There is a strange irony in the career that Francis Fukuyama recounts in his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man. The Stanford political scientist and former neoconservative rose to prominence, of course, by famously asking in 1989 whether humanity had reached the “end of history.” Arriving in The National Interest magazine just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama’s well-timed query perfectly articulated an idea then becoming a new form of political common sense: Western-style liberal democracy was the eventual destiny of all humankind. Even if some details remained to be sorted out—and some holdouts remained to be convinced—liberalism’s enemies were exhausted and the future seemed determined.
Now in his seventies, Fukuyama’s new retrospective inadvertently reveals that it’s the liberal democratic model that seems unready for the next century. Able to see the flaws in his system but unwilling to countenance the type of politics that might transcend them, Fukuyama has produced a book emblematic of a “centrism” still proudly fighting the last brushfires of the twentieth century long after the wildfires of the twenty-first have swept by them. Apparently meant as a kind of valedictory statement, In The Realm of the Last Man announces not just the latest phase of Fukuyama’s career but the exhaustion of the ideas that career rested on.
This career, as he reveals in the book’s opening vignette, began in California, where he first arrived to take up an internship at the Rand Corporation in 1978. That position was part of a quest to avoid what Fukuyama calls an “overdetermined outcome”: becoming an academic. “While I was growing up,” he writes, “I told myself I didn’t want to be a professor,” a path he rejected even after getting his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981. The son of first- and second-generation Japanese immigrants, Fukuyama came from an academic family. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, was a congregationalist minister and sociologist who served on the faculty at the Chicago Theological Seminary and Penn State. His mother, Toshiko, herself the daughter of an economics professor and university president, had survived World War II in Japan before emigrating to the United States in 1949 to attend the University of Chicago.
Yoshio, his son writes, was a “committed liberal and pacificist,” the source of some tension as Francis drifted rightward during his college years under the mentorship of Allan Bloom (the classicist most famous for authoring The Closing of the American Mind). The elder Fukuyama had narrowly escaped internment by the U.S. government during the war thanks to a scholarship program that helped Japanese American students attend universities outside the military exclusion zones on the West Coast. His parents and siblings had not been so lucky, spending the entirety of the war unjustly incarcerated in camps in Colorado and Arkansas. Whether those experiences influenced his father’s views, Francis does not say; regardless, Yoshio “and his church were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.” Yoshio often suggested that his son had been “brainwashed” by right-wing professors, and during a visit to California in the 1980s wondered aloud whether Francis would ever leave the Department of Defense–aligned Rand and “get a real job” elsewhere.
Fukuyama would, eventually, become a professor like his father, the result of another transition in which Bloom played a key role. In 1988, while Fukuyama was working for the State Department, Bloom invited him to speak at the University of Chicago as part of a lecture series gloomily titled “The Decline of the West.” Fukuyama accepted, provided he could present a “more optimistic take.” His talk was called “The End of History?” and it was published in article form the following summer.
In the piece (which he later turned into a bestselling book), Fukuyama championed a new political order—that which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as Cold War tensions ebbed and the welfare states of the West staggered under the weight of rising oil prices and slow economic growth. The new order was a fusion of two insurgent sets of ideas, often called “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism.” The former responded to the declining Cold War by arguing for the U.S. to use its power to aggressively spread liberal democratic ideals across the world. The latter, meanwhile, proposed solving the economic crises of the period by gutting the welfare state to free the economy to innovate and grow.
Fukuyama, for his part, saw this moment as the end of a long process of human evolution, one spanning from the primitive societies of the Stone Age past to the advanced industrial economies of the twentieth century. This idea of human history as an evolutionary process was borrowed openly from Alexandre Kojève, a Russo-French philosopher famous on the continent for a series of lectures he gave on philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in the 1930s (and about whom Fukuyama had learned from Bloom). Building on Hegel, Kojève depicted history as a millennia-old battle for “recognition” between dominant groups—“masters”—and their subordinates—“slaves.” The masters would employ belief systems to justify their rule, while the slaves would, with time, develop new ideas that revealed the weaknesses in the masters’ system. The result of the conflict between the “thesis” of the master and the “antithesis” of the slave would be a period of conflict and confusion, before a new “synthesis” was born, fusing the old ideas with the new. This three-step process was destined to continue on repeat until a final structure emerged, one that equally distributed recognition between master and slave, removing the age-old sources of conflict by granting all parties the recognition they desired. Kojève believed just such an idea system had arrived with the emergence of liberalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—history had thus “ended,” not in the sense that there wouldn’t continue to be wars and historical events, but instead meaning humanity had reached its evolutionary end point.
