Francis Fukuyama

Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer.

Fukuyama is known for his book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992), which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle and become the final form of human government, an assessment met with criticisms. In his subsequent book ''Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity'' (1995), he modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.

Fukuyama has been a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies since July 2010 and the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In August 2019, he was named director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford.

Before that, he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.

He is a council member of the International Forum for Democratic Studies founded by the National Endowment for Democracy and was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation. He is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.

Early life

Francis Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. His paternal grandfather fled the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and started a shop on the west coast before being incarcerated in the Second World War. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, a second-generation Japanese American, was trained as a minister in the Congregational Church, received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, and taught religious studies. His mother, Toshiko Kawata Fukuyama (), was born in Kyoto, Japan, and was the daughter of Shiro Kawata (), founder of the Economics Department of Kyoto University and first president of Osaka City University. Francis, whose Japanese name is Yoshihiro, grew up in Manhattan as an only child, had little contact with Japanese culture, and did not learn Japanese. His family moved to State College, Pennsylvania, in 1967.

Education

Fukuyama received his Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy under Allan Bloom. He initially pursued graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale University, going to Paris for six months to study under Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida but became disillusioned and switched to political science at Harvard University. There, he studied with Samuel P. Huntington and Harvey Mansfield, among others. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard for his thesis on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East. In 1979, he joined the global policy think tank RAND Corporation.

Fukuyama lived at the Telluride House and has been affiliated with the Telluride Association since his undergraduate years at Cornell. Telluride is an education enterprise that has been home to other significant leaders and intellectuals, including Steven Weinberg, Paul Wolfowitz and Kathleen Sullivan.

Fukuyama was the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University from 1996 to 2000. Until July 10, 2010, he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. He is now Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and resident in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford.

Scholarship

''The End of History and the Last Man''

Fukuyama is best known as the author of ''The End of History and the Last Man'', in which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies was largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The book was an expansion on ideas expressed in an earlier article, "The End of History?" published in ''The National Interest.'' In the article, Fukuyama predicted the coming global triumph of political and economic liberalism:

Authors like Ralf Dahrendorf argued in 1990 that the essay gave Fukuyama his 15 minutes of fame, which would soon be followed by a slide into obscurity. However, Fukuyama remained a relevant and cited public intellectual, leading American communitarian Amitai Etzioni to declare him "one of the few enduring public intellectuals. They are often media stars who are eaten up and spat out after their 15 minutes. But he has lasted." Bernard Crick in his book titled ''Democracy'' spoke of Fukayama's principle of 'the end of the world' as being a poor misreading of the historical processes involved in the development of modern democracy.

According to Fukuyama, one of the main critiques of ''The End of History'' was of his aggressive stance towards postmodernism. Postmodern philosophy had, in Fukuyama's opinion, undermined the ideology behind liberal democracy, leaving the western world in a potentially weaker position. The fact that Marxism and fascism had proven untenable for practical use while liberal democracy still thrived was reason enough to embrace the hopeful attitude of the Progressive era, as this hope for the future was what made a society worth struggling to maintain. Postmodernism, which, by this time, had become embedded in the cultural consciousness, offered no hope and nothing to sustain a necessary sense of community, instead relying only on lofty intellectual premises.

''The Origins of Political Order''

In the 2011 book, Fukuyama describes what makes a state stable, using comparative political history to develop a theory of the stability of a political system. According to Fukuyama, an ideal political order needs a modern and effective state, the rule of law governing the state and be accountable.

''Political Order and Political Decay''

The 2014 book is the second book on political order, following the 2011 book '' The Origins of Political Order.'' In this book, Fukuyama covers events taking place since the French Revolution and sheds light on political institutions and their development in different regions.

After tracing how a modern and effective government was developed in the U.S., Fukuyama asserts that it is experiencing political decay. Fukuyama believes that political decay can be seen in the deterioration of bureaucracies, special interest groups capturing the legislature, and inevitable but cumbersome judicial processes challenging all types of government action.

Other works

Fukuyama has written a number of other books, among them ''Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity'' and '' Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution''. In the latter, he qualified his original "end of history" thesis, arguing that since biotechnology increasingly allows humans to control their own evolution, it may allow humans to alter human nature, thereby putting liberal democracy at risk. One possible outcome could be that an altered human nature could end in radical inequality. He is a fierce enemy of transhumanism, an intellectual movement asserting that posthumanity is a desirable goal.

In another work, ''The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order'', Fukuyama explores the origins of social norms, and analyses the current disruptions in the fabric of our moral traditions, which he considers as arising from a shift from the manufacturing to the information age. This shift is, he thinks, normal and will prove self-correcting, given the intrinsic human need for social norms and rules.

In 2006, in ''America at the Crossroads'', Fukuyama discusses the history of neoconservatism, with particular focus on its major tenets and political implications. He outlines his rationale for supporting the Bush administration, as well as where he believes it has gone wrong.

In 2008, Fukuyama published the book ''Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States'', which resulted from research and a conference funded by Grupo Mayan to gain understanding on why Latin America, once far wealthier than North America, fell behind in terms of development in only a matter of centuries. Discussing this book at a 2009 conference, Fukuyama outlined his belief that inequality within Latin American nations is a key impediment to growth. An unequal distribution of wealth, he stated, leads to social upheaval, which then results in stunted growth.

In 2018 in ''Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment'' Fukuyama enlists Plato's notion of thymos in order to understand the politics of grievance and ressentiment.

At the start of the following decade, he published some reflections on his work in the form of conversations under the title ''After the End of History''.

Political views

Neoconservatism

As a key Reagan Administration contributor to the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine, Fukuyama is an important figure in the rise of neoconservatism, although his works came out years after Irving Kristol's 1972 book crystallized neoconservatism. Fukuyama was active in the Project for the New American Century

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