Francis Fukuyama

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American philosopher, political economist, and author best known for his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Quotes

1990s

The End of History and the Last Man (1992)

• What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

• Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
  • p. 330

2000s

• Neoconservatives believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support. …

  "[W]ar" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

  • From the essay "After Neoconservatism" in the New York Times Magazine, February 19, 2006.

• The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.
  • In "The history at the end of history", The Guardian, 3 April 2007.

2010s

• Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up.
  • On The Colbert Report, May 2, 2011,[1] answering the question of who Americans should be scared of now that bin Laden is dead

• The Left’s identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions.
  • "Against Identity Politics" (14 August 2018), Foreign Affairs

External links

• Fukuyama's homepage at Johns Hopkins University
• Fukuyama's WorldCat Identities entry (library holdings)