The scholar who read 1989 as liberal democracy's endpoint
In 1989 he wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history as such.”
Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist and scholar of international politics who has compared the formation of states, institutions, and political orders. His 1989 essay “The End of History?” interpreted the end of the Cold War and the spread of liberal democracy as a point reached in humanity’s ideological evolution, making it one of the defining claims in debates over what 1989 meant. He expanded the argument in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), while later work stressed state capacity, the rule of law, and accountability, qualifying any simple early optimism.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1974B.A. in Classics, Cornell University
- 1979–1981Ph.D. study and doctorate in Political Science, Harvard University
- 1979–1989Political scientist, RAND Corporation
- 1981–1982Member, Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State
- 1989Published “The End of History?” in The National Interest
- 1992Published The End of History and the Last Man
- 2001–2010Professor of International Political Economy, Johns Hopkins University
- 2010–현재Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
Related historical events
Departure from the Neoconservative Camp
Fukuyama worked at the RAND Corporation and on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff during the 1980s, engaging in the practical conduct of late Cold War foreign policy, and in that setting moved close to neoconservative circles. From 1997 he was active in the Project for the New American Century, and in 1998 he co-signed its letter urging President Bill Clinton to support Iraqi insurgencies in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. After September 11, 2001, he was among forty co-signers of William Kristol's letter to President George W. Bush recommending not only the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden but a "determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." As a supporter of the Iraq War, he defended it against critics who charged the United States with unilateralism and violations of international law.
From about 2004 he began to distance himself from the Bush administration's neoconservative line. At the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner in February 2004, he watched Dick Cheney and Charles Krauthammer declare a unipolar era under American hegemony while those around him cheered, and concluded that the Iraq War was being blundered. That year he voiced growing opposition to the war and called for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. In "After Neoconservatism" (New York Times Magazine, 2006) he argued that neoconservatives had believed history could be pushed along by the right application of power and will, and likened this to Leninism: Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, he wrote, and had returned as farce when practiced by the United States. In America at the Crossroads (2006) he stated that neoconservatism had evolved into something he could no longer support, and he rejected war as the wrong metaphor for the struggle against jihadism, describing it instead as a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims.
The break continued. He endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, saying he could not reward the Republicans for the failures of the Bush administration. From 2006 he described his own position not as neoconservatism or cynical realism but as "realistic Wilsonianism," retaining the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony.