Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama (born Chicago, 1952) is an American political scientist, best known for the 'end of history' thesis he put forward in the early 1990s. His work deals with political development, institutional order and the prospects of liberal democracy, and it remains a reference point in debates about the role of the state in the contemporary world.

He was born in Chicago's Hyde Park neighbourhood and grew up in Manhattan as an only child, with little exposure to the Japanese culture of his family. He studied classics at Cornell University, where he worked with Allan Bloom. After a short spell in comparative literature at Yale and a semester in Paris with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, which left him disillusioned, he switched to political science at Harvard, where Samuel P. Huntington was among his teachers. From 1979 he worked at the RAND Corporation and in the State Department's policy planning staff, and later taught at Johns Hopkins and George Mason. He is now based at Stanford University.

In The End of History and the Last Man (1992) he argued that history understood as a struggle between ideologies seemed to be reaching its conclusion after the Cold War, with liberal democracy and market economics emerging as the shared horizon. He drew on Hegel, read through Alexandre Kojève, and on the idea that the engine of history is the desire for recognition, Plato's thymos. Over time he qualified this view. In Our Posthuman Future (2002) he warned that biotechnology could change human nature and put liberal democracy at risk.

His later books focus on the state and social trust. Trust (1995) explored how social virtues shape prosperity, while The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014) traced the formation and decline of political institutions since the French Revolution. In 2018 he published Identity, a study of the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment.

He was one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century and is often associated with neoconservatism. From the mid-2000s, however, he distanced himself from that current, objecting to the unilateralism of American foreign policy and to its conduct in the Middle East. His influence endures in debates about democracy, science and the limits of political order.