Francis Fukuyama's New Memoir Traces Five Decades of Political Thought
Francis Fukuyama's New Memoir Traces Five Decades of Political Thought
"In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir" has drawn national attention ahead of its release and a CDDRL book talk with the author on September 23.
Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), has published a new intellectual memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man. From the book's description: "More than a conventional memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man is personal history as political history — the story of a life that illuminates the troubled fate of democracy and liberalism over the last fifty years. Returning to and developing the concepts that have been central to his work — recognition, thymos, trust, identity, human nature, institutions, and the Last Man — Fukuyama brings the depth and richness of personal experience and pathbreaking scholarship to illuminate the crises of the twenty-first century."
Persuasion, the online magazine and podcast network founded by Yascha Mounk — and now also home to American Purpose, the magazine Fukuyama founded in 2020 — has marked the book's publication with a five-part interview series, "The Eras of Francis Fukuyama," in which Mounk talks with Fukuyama chronologically about his life and work. The first episode, "His Life and Ideas," covers his family background — his grandfather's emigration from Japan ahead of the Russo-Japanese War, his father and uncle's diverging experiences of internment — and his early turn from French postmodernism toward Straussian political theory. The second, "The End of History and the Last Man," returns to the 1989 thesis itself, its debts to Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, and how Fukuyama thinks it has held up 35 years on. The third, "Human Nature," draws on his service on President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics to discuss human nature and his wariness of biotechnologies like CRISPR gene editing. The fourth, "How States Form," traces his early sympathy for the neoconservative movement through the collapse of state authority in Afghanistan and Iraq and into the state-building research of his two-volume Political Order series. The fifth and final episode, "Building Things," is more personal, touching on furniture-making, computer-building, and other hobbies Fukuyama has kept up alongside his academic work. You can view a playlist of the interviews below:
The memoir has also drawn national press coverage. On August 31, the New York Times ran a profile of Fukuyama, "He Warned That the End of History Could Be Rough. Maybe Now People Will Listen." It covers his family background, early intellectual formation, and break from the neoconservative movement, and argues that the "Last Man" half of his original thesis — the warning about complacency and stagnation once ideological struggle ends — has been widely misread and speaks directly to the present moment.
CDDRL will host Fukuyama for a book launch and discussion of the memoir on Wednesday, September 23, from 4:00 to 5:30 PM. Event details and registration are available here.