Fukuyama’s career-making triumph was suggesting that the events of the late twentieth century indicated such an end might really be in the offing, pointing to Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political liberalization of the Soviet Union, Deng Xiaoping’s contemporaneous opening of the Chinese economy, and a wave of democratization and economic liberalization in the global south. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire seemed to further confirm Fukuyama’s thesis, transforming an obscure State Department staffer into an intellectual celebrity.
Finally accepting his scholastic fate, he took up an endowed chair at George Mason University in 1996. The first of several academic posts (including later positions at Johns Hopkins and Stanford), it was the beginning of a long and successful career as an academic, consultant, and public thinker. The “end of history” idea, meanwhile, came to define the age, as a dominant United States loomed over a globe seemingly destined to transform into one vast mirror image of America.
More nuanced a scholar than many other neoconservatives and pro-market idealogues, Fukuyama emerged from all this as one of the most talented defenders of this new post–Cold War order, his very reticence in its support seemingly signaling his reliability. Never an orthodox neoliberal calling for the complete deregulation of the economy, for example, Fukuyama remained an ardent supporter of economic liberalization—usually finding other causes, like “social trust,” a concept he wrote about a great deal in the late 1990s, to explain problems others might have attributed to money’s machinations. He was also relatively wary of the use of military force abroad and yet still signed two open letters urging the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, one in 1998 and another, more significantly, in late September 2001.
It was with Iraq that things began to unravel. In private, Fukuyama was growing increasingly skeptical of what became George W. Bush’s March 2003 invasion of the country—hedging his bets in editorials and interviews over the course of 2002, suggesting that removing Saddam was justifiable but dangerous and that the U.S. should not proceed without U.N. support. He also reportedly warned, or cautioned, his friend and fellow neocon, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, against the invasion in a classified briefing in early 2003. He took a clear public stand against the war, however, only in 2004, after it was too late.
“The problem,” as he admits in the book, “was psychological … not a matter of policy judgment.” Though Fukuyama “knew full well that the intervention was likely to lead to huge unintended consequences,” he felt “a mental block against taking a public stand against the views of longtime friends” and allies like Wolfowitz, The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, and the columnist Charles Krauthammer. By the following February—as the situation in Iraq worsened and the invasion’s supporters continued to insist the mission was a success—Fukuyama had had enough, determining that his “friends … had taken leave of reality.” He would denounce the war in the pages of The New York Times soon after.
Fukuyama later broke even more decisively with neoconservative thinking in his 2006 book, America at the Crossroads, and would endorse Barack Obama in 2008. By this point, not only had neoconservatism lost its shine due to the disaster in Iraq, but so too had neoliberalism, thanks to the Great Recession that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers that September. As he writes in the memoir, “The twin failures of the war and of the financial system did a lot to discredit conservative ideas about the uses of military power and of free markets, mistakes for which America paid a huge price.”
Fukuyama deserves a great deal of credit for abandoning his previous positions once it was clear they were wrong—a rare enough trait in academia, as well as the punditocracy—but, as a widely respected scholar who apparently knew better, staying quiet about the war seems a bigger mistake than he acknowledges in these pages. He also further tests the reader’s tolerance for his mea culpas by describing the isolation he suffered after being cast out of neocon social circles—recalling a silent and “a painful ride up … in an elevator to a party” with Krauthammer and his wife, for example—right before admitting his break with the movement was “nothing like having your brains drilled out by an opposing militiaman, or losing your legs to an IED.” It’s an odd juxtaposition, however humble the intention.
On the whole, Fukuyama does not seem properly chastened by the events of the past two decades—mixing a strange complacency about the deeper problems confronting liberal democracy with attacks on straw-men versions of those who seek its reform.
These issues appear to stem from his continued attachment to the end of history thesis. In his mind, the biggest problems of the world in 2026—Donald Trump and the rise of authoritarianism draw most of his attention—are part of the tribulations of the “last man” of his title. The “last men” (and “last women”) are all of us living today in liberal societies. We, Fukuyama argues, are the “last” because we live in a time and place when history has ended, where all the big questions have already been answered. This, he suggests, is fundamentally unsatisfactory for many, because an inherent part of being human is in fact the desire to be part of history, to struggle for causes larger than oneself. “When the world is actually in pretty good shape,” he writes, and “there are no great causes worthy of risking one’s life,” people start to get restless. Thus, they pursue “struggle for struggle’s sake,” taking apart a perfectly good political order in the foolish pursuit of an impossible perfection. The primary culprits here for Fukuyama are “the extreme right and left.”
While he reserves most of his ire for the MAGA right, Fukuyama is also unwavering in lecturing members of the (so-called) radical left. Much of the analysis on this score is thin and unreasoned. Though Fukuyama admits that the left focuses on problems truly in need of fixing—like economic inequality, climate change, and “the plight of Palestinian civilians … in Gaza,” for example—he still thinks most activists are motivated primarily by boredom. Of students protesting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, he sniffs, “What they want is a break from their lives of steady but unheroic striving.” Ignoring the glaringly obvious differences between U.S. policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, he argues that if the protesters were serious about improving the world they would be “similarly outraged at the situation of Ukrainians besieged by Russia.”
In another sleight of hand, he proclaims that “virtually all progressive visions for an alternative to the current liberal order have been tried already,” or “have already been happily incorporated into present day social democratic welfare states.” (Never mind the work his ideological fellow travelers did to dismantle the midcentury welfare state decades ago.) Briefly acknowledging the desirability of a carbon tax, he also castigates “extreme environmentalists” and the very small “de-growth” movement, leaving the reader with the impression that the latter effectively characterizes the entirety of the environmentalist cause. On all these issues, he insists paternally, the real answer is not “radical change” but the “boring” work of “slow, steady … reform.” Who is going to bring about this reform if not the very people he is dismissing, and when and how it should be expected to arrive, are questions he leaves unanswered.
And herein lies the problem with the “end of history” as an idea: It’s an intellectual trap, limiting our ability to imaginatively confront the future. If the current form of liberal democracy is more or less the best we can hope for, then Fukuyama is right and no problem is worth too radical a reform. We must throw up our hands and simply wait for things to somehow, miraculously, get better—wait for the powers that be to have the spare time to fix up the small projects left unfinished in our otherwise well-founded post-historical home. Meanwhile, perhaps we can take up woodworking, one of the several hobbies (along with photography and flying drones) that Fukuyama describes in strange, avuncular asides that fill the book.
But as it is, the end of history thesis plainly fails to account for important features of our reality. As long as capital continues to dominate the worker, liberal society will be inherently unstable—as is the case today, thanks to four decades of neoliberal economic policy and the rampant inequality it created. End of history liberalism also hides another master-and-slave relationship that must be addressed: that between wealthy industrial states and those of the former colonized world. As long as the bond between affluence in the one and poverty in the other is obscured, the liberal synthesis will continue to generate destabilizing antitheses among the world’s poor and oppressed, in Gaza and elsewhere.
Finally, there is the dialectic between humanity and nature. The very idea of historical progress is premised on the flawed assumption that humanity has separated itself from its natural origins, that—as Kojève himself described it—human progress “creates … a non-natural World, a cultural historical human World” where “man lives an essentially different life from that of animals.” Such logic renders the environment a mere object for our disposal, an utterly plastic means to human ends, open to whatever purposes we seek to put it toward, whether they be rampant consumerism or launching rockets to the moon. Nature in 2026 is exposing that lie, forcing on us the recognition it deserves—whether as equal or master remains to be seen—flooding into our homes, melting our cities, and burning our fields.
Liberal democracy’s achievements should be cherished—yes—but they should not be embalmed. Reflecting on a long career tied to the idea, Fukuyama can perhaps still afford to live at the end of history. The rest of us cannot.
