Francis Fukuyama has long been considered a naive triumphalist. He now wants to set the record straight.
Francis Fukuyama never promised us we’d be happy.
To be fair to the many readers who thought otherwise, The End of History and the Last Man, his famous 1992 book, did give off a whiff of utopia, trumpeting a post–Cold War world in which liberal democracy had vanquished competing political systems and everyone could lie back on their affordable chaise longues and raise a glass to the expiration of all strife and struggle. “Several” people each week still ask the poor man whether he would like to unwrite that book, he says. Yet Fukuyama insists today that if you had read to the last page—in fact, the last five chapters—you would not have expected serenity. His more sober forecast is right there in the original essay that led to the book: “The end of history will be a very sad time.”
