Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy. He’s the author of a dozen books including The End of History and the Last Man, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. His most recent book is In the Realm of the Last Man.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
I’m not sure that that understanding of American exceptionalism is that powerful and that the United States may be a much more ordinary kind of democracy than I used to think.
Francis Fukuyama
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:20
- Realm of The Last Man – 4:20
- After the Neocons – 12:54
- Statebuilding – 19:23
- Political Decay – 36:14
Introduction
Today’s guest is Francis Fukuyama. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably already familiar with him. He’s the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy. He is the author of a dozen books but he is most known for The End of History and the Last Man and the essay that preceded it, “The End of History?” His most recent book is a memoir titled In the Realm of the Last Man.
The response to this memoir has been a reassessment of Fukuyama’s earliest ideas. From Ezra Klein to The Economist people are asking the question, “Was Francis Fukuyama right all along?” The consensus among intellectuals is Fukuyama’s ideas are often misunderstood. For example, anytime a world changing event like the financial crisis or COVID happens, somebody will flippantly say ‘I guess history didn’t end.”
Fukuyama has long corrected the public that he never meant important events would stop happening. Instead, he was referring to the Hegelian view of history. An idea that history is developing towards something. Hegel actually thought history was over in 1806. Marx thought history would end in a communist utopia. Fukuyama argued they were both wrong. History had ended in liberal democracy, because its most viable alternatives, communism and fascism, were discredited.
Now what most of us miss are the implications of this idea. Fukuyama thought the big questions were already answered so people would shift to technocratic problems like growing the economy or fairly distributing income. But that’s not what happened. People continued to debate about core values within liberal democracies. And according to Fukuyama, scholars even went so far as to abandon the study of public administration.
Over the years, Fukuyama has even become among the most prominent voices to argue that democracy has not delivered. In other words, the end of history, for Fukuyama, brought about outcomes that were the opposite of what he would have expected when he wrote his essay in 1989. Rather than slowly resolving problems in a systematic but boring way, he believes governments stopped solving problems altogether.
What this means for Fukuyama’s legacy is that while he is widely misunderstood, it doesn’t mean he’s right. You’ll find in this interview that Fukuyama still stands by many of his earliest arguments. He thinks history has more or less proven him right. I’m more skeptical. But I’d like to know your thoughts.
What is Francis Fukuyama’s legacy? For my part, I still view him as among the most creative thinkers of politics of his generation. He discovers unexpected connections from a wide range of experiences and through an uncommonly eclectic range of study. So whether he is right or wrong, his opinion deserves our attention.
But tell me your thoughts. If you listen to Spotify, you can leave them as a comment on the episode. You can also send your ideas to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. There is a link to the complete transcript in the show notes.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. But for now… here is my conversation with Francis Fukuyama…
Podcast Transcript
jmk: Frank Fukuyama, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Francis Fukuyama: Thanks very much for having me.
jmk: Well, Frank, I was impressed with the recent book, In the Realm of the Last Man. The Last Man refers to an idea that Nietzsche has in Thus Spake Zarathustra, but it’s also an idea that you incorporate within your first book, The End of History and the Last Man.
It’s a term that I do not hear repeated outside of you in political discourse. We don’t talk about the idea of the Last Man, and so it’s easily misunderstood. So why don’t we start there? You know, who is the Last Man? Or maybe better yet, what is the Last Man?
Francis Fukuyama: Sure. Well, the Last Man is the creature who emerges at the end of history.
The end of history being Hegel’s idea that there would be an evolution of social forms and ideas leading up to modernity. In his case, the kind of liberal regime that he saw emerge after the French Revolution, in which people were granted equal rights, recognizing equal human dignity.
Nietzsche did not like this idea. He hated English liberalism. He felt that it flattened society. It took away aspiration. You had to tolerate everything, and you couldn’t aspire to being greater, that this was a society that removed daring and courage and struggle from human existence and made people content with simple peace and prosperity.
And the trouble with the Last Man is not that the Last Man is troublesome. The thing is that people want to revolt against the Last Man. They don’t want to be Last Man because they have an intrinsic desire for recognition and for recognition of themselves as superior to other human beings. And that’s really the cause of the downfall of democracy because that’s a regime that is based on equal recognition, and therefore the end of history, according to Nietzsche, would be very unstable.
