There aren’t many public intellectuals who can say they’ve been quoted by Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, but Francis Fukuyama is one of them. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, William Shatner’s character gets philosophical and tells the Klingon chancellor, “Some people think the future means the end of history. Well, we haven’t run out of history quite yet.”
When the film came out in 1991, and in the years after, you’d often hear remarks like that. They were references to a theory so well-known it didn’t need explaining. It first appeared in a 15-page essay by Fukuyama, who was then a 36-year-old think tank analyst. The essay was published in the summer of 1989 in The National Interest, a right-leaning US foreign policy journal. The title had a question mark: “The End of History?” Three years later, it came out as a book called The End of History and the Last Man. But those nuances, as we’ll see, were lost on many.
The essay made Fukuyama famous worldwide and helped launch a career as a political scientist, philosopher, and analyst focused on foreign policy and political economy. Governments and corporations around the globe sought his advice, from Ford’s executive offices to the tent of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But, as his new memoir makes clear—which is less a traditional autobiography and more the story of a life shaped by ideas, revisiting intellectual shifts and academic disputes, and barely mentioning his 40-year marriage—that essay also became something of a burden.
I ask him how he feels about that article now. Maybe the way the Beatles might have felt about their breakout hit “She Loves You”: grateful for the success, but tired of replaying it over and over.
“Well, a little bit of both,” says Fukuyama, now 73, on a video call from California, using a computer he built himself, by the way. “I definitely think I wouldn’t have gotten the attention I did if I’d used a different title. So that made a difference.”
But there’s been a downside. “You know, I get these ridiculous comments online. If I post a picture of my grandkids, people say, ‘Oh, I thought it was the end of grandkids.'”
The problem, as Fukuyama sees it, is a 37-year-old misunderstanding—one that took hold as soon as the essay came out. Because of that simple, catchy phrase—”the end of history”—people assumed he was saying that, with the Cold War winding down and the Berlin Wall about to fall, human conflict, even human events, were coming to an end. That all the big debates were settled, there would be no more war, and the whole world was about to live under US-style liberal democracy. As he puts it in his new book, In the Realm of the Last Man, it was seen as “naive liberal triumphalism, and I have been asked several times a week over the past three decades whether I wish to recant my argument. I have written thousands of words and given dozens of interviews trying to answer this question.”
In fact, he tells me, that was “one of the reasons for writing the memoir: to finally lay out clearly what I meant, where I was wrong, and where I believe I’m still right.” The book makes clear his argument was subtle, rooted in Hegelian thought and inspired by an earlier interpreter of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, from whom Fukuyama borrowed that all-important title.
According to Kojève, the end of history was the moment when a principle or set of ideas emerged that couldn’t be improved upon, in terms of how well they satisfied the people living in a system shaped by them. Kojève himself had jokingly suggested 1806 as the end of history, sinThat was the moment when, thanks to his defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, Napoleon brought the code that bore his name—the legal framework born from the French Revolution—into the heart of old Europe. As Fukuyama writes, the revolution of 1789 “established the underlying principles of a modern liberal order, namely, the two principles of liberty and equality, or the equality of liberty.”
Of course, those principles were not put into practice right away or in full. Even as Napoleon advanced through central Europe, French colonial authorities were crushing a slave revolt in Haiti. “But Kojève’s point was that once the idea of universal freedom got out, it was only a matter of time before those principles became accepted and practised around the world.” Even if that time was measured in centuries, with plenty of events—including two world wars—along the way.
This was the essence of Fukuyama’s argument about 1989. Not that liberal democracy was perfect, or that it had been achieved everywhere and all conflict was over. Rather, the evidence had become convincing that there was no better guiding principle or system. And Fukuyama still holds that view today.
“For the last 30-odd years, I’ve been saying that I’m looking for an alternative system that claims to be more humanly satisfying than liberal democracy. And a number of candidates have come along. Some of them, I think, are very implausible.” He cites Iranian-style theocracy as one such candidate. The Chinese model is a more serious contender. As an authoritarian system, he says, it can make decisions more efficiently than liberal democracy. “So the question for me is: is this also a sustainable system? Are we going to see this [replicated] in other places in 30 years? And that is still an open question.” If, over the next generation or so, China turns out to be much more successful than the US, with an exportable model that meets human needs, then Fukuyama promises he will be “perfectly happy to concede that I was wrong on the fundamental premise.”
