 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?" 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 6, 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.
Thanks very much for having me.
And listeners, we can take some of your questions and comments. Call us and text us. What would you like to ask Francis Fukuyama? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. 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?
Sure. So the word "history" and the idea of the end of history was not mine. It was that 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, you know, rise from hunter-gatherer to agrarian to feudal to industrial. And 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.
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.
No, absolutely. So the problem of the last man came from the other 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, you know, 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. And his worry about the last man was that human beings would be satisfied by that. They would be content just to, you know, 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, you know, we're living in an egalitarian democracy. But that aspiration to be better than other people was something that was constitutive of what it means to be human. You couldn't do away with that. And 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 men, that they really do have ideals, they are willing to take risks, that they want to strive for something better. And 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.
Would it be fair to say that 37 years now after communism was collapsing country by country in Eastern Europe, that you are of the belief that liberal democracy has won the contest of ideas, but that the process is ongoing? Is that a fair assessment?
Well, if you look at the progress of democracy or of any other political institution, it's not linear. You know, you have times when it advances and times when it goes into reverse. If you think about the 20th century, we had a huge backlash in the 1930s with the rise of Stalinism and fascism, and another one during the energy crisis in the 1970s when many people thought that democracy was on its last legs. So I don't take the current setbacks that seriously, and probably the reason I don't is that I don't see an idea for a superior form of society other than basically a liberal democracy on offer. You obviously have alternatives like Russia and China, you know, full-blown authoritarian ones. We can discuss that. I think China is a little bit more plausible than Russia, but I don't think that's going to be the future of mankind. And on the right, it's not clear to me that, you know, any of the theorists of MAGA or anyone else really have a different idea of how to organize the institutions of a modern society.
Let's take a phone call. Alan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Francis Fukuyama. Hi, Alan.
It's an honor to speak to you after having heard your name mentioned often by my rabbi's sermons in the early 1990s. And he seemed to have fallen into the foreseeable trap of oversimplification that resulted when you removed that question mark between the article and the book. And I now understand your sense of the topic better, and I think it's a more defensible reading of the topic. My question is, wasn't it foreseeable that triumphalist capitalists would exploit that confusion by dropping the question mark and use it as an occasion to argue for a more unfettered removal of regulations and denial of the need for government involvement in environmental and climatic and other issues that cannot be handled entirely by the free enterprise system?
Interesting question, Alan. Thank you. Professor Fukuyama.
Yeah, I think that's right. Beginning in the late 70s, 1980s, we had the rise of what some people called neoliberalism, meaning an extreme form of capitalism in which a lot of economists like Milton Friedman argued that you should really take all of the constraints off of, you know, the market system because they were just getting in the way of growth. And so we had several decades of this kind of policy in which, for example, we didn't enforce antitrust laws. We allowed these tech companies to get very large under the assumption that they were just more efficient and therefore they shouldn't be punished for, you know, their size. I think we're now seeing a backlash against that. I'm not sure that this is the end of the story because I do think, you know, you see this with data centers, that there's a lot of political opposition, and I'm not sure that the tech oligarchs behind this are simply going to be able to run everybody over and get their way on this because, you know, we are not just living in a capitalist system. We are also a democracy where what people think, you know, is going to make a difference.
The new book is a memoir, and so I want to ask about your family and upbringing a little bit in the context of your politics. You write that your father, quote, "remained a diehard liberal his whole life," unquote, and he was disappointed when you moved toward moderate conservatism. So how would you characterize your own politics, and what were those arguments like at home?
Sure. Well, my father was a pacifist. He was a Christian minister, a Protestant minister. He was very heavily involved in the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, that sort of thing. And so he was, you know, upset when I became more conservative. I think his main reaction was not to take anything that I said seriously. He would tell his friends that I'd been brainwashed by the Pentagon. I'm not quite sure how he understood that to have happened, but...
Parents have been taking that attitude toward their kids' politics for probably millennia, right? They don't take them seriously.
They don't take them seriously. However, you know, I changed my views really in the early 2000s because you had these two developments. So one was the Iraq War in 2003, and the second was the financial crisis, the Great Financial Crisis in 2008. Both of those, I think, were direct results of conservative ideas. The first really had to do with the uses of American power, particularly military power, to spread democracy. And the second was the belief that markets could regulate themselves, particularly in the financial sector. Neither of those premises was right. They both led to big disasters for which we're still paying the price. In fact, I would say that if you didn't have that debacle of the Iraq War and the financial crisis, you probably wouldn't have Donald Trump, who's in some sense a reaction to, you know, those big mistakes. My attitude was, you know, if certain conservative ideas are shown to be empirically really not just wrong, but pretty disastrous, you shouldn't believe in them anymore. So, you know, my politics has shifted back more in alignment with what I think my father's would have been, you know, back when I was growing up.
You characterize that as being a social democrat with qualifications. Did I see that right?
Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. But I think that a market economy by itself is going to produce very large and growing inequalities. The winning formula is to combine a market economy with democracy, where people can vote for social protections, for, you know, some degree of redistribution. The trick is to, you know, to keep that at a level that doesn't kill economic growth. I think that in Europe and in the United States in the decades after the Second World War, that was the winning formula, and I think it still should be going into the future.