And we’re seeing echoes of that in our contemporary politics.
jmk: Your book is called In the Realm of the Last Man. So are you saying that most of us who are living and content within liberal democracy are the Last Men?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, that would be Nietzsche’s characterization. I’m not sure that it’s accurate in speaking about our contemporary societies because there still is quite a lot of striving, but there certainly is a feeling among a lot of people that equal recognition isn’t enough, that they want something more.
You’re always going to have ambitious individuals in the society, and it’s always a struggle for a democracy to contain that ambition and make sure that it doesn’t destabilize the whole system. You know, I had actually written about Donald Trump back in nineteen ninety-two saying that in a liberal democracy tied to a capitalist economy, some of the energy, this ambitious energy of people that wanted greater recognition could bleed off into the marketplace where you’d simply get rich.
And I said that Donald Trump might be an example of that. But it turns out thirty years later, that wasn’t enough for him. He didn’t want to just be rich, he wanted to have political power as well. And so that’s one of the problems our democracy is facing today.
jmk: So your essay, The End of History, you don’t talk about the last man in that essay, but I feel like you allude to it, especially at the very end in the last paragraph.
You write, “In the post-historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the Museum of History. I can feel in myself and see in others around me a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.” You wrote that back in 1989. A lot has happened since then—opportunities to be able to rethink in terms of how you feel about things.
Do you feel that that prediction has come true? Not so much about this mistaken notion of what the end of history means, but the idea that things have been boring since then, that there hasn’t been art and philosophy and things like that, because it was a very controversial statement at the end of that essay that was making the case for what the end of history would look like.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, by the way, I did write about The Last Man in my 1992 book, The End of History and The Last Man, and I devoted five whole chapters to the problem of the last man and the way that that might destabilize democracy. I honestly have not reread the book in quite a few years, but in the last couple I went back and read it, and it does seem to me a lot of it is pretty prophetic, that people aren’t content just with being safe and well-fed.
You know, they want to have aspirations, and a liberal democracy doesn’t offer that to them, and therefore they turn against democracy. There’s a line in the book where I say that if people can’t struggle on behalf of democracy and human rights because it’s been achieved already in an earlier generation, then they’re going to struggle against democracy and human rights because what they want to do is struggle.
It’s a struggle for struggle’s sake, and I do think that that describes a certain part of our politics today.
jmk: Some political thinkers, like I think of Robert Dahl, would’ve said that democracy is something that we never fully achieve, though. He would say that there’s a continuing opportunity for new transformations of democracy.
He foresaw the idea of there being a more economic form of democracy in the future that never had come to pass yet. When I read your work, you very much sound, even now, as though liberal democracy as it is currently constructed really is the end goal. That’s the most perfect achievement that we can achieve politically.
Do you still feel that way, or do you think that humanity could develop something that’s better or make improvements upon democracy that would change the way that we think about it today, but that would be an even better form of democracy, something like Dahl or some others might imagine?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I never said I knew that this was the best possible form of government. What I said was that unlike the period when you had Marxists believing that there was an end of history that was different from what we have now, that there’d be a superior form of human civilization, namely communism, that that alternative end of history had disappeared.
And the challenge that I made to people was, “Point me to what you think is actually going to be a superior system, and, you know, we’ll see.” And I don’t believe that superior system has been demonstrated. I think the closest you come is maybe China, because it is a market economy linked to an authoritarian government that seems to be very effective in mastering technology.
But there are various reasons why I don’t think we’re all going to be China in the end. So it’s not that I proved somehow that democracy is the best system. What I said was, “You disprove it by showing me a system that is systematically different and, you know, we’ll see.” And that’s what I’m still waiting for.
jmk: Yeah, and there’s a strong case to be made that even the anti-democratic actors that exist, people aren’t necessarily fighting for those political systems. Nobody’s out on the streets fighting for Putinism. In fact, Putin and even China try to claim that they’re different forms of democracy rather than claiming that they have a better system to democracy oftentimes.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, I think that people don’t contest the egalitarian part of democracy. What they really contest is the liberal part of liberal democracy. A lot of political actors out there do not like constraints on state power, and that most of the backsliding we’ve seen in recent decades has been violations of liberal norms of constraints on power rather than challenges to the underlying democratic principle.
‘Cause I think you’re right that there are very few groups that get up and say, “Well, actually, there’s one class of human beings that’s superior intrinsically to another.”
jmk: So I was fascinated by the account in the book where you talk about your own transformation politically, the way that you went from being somebody who was more associated with the neoconservatives early in your career to becoming somebody who thought differently politically and how that affected the way that you thought.
In particular, it was interesting how you felt that a very simple break politically in terms of the Iraq war and your feelings about that gave you freedom to be able to think differently on other political issues. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that seems very fascinating to me, ’cause we normally don’t want to think of ourselves as constrained within an ideological position, but it seems very much like you felt that way even though there was no requirement for you to be that way.
It wasn’t like you’re a politician or something. It was something that was more socially enforced rather than something that was practically enforced.
Francis Fukuyama: Oh, no, it wasn’t practically enforced. No, the point is that Jonathan Haidt’s general observation about motivated reasoning is correct, that on very many issues, we do not take in empirical data, analyze it, and then come to conclusions.
We start with the conclusions, and we cherry-pick the empirical data that supports those conclusions. And a lot of political opinions that people have is the result of social conformity rather than rational individuals making their own judgments about the correctness of different positions.
So for example, in the early 2000s, a lot of conservatives combined a willingness to use US force to promote democratic values in the Middle East with a belief in market economics. Now, why should those two go together? You know, there’s no intrinsic reason why those ideas are connected to one another except that that’s what many conservatives at that time thought.
Today, you have many conservative Republicans abandoning principles of free trade and openness to immigration that they embraced in the days of Ronald Reagan, and all of a sudden they become protectionist nationalists that want to restrict immigration. So did the data change in a way that made them change their minds in the subsequent period?
I don’t think so. It had to do with the rise of a different kind of leadership and pushing different ideas, and most people were afraid not to go along with that.
jmk: How did that moment occur to you, though, when you started rethinking multiple different political ideas? Did you feel like it was almost a sense of intellectual crisis where you found yourself rethinking one idea and then started questioning multiple different positions that you took, or was it something simpler than that?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, it was more in response to actual events. In the first decade of the 21st century, there were two big events that discredited a lot of conservative ideas. So one was the role of force in American foreign policy and whether that could be used to transform the politics of an entire region.
And the second was the idea that markets, and especially financial markets, could be self-regulating. And both of those led to big debacles. You know, the first, the Iraq invasion in 2003, and the second, the financial crisis in 2008. Now, those two failures were not directly linked to each other, but they both hit at the political and economic pillars of what was held to be conservatism at the time, and they both led to big setbacks for the United States.
And so if you’re honest with yourself, you’d have to say, “Well, maybe there’s a problem with those underlying ideas, and maybe those need to be rethought.”
jmk: But in your current positions, do you find yourself questioning whether or not you’re adopting certain positions because of the same kind of motivated reasoning that you used in the past?
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s something you got to worry about all the time. But you need to check yourself also against your view of what is going on out in the world. You know, part of the reason that people engage in motivated reasoning is they’re basically lazy. They don’t want to have to come up with a theory about are cryptocurrencies a good thing or a bad thing, or is AI going to be good for democracy or bad for democracy?
They just don’t have the energy to do that, and so they’ll basically take ideas from people that are socially situated in a similar way to them. And, quite honestly, there are so many policy areas in which we are asked to make decisions that it’s impossible that everybody independently arrives at all of these by thinking them through very rationally.
You know, we have this idea of this ideal NPR listener who’s sitting there every week listening to facts and writing them down and coming up with opinions about what’s the right attitude to take on a whole host of different issues, and that kind of person just doesn’t exist.
jmk: At the same time, though, a lot of times when people start changing their mind on different political positions, especially when they take a wholesale change in ideology, it’s not that they were being lazy about each individual position sometimes.