He also accepts that the current consensus on liberal democracy is far from universal, and that the “liberal” part of that idea—the belief in limits and checks on elected power—is especially fragile. He writes that this is partly because support for those limits has often depended on a shared memory of how dangerous the world can become without them. A younger generation that has known only peace and prosperity, and for whom the tyrannies of the mid-20th century are ancient history, will only be vaguely aware of the dangers of unrestrained, illiberal rule.
But surely Donald Trump, born just one year after the defeat of Nazism, is living proof that being close to that dark history hardly guarantees respect for the safeguards that liberal democracy put in place? How do we explain the US president’s disregard for that danger?
“You know, that is one of the great psychological questions that future historians are going to have to answer. He has had this strange attraction not just to the current Russia and Vladimir Putin but, all the way back in the 1980s, he visited Moscow. He took out these full-page ads attacking Nato back then, when we were still in the middle of the cold war. I mean, it somehow has to do with his lack of any kind of moral compass beyond his own self-interest. He basically worries about whether he can make money, and if you can make money in a tyranny, that’s fine with him.”
It’s worth getting to the bottom of what Fukuyama meant all those years ago because, once you do, you find an idea more interesting than the soundbite versions of his thesis ever allowed.A paragraph from his original essay declared: “The end of history will be a very sad time.” With the fundamental question of politics essentially settled, even if far from fully realized, “the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” As Fukuyama writes now: “The being who emerges at the end of history is typically someone stripped of struggle, risk and ambition, someone whom the philosopher Nietzsche labeled the ‘Last Man.’ We have been living in the realm of the Last Man for some time now.” Once this idea is unpacked, even those who disagree with Fukuyama’s reading of 1989 will admit that he had an uncanny sense of what was to come.
What he was anticipating was that liberal democratic societies might prove good at delivering stability and relative material comfort, but that would still leave something deeply missing. He cites Socrates’ notion of thymos, or spiritedness: that part of the soul which craves the respect or esteem of other human beings. The last man might have his basic economic needs met, but he would become angry if he felt he wasn’t getting the recognition he deserved. It comes down to the simple desire for one’s equal dignity to be respected.
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“If you can make money in a tyranny, that’s fine with him” … Donald Trump at a Maga rally in North Carolina. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Reading those passages, it’s hard not to think of the worldwide rise of nationalist populism, and the Maga movement in particular. “The mass of the people that come to Donald Trump’s rallies feel that the liberal elites have not been respecting them,” says Fukuyama. “One of the things that propelled Trump to the top of the American political system is his recognition that they were being disrespected, and he found a way of talking to them in a manner that didn’t show that kind of contempt. He doesn’t use big words. He tells stupid stories that they think are very funny, and you know, educated people are appalled by.”
This, he says, is a key challenge for Democrats. “If you really want to solve this problem of equally distributed respect … it’s about both listening and talking. I think a lot of elite politicians actually don’t listen to people that are not like themselves. They don’t necessarily listen to ordinary people, and they also don’t know how to speak to ordinary people.” He notes the desperation of Democrats “looking for working-class candidates that they can push” in the November midterm elections, but says the “equal distribution of respect requires both policies that distribute actual material benefits more equally and a different kind of political discourse.” In that context, he likes the look of former Chicago mayor and potential 2028 presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel, a man with a streetfighter’s manner who is also, says Fukuyama, “very funny.”
The other defining trait of the last man is the hunger for a cause, for a life-or-death struggle that might give his life meaning. In 1989, Fukuyama anticipated “a powerful nostalgia” for the age when such battles raged, and that too reads like a premonition of our own era. “Fundamentally we’re living in a really weird time,” he says now. He looks back to Germany of the 1930s. “They’d just lost a horrendous war, millions of casualties. Then hyperinflation. Everybody’s savings get wiped out. You have instability on the streets of the Weimar Republic, and so – it’s not an excuse – but you can kind of understand why people would be drawn to extremist ideologies at that point. But that’s not the world we’re living in in 2026. You know, we’re actually pretty stable, pea”Peaceful. Yet you find people on both the left and the right saying, ‘This is the worst possible world.’ In America, the MAGA right claims America is dying, being killed by the other side. It’s hard to see how they can argue that with any historical awareness.
