Francis Fukuyama

• Born: October 27, 1952
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

SCHOLAR AND PHILOSOPHER

Best known for his theory about the “end of history,” which set off an international debate on the nature of history and significance of the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama had a successful career in government and later became a noted scholar of international affairs and bioethics.

Full name: Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama

Areas of achievement: Scholarship, philosophy, government and politics

Early Life

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama was born in Chicago, Illinois, to parents of Japanese ancestry. His paternal grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, was a Protestant minister and, later, a sociologist and professor of religion. His father’s interest in moral and social issues would later inspire Fukuyama’s own work. His mother, Toshiko Kawata Fukuyama, was also an academic. Fukuyama grew up in New York City in the middle-class Manhattan community of Stuyvesant Town. Following his childhood, Fukuyama followed in his parents’ footsteps, embarking on his own academic career.

Fukuyama began his studies at Cornell University in 1970, majoring in classics and studying with philosopher Allan Bloom; he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1974. Fukuyama then began graduate work in comparative literature at Yale University under the supervision of literary critic and theorist Paul de Man, but did not complete his degree. Instead, he enrolled in the PhD program at Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in political science in 1981. His thesis focused on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East.

In 1979, Fukuyama began working for the RAND Corporation, a public policy research and analysis organization incorporated as a nonprofit in 1948. He left the organization in 1980, then returned from 1983 to 1989. At RAND, he produced his first three monographs: “Moscow’s Post-Brezhnev Reassessment of the Third World” (1986), “Soviet Civil-Military Relations and the Power Projection Mission” (1987), and “Gorbachev and the New Soviet Agenda in the Third World” (1989). Following his later successes, Fukuyama would be named to the RAND Corporation board of trustees.

In 1981 and 1982, between his first and second terms of employment at the RAND Corporation, Fukuyama was also a member of the policy planning staff of the US State Department, then under the direction of Paul D. Wolfowitz. Around the same time, Fukuyama was part of the American delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. He returned to the State Department in 1989.

Life’s Work

Fukuyama rose to international prominence in 1989 when he published the essay “The End of History?” in the foreign-policy journal theNational Interest. In it, Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War indicated the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism over communism. Adopting a perspective based on the work of philosophers G. W. F. Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama argued that history was a series of ideological battles moving toward a rational end. He argued that liberal democracy was that end because it did not suffer from internal inconsistencies; history moves toward ideal liberal democracy. The article was accompanied by responses from several notable thinkers, including Bloom. It inspired an international debate in both academic and mainstream literature, with articles appearing in Newsweek, theNew York Times, and the French journal Commentaire. Fukuyama expanded “The End of History?” into a book, The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. It was translated into a dozen languages, becoming an international best seller. It also won the Los Angeles Times’ Book Critics Award and Italy’s Premio Capri award.

Fukuyama returned to the RAND Corporation in 1995 and 1996, during which time he released his next award-winning book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995).

Fukuyama’s career then moved into the academic realm. In 1996, Fukuyama was named Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. There, he produced The End of Order (1997) and The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999). In 2000, he moved to the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Fukuyama moved to Stanford University in 2010.

In 2001, after the dissolution of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, President George W. Bush created the President’s Council on Bioethics. Fukuyama served on the council from 2001 to 2004. During that time, he contributed to bioethics literature with the release of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002). He argued that biotechnology may alter the course (and end) of history. The report “Beyond Bioethics: A Proposal for Modernizing the Regulation of Human Biotechnologies” (2006) followed. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Fukuyama returned to his “end of history” thesis. In Has History Restarted Since September 11? (2002), Fukuyama argued that the terrorist attacks were a historical event, rather than the birth of a competing ideology, and thus did not undermine his thesis. Radical Islam provided a detour on the path of modernization and globalization through liberal democracy and capitalism but could not serve as an ideology that orders world politics. Differing European and American reactions to the September 11 attacks, however, suggested that Fukuyama’s thesis that Western ideals would triumph needed to be revised. Europeans and Americans disagreed on the source of legitimacy for liberal democracy. Europeans found it in the international community, while Americans found it in the nation-state. Fukuyama emphasized the importance of the nation-state, later publishing State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (2004) to expand on this point. In 2011 he published The Origins of Political Order, exploring societies from prehuman times to the French Revolution, and he followed that in 2014 with Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

In the late 2000s, Fukuyama edited several volumes of traditional international-affairs essay collections, including Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (2006), East Asian Multilateralism: Prospects for Regional Stability (2008),Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap between the United States and Latin America (2008), and New Ideas on Development Since the Financial Crisis (2011). He published Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment in 2018, in which he posits that the rise of identity politics in the twenty-first century has threatened liberalism. He also served as chair of American Purpose, a magazine and intellectual communtiy focused on promoting liberal democracy in the United States and abroad.

He has received numerous awards and honors. In 2016, Harvard University bestowed its Centennial Medal on him. He received the 2024 Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration from the Section on International and Comparative Administration of the American Society for Public Administration.

Significance

Fukuyama’s influence extends to numerous fields, including political philosophy, philosophy of history, international affairs, and bioethics. Fukuyama’s theory on the “end of history” was crucial to post–Cold War political thought. It helped frame the debate about the meaning of the end of the Cold War and the future of international politics. It also led to a revived mainstream interest in Hegelian philosophy. The phrase “the end of history” was added to the Oxford Book of Quotations. The theory remained influential even in light of continuing major historical events and the seeming rise of radical Islam as a competing ideology. His thesis has been carefully revised in light of changing circumstances but remains fundamentally the same. Fukuyama’s significance, however, extends beyond his “end of history” thesis. His works in bioethics and international affairs have been widely read. Fukuyama has been able to move from theory to practice with ease, often within the same text.

Bibliography

Atlas, James. “What Is Fukuyama Saying? And to Whom Is He Saying It?” New York Times Magazine 22 Oct. 1989: 38–42. Print.

Bertram, Christopher, and Andrew Chitty, eds. Has History Ended? Fukuyama, Marx, Modernity. Brookfield: Ashgate, 1994. Print.

Burns, Timothy, ed. After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics. Lanham: Littlefield Adams, 1994. Print.

"Francis Fukuyama." Stanford University, Nov. 2020, profiles.stanford.edu/francis-fukuyama. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 2006. Print.

Fukuyama, Francis. Has History Restarted Since September 11? St. Leonards: Ctr. for Independent Studies, 2002. Print.

Fukuyama, Francis. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. New York: Farrar, 2014. Print.

Fukuyama, Francis. "Q. and A.: Francis Fukuyama on China's Political Development." Interview by Qitong Cao. New York Times. New York Times, 1 May 2015. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

Menand, Louis. "Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History." The New Yorker, 27 Aug. 2018, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/francis-fukuyama-postpones-the-end-of-history. Accessed 20 July 2021.

Sulots, Nora. "Francis Fukuyama Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award." Stanford University, 12 Mar. 2024, cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/news/francis-fukuyama-honored-lifetime-achievement-award. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Yang, Wesley. "Francis Fukuyama: 'In Recently Democratised Countries I'm Still a Rock Star.'" Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 27 Dec. 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.