Ever since its first publication in 1992, the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. "Profoundly realistic and important...supremely timely and cogent...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world." —The Washington Post Book World Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
Francis Fukuyama claims that liberal democracy is the end of history. This book provides a theoretical re-examination of this claim through postmodernist ideas. The book argues that postmodern ideas provide a valuable critique to Fukuyama’s thesis, and poses the questions: can we talk about a universal and teleological history; a universal human nature; or an autonomous individual? It addresses whether postmodern theories - concerning the movement of time, what it means to be human, and what it means to be an individual/subject - can be accommodated within a theory of a history that ends in liberal democracy. The author argues that incorporating elements of postmodern thought into Fukuyama’s theory makes it possible to produce a stronger and more compelling account of the theory that liberal democracy is the end of history. The result of this is to underpin Fukuyama’s theory with a more complex understanding of the movement of time, the human and the individual, and to show that postmodern concepts can, paradoxically, be used to strengthen Fukuyama’s theory that the end of history is liberal democracy. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, postmodernism and the work of Francis Fukuyama.
'It's been a long time since a text was so useful in helping me think through our present moment and my role within it. The End of The End of History is a clear, powerful and panoramic analysis of our world at the dawn of the 2020s.' Vincent Bevins, author, The Jakarta Method The “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters, “populism”, Putin, Facebook... anyone but themselves. They are suffering from Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome. Emerging from four years of interviews and debates on the popular global politics podcast Aufhebunga Bunga, The End of the End of History examines how the political consequences of the 2008 financial crisis have come home to roost. If Trump and Brexit shattered the liberal-democratic consensus in 2016, then the global pandemic of 2020 put a final end to the “End of History”. Politics is back, but it's stranger than ever.
Fukuyama’s concept of the End of History has been one of the most widely debated theories of international politics since the end of the Cold War. This book discusses Fukuyama’s claim that liberal democracy alone is able to satisfy the human aspiration for freedom and dignity, and explores the way in which his thinking is part of a philosophical tradition which includes Kant, Hegel and Marx. Two new chapters in this second edition discuss the ways in which Fukuyama’s thinking has developed – they include his celebrated and controversial criticism of neoconservatism and his complex intellectual relationship to Samuel Huntington, whose Clash of Civilization thesis he rejects but whose notion of political decay is central to his more recent work. The authors here argue that Fukuyama’s continuing fundamental contributions to debates concerning the spread of democracy and threat of global terror mark him out as one of the most important thinkers of the twenty-first century.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy. Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.
Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins. Francis Fukuyama examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions, spanning such diverse disciplines as economics, anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the emergence of mankind as a political animal, by one of the most eminent political thinkers writing today.
This book is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood both as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy?as well as the older political traditions?and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.
Weak or failed states - where no government is in control - are the source of many of the world's most serious problems, from poverty, AIDS and drugs to terrorism. What can be done to help? The problem of weak states and the need for state-building has existed for many years, but it has been urgent since September 11 and Afghanistan and Iraq. The formation of proper public institutions, such as an honest police force, uncorrupted courts, functioning schools and medical services and a strong civil service, is fraught with difficulties. We know how to help with resources, people and technology across borders, but state building requires methods that are not easily transported. The ability to create healthy states from nothing has suddenly risen to the top of the world agenda. State building has become a crucial matter of global security. In this hugely important book, Francis Fukuyama explains the concept of state-building and discusses the problems and causes of state weakness and its national and international effects.
