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.
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