Francis Fukuyama is one of the few public intellectuals who can claim to have been quoted by Captain James T. Kirk of “Star Trek.” In the 1991 film “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” Kirk says, “Some people think the future means the end of history. Well, we haven’t run out of history yet.”
It was an allusion to Fukuyama’s famous thesis, which he first put forward in 1989 in the essay “The End of History?” published in the American magazine “The National Interest.” Three years later, he elaborated on it in the book “The End of History and the Last Man.” However, what Fukuyama was really arguing was often lost behind the simple and catchy phrase “the end of history.”
Speaking to Jonathan Friedland for The Guardian, Fukuyama revisits the idea and explains what he really meant by it, where he went wrong and where he still believes he was right. The essay brought him international fame and paved the way for a career as a political scientist, philosopher and analyst whose advice was sought by governments and business circles around the world, from Ford to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But the thesis that made him famous also became a burden of sorts.
Fukuyama admits that it was the title “The End of History?” that brought him attention that he probably would not have received if he had titled the essay differently.
"A bit of both," says the 73-year-old Fukuyama when asked how he views the text that made him famous today. "I certainly don't think I would have attracted as much attention if I had chosen a different title. That made a difference."
But such fame had its downside.
"You know, I get these absurd comments online. If I post a photo of my grandchildren, they say, 'And I thought it was the end of grandchildren.'"
The problem, as Fukuyama sees it, is a 37-year-old misunderstanding that arose almost as soon as the essay was published. Because of the simple and memorable phrase “the end of history,” many have concluded that Fukuyama was arguing that, as the Cold War drew to a close and the fall of the Berlin Wall loomed, the end of human conflict, and even of major historical events, was approaching—that key ideological debates were over, that there would be no more wars, and that the entire world would embrace American-style liberal democracy.
As he writes in his new book "In the Realm of the Last Man," his thesis was understood as an expression of "naive liberal triumphalism."
"Over the past three decades, I've been asked several times a week if I want to retract my argument. I've written thousands of words and given dozens of interviews trying to answer that question."
As he tells Friedland, this was "one of the reasons for writing my memoirs – to finally, quite clearly, explain what I intended to say, where I was wrong, and where I still believe I was right."
The book shows that his argument was much more nuanced than has often been presented. It drew on Hegel's philosophy, and in particular on the interpretation of Alexander Kojève, from whom Fukuyama borrowed the key phrase "the end of history."
According to Kojève, the end of history marks the moment at which political principles emerge that can no longer be surpassed in their ability to satisfy human needs.
Kojève, somewhat provocatively, identified 1806 as such a turning point, when Napoleon, with his victory over Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, extended the political and legal legacy of the French Revolution into the heart of Europe. The 1789 Revolution, Fukuyama writes, established the fundamental principles of the modern liberal order – freedom and equality.
These principles, of course, were not immediately or consistently applied. But Kojève's point was that, once the idea of universal freedom emerged, it was only a matter of time before it would be accepted and implemented throughout the world – even if that process took centuries and went through wars and major historical upheavals.
Friedland argues that this was the crux of Fukuyama's argument in 1989. He did not claim that liberal democracy was perfect, that it was established everywhere, or that all conflicts had ended, but that the evidence pointed to no better guiding principle or political system. He still holds to this day.
"For the last thirty years or so, I have been saying that I am looking for an alternative system that claims to be better at meeting human needs than liberal democracy. Several candidates have emerged. Some of them are, in my opinion, very unconvincing."
He cites the Iranian-style theocracy as one such example. He sees the Chinese model as a more serious challenge. As an authoritarian system, he says, it can make decisions more efficiently than a liberal democracy.
"The question for me is: is this system sustainable? Will we see this model adopted in other places in 30 years? That's still an open question."
If, over the next generation, China proves to be significantly more successful than the US and that its model can be applied elsewhere while meeting human needs, Fukuyama says he will "have no problem admitting that he was wrong in his basic assumption."
Fukuyama also acknowledges that today's consensus on liberal democracy is far from universal, and that its "liberal" part - the belief that elected government must be limited and subject to control - is particularly vulnerable.
Support for these restrictions, he writes, depended in part on a collective memory of how dangerous the world could become when they were gone. Younger generations, who have known only peace and prosperity and for whom the tyrannies of the mid-20th century are a distant memory, are only vaguely aware of the dangers of unlimited, illiberal power.
But isn't Donald Trump, born just a year after the defeat of Nazism, living proof that proximity to that dark period of history does not in itself mean respect for the protective mechanisms of liberal democracy? How can we explain the US president's disregard for this danger?
"You know, that's one of the great psychological questions that future historians will have to answer. He has this strange attraction not only to today's Russia and Vladimir Putin. He visited Moscow back in the 1980s. Back then, he was running full-page ads attacking NATO, while the Cold War was still going on. I think it has something to do with the fact that, outside of self-interest, he has no moral compass. He's basically interested in whether he can make money, and if you can make money in tyranny, that's fine with him."
Friedland writes that it is worth going back to what Fukuyama really meant, because behind the simplified versions of his thesis lies a much more interesting idea. In the final paragraph of the original essay, Fukuyama wrote: “The end of history will be a very sad time.” If the basic political question is essentially solved, even if that solution has not yet been realized in practice, “the world ideological struggle that inspired audacity, courage, imagination, and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, endless technical problem-solving, environmental concern, and the satisfaction of increasingly sophisticated consumer demands.”
As Fukuyama writes in a new book: "The being who emerges at the end of history is usually someone devoid of struggle, risk, and ambition, someone whom the philosopher Nietzsche called 'the last man.' We have been living in the realm of the last man for some time now."
When this idea is considered in more detail, Friedland estimates, even those who dispute Fukuyama's interpretation in 1989 might admit that he had an almost prophetic premonition of what was to come.
Friedland points out that Fukuyama actually predicted that liberal-democratic societies could successfully provide stability and relative material comfort, while still leaving people with a sense that something fundamentally is missing.
Fukuyama refers to Socrates' concept of thymos - that part of human nature that wants to be respected and esteemed by other people. The "last man" may have his basic material needs met, but he will become resentful if he feels that he is not being given the respect he deserves. It is fundamentally a need to have his equal human dignity recognized.
Reading those passages, Friedland writes, it's hard not to think of the global rise of nationalist populism, and in particular the MAGA movement.
"The masses of people who come to Donald Trump's rallies feel disrespected by the liberal elites," Fukuyama says. "One of the things that brought Trump to the top of the American political system is that he recognized that he was treating these people with disrespect and found a way to address them without that kind of contempt. He doesn't use big words. He tells stupid stories that are very funny to them, while educated people are disgusted by it."
Fukuyama says this is one of the key challenges for Democrats.
"If you really want to solve the problem of equal distribution of respect, you have to both listen and talk. I think a lot of elite politicians don't really listen to people who are not like them. They don't necessarily listen to ordinary people, and they don't know how to talk to them."
He also points to Democrats' desperate search for "working-class candidates they can highlight" in the November congressional elections, but believes that "a more even distribution of respect requires both policies that will distribute concrete material benefits more fairly, as well as a different kind of political discourse."
Another characteristic of the “last man,” Friedland writes, is a hunger for some purpose, for a life-and-death struggle that would give his life meaning. As early as 1989, Fukuyama predicted a “strong nostalgia” for a time when such struggles were fought, which today seems like another prediction of our times.
“Basically, we live in a really strange time,” Fukuyama says, looking back at Germany in the 1930s. “They had just lost a terrible war, with millions of casualties.
Then came hyperinflation. People lost all their savings. There was instability on the streets of the Weimar Republic, and so – this is not an excuse – you can understand to some extent why people were attracted to extremist ideologies back then. But that is not the world we live in in 2026. We actually live in a fairly stable and peaceful world. And yet you have people on both the left and the right who say, ‘This is the worst possible world.’ In America, we have the MAGA right that claims that America is dying, that the other side is killing it. And it is very difficult to understand how anyone, with any historical awareness, can say that.”
Friedland asks whether, at least on the left, the climate crisis has contributed to this sense of existential doom. Fukuyama doubts it.
"I'm sitting in California. It's a pleasant 21 degrees. I don't burn from the heat like you do in Europe, so maybe it's just my personal situation. But I think climate remains a pretty abstract thing for a lot of people."
He sees the cause elsewhere.
"Social media and the internet in general have enabled a huge gap between people's real, material everyday lives and what they experience online."
As an example, he cites the multitude of young men in the manosphere who spend their days playing video games, while simultaneously gaining a falsely bleak view of the world and longing for a goal worth dying for. Friedland recalls that Fukuyama warned of just such a phenomenon in the last sentence of his 1989 essay:
"Perhaps it is the prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history that will serve to make history begin again."
If you're an intellectual and you believe certain things about the use of military force in foreign policy and unregulated markets in economics, and both lead to major disasters, then you should reconsider some of those assumptions.
One chapter of the new book is titled “On Changing Minds,” which hints at another important story in Fukuyama’s memoir. He has taken a relatively rare political path – from the right to the left.
A former official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Fukuyama writes about his time as a follower of the renowned conservative thinker Alan Bloom and part of a circle of neoconservative intellectuals who prepared the intellectual ground for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Fukuyama renounced his support for the war in February 2004. In the book, he openly admits that he was prevented from making an early break not only by ideological reasons, but also by something much more personal – he did not want to lose friendships that were important to him.
Yet Fukuyama's move away from the right was not limited to foreign policy. While his former colleagues in the state saw only an obstacle to be removed, his study of societies around the world led him to conclude that a capable state was essential, Friedland writes.
As if to confirm how much his views have changed, one chapter of the book is titled "How I Learned to Love Bureaucrats."
Friedland asks him if his worldview might have differed from that of other Republicans and conservatives because of his Japanese-American background, which Fukuyama writes about in the book.
His grandmother was a “photographed bride”: at the age of 21, she left Japan alone by steamship to Los Angeles, where she was to marry a man ten years her senior whom she did not know. Fukuyama also writes about an uncle who was left “without a penny” after the store he had built was virtually taken away from him when, like all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, he was interned in a camp during World War II.
The question was whether belonging to an ethnic minority with a painful history of exclusion influenced him to view the world differently.
“No, I don’t,” he replied. “I’ve tried my whole life not to think of myself as Asian-American, because I just don’t like that kind of identity politics. It’s true that after 9/11, some right-wingers in the United States were saying, ‘Well, we should put Arab-Americans in camps.’ And of course, because of my family history, I thought that was really wrong, but I don’t think that made me particularly sensitive to those kinds of issues.”
What changed Fukuyama's thinking was a changing world. Although he still believes the big question has been basically settled, events matter. The Iraq War and the 2008 financial crash fundamentally changed his view of the world.
"If you're an intellectual and you believe certain things about the use of military force in foreign policy and unregulated markets in economics, and both lead to major disasters, then you should reconsider some of those assumptions," Fukuyama says.
For Francis Fukuyama, Friedland concludes, the end of history never meant the end of thinking.
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