For the left, at least, hasn’t the climate crisis contributed to that mood of existential doom? Fukuyama doubts it. “I’m sitting in California. It’s a comfortable 70 degrees [21C]. I’m not burning up like you in Europe, so maybe it’s just my personal situation. But I think climate change is still a rather abstract thing for many people.” He points the finger elsewhere. “Social media and the internet in general have created this huge gap between actual material life and what people experience online.” He cites the many young men in the manosphere, gaming away their days, fed a falsely bleak picture of the world while longing for a cause worth dying for, as an example of what he warned about in the very last sentence of the 1989 essay: “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
There’s a chapter in the new book whose title hints at the other story the memoir tells: On Changing Your Mind. Fukuyama has made the relatively rare political journey from right to left. A former official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, he describes his time as a follower of the noted conservative scholar Allan Bloom and as part of the neoconservative group of thinkers who laid the intellectual groundwork for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fukuyama renounced his support for that war in February 2004. In the book, he candidly admits that what kept him from breaking earlier was, in part, less ideological than social and human: he didn’t want to end friendships he valued.
Still, his departure from the right wasn’t only in foreign policy. While his former colleagues saw government only as an obstacle to be removed, his own studies of societies around the world led him to see a capable state as essential. As if to confirm how far he’s come, one chapter is titled Learning to Love Bureaucrats.
I ask whether his view of the world might have differed from other Republicans and conservatives because of his Japanese-American roots, which are detailed movingly in the book. It tells of his grandmother, a “picture bride” who left Japan at 21 when she was put on a “steamer to Los Angeles all alone, where she was to marry a stranger 10 years older than herself,” and of an uncle left “penniless” after the store he built was effectively confiscated when he, like all Japanese-Americans on the west coast, was interned during World War II. Did he see things differently because he was part of an ethnic minority that had suffered a bitter history of exclusion?
“No, I don’t think so,” he says right away. “I’ve tried to avoid thinking of myself as an Asian-American my whole life, because I just don’t like that sort of identity politics. It’s true that, after September 11, some right-wing people in the United States said, ‘Well, we ought to put Arab-Americans in camps.’ And, yes, of course, I felt that was really wrong based on my family history, but I don’t think that made me especially sensitive to those kinds of issues.”
What changed his mind was a changing world. Even if he still thinks…Now that the big question has been settled, events clearly matter. The Iraq war and the 2008 financial crash shook his worldview. As he says, “If you’re an intellectual and you believe certain things about using military force in foreign policy and about unregulated markets in economics, and both lead to major disasters, you should rethink some of those assumptions.” For Francis Fukuyama, the end of history never meant the end of thinking. In the Realm of the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama is published by Profile Books (£20) and comes out on 8 September. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you’d like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email for possible publication in our letters section, please click here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the articles themes written in a natural accessible tone
General Background Questions
1 Who is Francis Fukuyama and why should I care what he thinks
Francis Fukuyama is a famous political scientist He became worldfamous in 1989 with his End of History theory which argued that Western liberal democracy was the final form of human government Because of that when he changes his mind about democracy its a big deal
2 What does the quote If he can make money under a dictatorship thats fine with him mean
Its Fukuyamas summary of what he thinks a lot of American business leaders and billionaires believe about Donald Trump Hes saying they dont really care about protecting democratic institutions they only care about making money even if it means supporting someone who acts like a dictator
3 Is Fukuyama saying Trump is actually a dictator
No not exactly He is warning that Trump behaves like an authoritarian and has dictatorial tendencies Fukuyamas bigger point is that Trump is willing to break democratic rules and norms and that many powerful people are okay with that as long as they profit
4 Why is this surprising coming from Fukuyama specifically
Because he spent his whole career defending liberal democracy as the best system Hes now saying that system is in real danger in the US and hes admitting his earlier optimistic theory didnt account for how fragile democracy could become
5 Has Fukuyama actually changed his views
Yes he says he has He admits he was too optimistic about the End of History He now believes that democracy isnt a finish line its something that needs constant defending and he sees Trump as proof that it can decay from within
Questions About His Specific Arguments
6 What is Fukuyamas main criticism of Trump
His main criticism is that Trump rejects the basic rules of the game He argues Trump refuses to accept election results he loses tries to weaponize the justice system against his enemies and cares more about personal loyalty than the Constitution
7 Why does Fukuyama think Republicans go along with Trump
He believes its a mix of fear and political calculation But
