Francis Fukuyama Predicted the End of History. He’s Back (Again).


“It looked like I was ahead in the 1990s and early 2000s, but after 9/11 people started arguing that he was right,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s certain that I will lose.”

He believes that liberal democracy is not an accidental, culturally contingent by-product of a particular historical moment, as some of its critics have argued. “I believe that history has an arc, and that leans towards some kind of justice,” he said.

In his new book, published Tuesday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Fukuyama argues that liberalism is threatened not by a rival ideology but by “absolutized” versions of its own principles. On the right, supporters of the neoliberal economy have distorted the economy and led to dangerous systemic instability, turning the ideal of individual autonomy and free market into a religion. And on the left, he argues that progressives are abandoning individual autonomy and freedom of expression in favor of claims of group rights that threaten national integrity.

“The answer to these discontents,” he writes, “is not to abandon liberalism, but to temper it.”

Fukuyama said his editor at Straus, Farrar, Eric Chinski, forced him to associate with the most thoughtful critics of race-blind liberal individualism, such as the Black philosopher. Charles W. MillsRather than the recent media-fueled anger fueled by critical anti-race theory activists.

Fukuyama may not agree with them, but Fukuyama said that many critical race theorists in academia are “having serious arguments” in response to liberalism’s historical and ongoing failure to fully promote equal rights for all.

he is harder about the “postliberal” intellectuals of the American right, with their admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, such as the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule (which he described as “openly flirting with the idea of ​​authoritarian government”) and political scientist Patrick Deneen.





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