Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and international relations scholar. He is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which controversially argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and Western free-market capitalism may represent the final step in humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle and the final form of human government.
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. Previously, he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, he had also been the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.
Moreover, he serves as 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 and education 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 during World War II. 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 , 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. In 1967, his family moved to State College, Pennsylvania. 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; however, he 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 from Harvard for his thesis on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East. In 1979, he joined RAND Corporation, the global policy think tank.
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 such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Luciano Canfora argued in 1990 that the essay gave Fukuyama his 15 minutes of fame, which a slide into obscurity would soon follow.Dahrendorf (1990) Reflections on the revolution in Europe p. 37Luciano Canfora La grande illusione del capitalismo eterno preface to Ercolani, Paolo La storia infinita. Marx, il liberalismo e la maledizione di Nietzsche quotation: However, Fukuyama remained a relevant and cited public intellectual, which led 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 Fukuyama's principle of "the end of the world" as being a poor misreading of the historical processes involved in the development of modern democracy.Bernard Crick. Democracy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford Univ. Press. p. 112.
According to Fukuyama, one of the main critiques of The End of History was of his aggressive stance against postmodernism. In Fukuyama's opinion, postmodern philosophy undermined the ideology behind liberal democracy, leaving the Western world in a potentially weaker position.'Francis Fukuyama, "Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later", History and Theory 34, 2: "World Historians and Their Critics" (May 1995): 43. 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.'Francis Fukuyama, "Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later", History and Theory 34, 2: World Historians and Their Critics (May 1995): 36.
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 accountability.
Political Order and Political Decay
The 2014 book is his second work on political order, following the 2011 book The Origins of Political Order. In this book, Fukuyama covers events since the French Revolution and sheds light on political institutions and their development in different regions.
After tracing the development of a modern and effective government in the United States, Fukuyama asserts that the country is experiencing political decay. Fukuyama believes that political decay can be observed 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.For a critical analysis of Fukuyama's bioethical argument, see: 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 analyzes current disruptions in the fabric of human moral traditions. He considers these disruptions to arise 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 and where he believed it was going wrong at the time.
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 an understanding of 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 impedes growth. He stated that an unequal distribution of wealth leads to social upheaval, resulting in stunted growth.
In 2018, in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Fukuyama enlists Plato's notion of thymos to understand the politics of grievance and resentment.Addis Goldman, Finding Fukuyama's Ends Between Aspirations and History, THR Web Features, July 22, 2021 Fukuyama contends that human beings seek recognition of their dignity, and this need forms the psychological foundation of modern identity politics- the need for others to recognize one's moral and social worth, a need that has intensified in the modern era. The politics of dignity encompasses both liberal efforts to remedy the exclusion of minorities and authoritarian promises to restore the dignity of a supposedly disrespected majority. He argues that when dignity becomes tied to narrower identities—ethnic, religious, or national—it can be weaponized by strongmen who claim to speak for a humiliated people. Yet the same drive can also advance democratic aims when it pushes societies to acknowledge marginalized voices and expand equal rights. In this sense, the dynamic of dignity-seeking unifies otherwise opposing political movements.
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.After the End of History: Conversations with Francis Fukuyama, Edited by Mathilde Fasting, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021.
In 2022, Fukuyama published the book Liberalism and Its Discontents, in which he defended liberalism from critics on the populist right and the progressive left. He also criticized neoliberalism and identity politics.
Based on his published book Liberalism and Its Discontents, he wrote the article A Country of Their Own: Liberalism Needs the Nation, which was published in Foreign Affairs in April 2022. The article argues that liberalism globally is in crisis, and it must be combined with a strong and inclusive national identity in order to survive the current threats from authoritarianism and nationalist movements worldwide.
In 2026, Fukuyama published In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir, a reflection on his career as an academic and on the reception and impact of his work.
Political views
Neoconservatism