Picture of author.

Francis Fukuyama

Author of The End of History and the Last Man

48+ Works 6,875 Members 85 Reviews 9 Favorited

About the Author

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama was born October 27, 1952 in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Fukuyama received his Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy under Allan Bloom. He initially pursued graduate studies in comparative literature show more at Yale University, going to Paris for six months to study under Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, but became disillusioned and switched to political science at Harvard University. There, he studied with Samuel P. Huntington and Harvey Mansfield, among others. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard for his thesis on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East. In 1979, he joined the global policy think tank RAND Corporation. Fukuyama was the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University from 1996 to 2000. Until July 10, 2010, he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, located in Washington, D.C. He is now Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and resident in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies is largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Fukuyama predicted the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism. He has written a number of other books, among them Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. His latest work The Origins of Political Order: From Prehistoric Times to the French Revolution made Publisher's Weekly Best Seller's List for 2011. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Series

Works by Francis Fukuyama

Our Posthuman Future (1992) 605 copies
End of Order, The (1997) 3 copies
FIN DEL HOMBRE (2008) 1 copy
Distruzione 1 copy

Associated Works

The Best American Political Writing 2006 (2006) — Contributor — 35 copies
The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law (2013) — Contributor — 15 copies
The New Invisible College: Science for Development (2008) — Foreword, some editions — 12 copies
Utopie Eindexamencahier Havo vanaf 2007 (2006) — Contributor — 11 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Members

Reviews

Interesting non-fiction by the guy who brought us The End of History and the Last Man.
Author has some insights & some historical knowledge but also some exaggeration, political bias & some generalization - as well as a few factual errors (e.g., Nixon won a landslide by a in '68 - it was 0.5%; England was a liberal society when the Industrial Revolution began - uhh- not in anyone's dreams). Of course, history did not end in 1997, either.

The author has a scholar's broad & deep knowledge of some areas but also the overreach that many experts have when opining outside their areas of expertise. Still, it is worth reading because of the depth & insights he does have ... but with one's eyes open.… (more)
 
Flagged
RickGeissal | 6 other reviews | Aug 16, 2023 |
3.5 stars: there is nothing really new here, and there is nothing horribly, terribly wrong here, either. I wish that there was a little more explicit attention paid to e.g. the history of "identity politics" as used to justify slavery, Jim Crow, etc. Then again, maybe Fukuyama felt that, especially in a short work, the obvious didn't need to be stated (if you don't understand that the power of white racism was nigh 100% expressed through identity politics, up to and including making it legal to own, torture, kill, etc. people, then you are hopelessly lost; to state it as boilerplate just to prove you know it is nothing but virtue signaling...) Nonetheless, there were a couple of moments where I was left with of a bit of a sense that a false equivalency was being made.

The biggest drawback for me was that the book, for being so short, zoomed out to the broad international, then to the US, then to the EU/EU region, back to the US, etc. A tighter focus would have helped make his point more strongly.

Some reviews seem angry that Fukuyama falls into the trap of claiming that activists/minorities/women/etc. invented identity politics or some such. I do not get that read at all. Modern IP (60's - 10's) is a creature of the left. The never-quite-gone-away and neo-nativist IP of white identitarians is a reaction to that left IP. That doesn't deny the fact that there is continuity with white racisms of the past, or that racism is an animator of those politics today.

What is new, what the book is about, is the growing (and some would say already outsized) role IP plays on the left, how that has displaced (imperfectly) more universal groupings, and where all that, in tandem with the already existing white racism and white identity politics that is being consolidated by the right, will lead us. I think reviews like e.g. Mehrsa's somewhat miss this point.

It critiques like that (couched as a critique of historical accuracy) that makes me reflect on the confusions --or the continuums-- that I sum up as Identity Politics != politics with an identity != having social identities != tribalism != personal identities.

A critique of the book that I would give, and a critique of the critiques I've read, is that they don't seem to acknowledge how grievance/desire for respect can move separately from political, or even social, activity. Though, I suppose, it depends on what you mean by the word. A desire for acceptance isn't necessarily the same as a desire for dignity/respect...

There is definitely a lot here to think about, even if ultimately I think the book leaves a lot to be desired.
… (more)
 
Flagged
dcunning11235 | 9 other reviews | Aug 12, 2023 |
Much too thin and simplistic.
 
Flagged
fji65hj7 | 6 other reviews | May 14, 2023 |
Two volumes of Fukuyama on comparative political history unconscionably simplified into a matrix of institutional sequences...

State-building without Rule of Law or Accountability = China (dictatorial central state).

State-building with Rule of Law but weak Accountability = Prussia or Meiji Japan (powerful but rule-bound administration).

State and elites balanced, with Rule of Law, before Democracy = UK (strong parliamentary executive).

Rule of Law & Democracy before State-building = USA (weak executive highly constrained by courts and legislature, having suffered mass clientelism).

Rule of Law with weak State captured by elites = Ancien regime France (State used to defend legal privileges of feudal elites).

Weak State captured by elites without Rule of Law = Tsarist Russia (absolutist feudalism without constitutional or legal institutions for control of executive).

Democracy without State-building or Rule of Law = Nigeria (incompetent, corrupt, clientelistic State).
… (more)
 
Flagged
fji65hj7 | 25 other reviews | May 14, 2023 |

Lists

Awards

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Statistics

Works
48
Also by
7
Members
6,875
Popularity
#3,559
Rating
½ 3.7
Reviews
85
ISBNs
259
Languages
24
Favorited
9

Charts & Graphs