After the End of History: Conversations with Francis Fukuyama

by Mathilde Fasting (Editor), Francis Fukuyama (With)

Overview

A series of in-depth interviews between Francis Fukuyama and editor Mathilde Fasting, After the End of History grants unprecedented access to one of the greatest political minds of our time. Drawing on his work on identity, biotechnology, and political order, Fukuyama provides essential insight into the threats our world faces today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647120870
Publisher:	Georgetown University Press
Publication date:	05/03/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mathilde Fasting is a project manager and fellow at Civita, one of Norway’s most influential think tanks, where she regularly hosts its weekly podcast. Her published works include Freedom of Choice, The Citizen and the Community, and Torkel Aschehoug and Norwegian Historical Economic Thought: Reconsidering a Forgotten Norwegian Pioneer Economist. Fasting earned her MA in economics from the Norwegian School of Economics, her BA and MA in the history of ideas from the University of Oslo, and her PhD in the economic history of ideas from the University of Erfurt.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), the director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues related to democratization and international political economy, including his seminal work The End of History and the Last Man. His most recent book is Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. What Has Happened after the End of History?

2. How Have World Politics Changed?

3. How Do Illiberal Attacks Threaten Democracy?

4. Will the US Cease to Be the Beacon of the Liberal Order?

5. Will Orwell’s 1984 Dystopia Come True?

6. Is Fukuyama a Classical European Liberal?

7. What Led Fukuyama to International Politics?

8. What Is the End of History?

9. Why Do We Go to Denmark?

10. How Do We Build Liberal Democracies?

11. How Can We Understand How Societies Work?

12. Is Identity Politics a Question of Thymos?

13. How Do Society and Capitalism Interact?

14. How Does Human Nature Shape Society?

15. Is China a Serious Contender to Liberal Democracy?

16. Are We Experiencing a Clash of Civilizations?

17. How Can We Make Liberal Democracies Thrive?

18. The Future of History

Epilogue

Literature

What People are Saying About This

Helena Rosenblatt

A fascinating set of interviews offering unprecedented insight into the mind of one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time. Topics range from Fukuyama’s early childhood education, to the challenges facing liberal democracies today, including the US-China trade war, the rise of authoritarianism around the world, the power of AI and Facebook, and intensifying identity politics. A great read.

Jeffrey Gedmin

What a splendid piece of work and service rendered by Mathilde Fasting. After the End of History sets records straight, clarifies, challenges, and provokes. It is sufficient in detail, broad in scope, and focuses the mind on the problem at hand. Liberalism and liberal democracy are in trouble. To manage the problem we need a clear and precise understanding of how we got here. This book helps.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Fukuyama here shows again that the telos of history is human dignity, not the State’s boot on your face, forever.

Branko Milanovic

Francis Fukuyama is without doubt one of the most influential political scientists of the post Cold War period. There is hardly anyone who has not heard of his The End of History and the Last Man. In this splendid book of conversations between Mathilde Fasting and Francis Fukuyama, we discover much more about Fukuyama: his background and studies, polymathic interests, relationship to neocons, and his relationship to contemporary economics. It is a book about the person and the scholar, and it will appeal both to biographers and to students of social sciences.

Editorial Reviews

This extended conversation between Fasting and the famed political scientist Francis Fukuyama takes readers on an engaging intellectual journey in which Fukuyama reflects on the global crises and transformations that have unfolded in the three decades since his famous essay on “the end of history.”

Foreign Affairs

After the End of History offers unmatched insights into Francis Fukuyama’s biography and scholarship and combines them with wide-ranging reflections on liberal democracies and global politics.

Review of Democracy

Indeed, for anyone who lacks the time to absorbhis numerous books and essays, this volume offers a useful introduction to thecore ideas of one of America’s most consequential (and often misunderstood) contemporary thinkers.

National Review

The book is a horn of plenty. Every page presents a novel idea, a new fact, or an unexpected perspective.

Journal of Peace Research

...Fukuyama provides an interesting counterpoint to the current pessimism about the future of democracy.

MoneyWeek

2021-02-23
Conversations with the noted scholar of political theory.

Fukuyama became well known in 1989, a time when the communist world was collapsing and the Berlin Wall was coming down, for arguing that liberal democracy had won out over totalitarianism by its own self-evident virtues. He is less certain today, as these conversations with Norwegian think-tank administrator Fasting reveal. He began to take note of some of the inherent “weaknesses in Western political development” even as his “end-of-history” thesis was making the rounds, especially among the Cold War triumphalists in the Reagan and Bush administrations. One outcome of the financial crisis of 2008 was the acceleration of a body of left-behinds who were susceptible to populist and authoritarian leaders. Those left-behinds were not lacking in reasons to mistrust those in power, who, Fukuyama notes, “can game the system in such a way that they really make the system not responsive to the people’s true wishes,” working against the spirit of democracy itself. Things are worse elsewhere, of course, such as Russia, where Vladimir Putin has traded in a kind of “sovereign democracy” brand of populism that has found a large following in White nationalist circles—some in the U.S. Still, America has not proven immune to leaders who would diminish democratic values and profess a kind of populism that “basically uses democratic legitimacy to undermine liberal institutions.” Can democracy endure? Fukuyama suggests at various points that inequality must be addressed and corporate power diminished, the latter by enforcing long-abandoned antitrust laws. He also observes that the voters who made Donald Trump’s term possible “are a declining group within the country as a whole,” not likely to have the same clout in the future, even as new opponents—China, social media, predatory capitalism—do their best to diminish the rule of the people.

Students of geopolitics and world history will find Fukuyama’s thoughts both provocative and inspiring.

Kirkus Reviews