Sometimes the underlying ideas don’t make sense for them anymore, so all of the subsequent ideas get challenged. Is that something more similar that happened to you, or did you just experience these events one at a time and just gradually change on different positions?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, yeah, it depended on external events.
I didn’t have any particular views about the level of large bank risk-taking until 2008 happened, ’cause it’s just not something that a non-specialist would think about very much. But once it happened, you start taking in information about why the crash happened, why did Lehman Brothers go bankrupt, and you reach conclusions that it’s not just a short-term set of accidental events.
It does flow all the way back to the ideas that underlie what’s now called neoliberalism, and that there was something wrong with those ideas.
jmk: So another thing that I found fascinating within the book was how you talked about getting back to the idea of the end of history that we were talking about earlier.
You mentioned how your two-volume set on political order, The Origins of Political Order and the book on Political Decay, those were effectively your version of rewriting the end of history. I found that incredible for a number of reasons. One of them is I think of those two books very much as an homage to Samuel Huntington, and yet I grew up thinking of the end of history as something that was in conflict with Samuel Huntington.
So can you talk a little bit about how you saw the end of history idea leading to your ideas, like your big masterwork, in my opinion, the two-volume set on political order?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, you’re talking about two different Huntington books that are only connected by the fact that they had the same author.
The Political Order books were an effort to update and rethink Political Order in Changing Societies, which was Huntington’s first book published back in either ’67 or ’68, which created a lot of the field of comparative politics and the idea of political development. Where people contrast that to The End of History, it’s not that book.
Nobody’s read that book outside of academia. The book that people thought about was Clash of Civilizations, which I don’t think has anything to do with Political Order in Changing Societies. It’s just two different strands of thought, and that’s the one that got, in countless introductory IR courses, became the opening contrast of ideas that tried to define the nature of the post-Cold War reality.
But these are two completely different Huntington books on different topics that weren’t related to one another.
jmk: I still did not realize the connection between the two was so strong until I read your recent book, because the idea of The End of History felt like it was talking about a shift in terms of how we think about politics, in terms of how we are seeing political regimes and where we’re trying to get to.
Political Order felt like a more foundational text in terms of political theory. It felt like they were doing two different things, but when you explained it in your autobiography, it made a lot more sense how the two had an even stronger connection than I had realized. It made a lot more sense that Political Order seems to be not just building on ideas that you’ve experienced your entire career, but it’s rewriting and systematizing them.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, it wasn’t just rewriting and systematizing.
The thing that I didn’t understand when I wrote The End of History and The Last Man was the importance of a modern state. I don’t talk about the state very much in that book, except to say that it’s a potential cold monster that takes away people’s rights. It’s a very traditional American way of thinking about the state.
What had happened in the 20 years prior to the Political Order books was a whole line of thought that began with the collapse of the Iraqi and Afghan states, and then the problem that American foreign policy faced of having its success depend on the ability to create a state. And then the realization that American officials had no idea how you went about doing this.
Not only did they not have another idea, but political science had not spent very much time thinking about state formation, state capacity, this whole set of ideas related to the strength of modern states. And so that’s stuff that I had only started to think about in the aftermath of those two interventions.
And it was a lack in the first book ’cause I assumed, like many Americans, that the state would always exist, but that’s a trap. I think it’s one of the reasons our foreign policy got into so much trouble—this belief that somehow the state would always be there.
jmk: You wrote the book State Building early in the Iraq war.
It was published in 2004, so it must have been very early into the process of the Iraq war that this idea of building the state came to you.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I don’t know, it was a pretty obvious thing at that point. You know, you had two states or societies who were engaged in civil wars or wars of every man against every man and that’s not a good situation to be in.
And the only way you could get out of it is by creating a state.
jmk: Now, you say that political science didn’t think much about building states. I mean, there is a long tradition about talking about the state. There’s works by Charles Tilly and, of course, Linz and Stepan established a strong state as a requirement for democratization in their works about transitions to democracy.
A lot of people have talked about the role of the state. Did you feel like it wasn’t defined enough and clear enough, or did you feel that those works were still superficial enough that they didn’t touch on some of the important concepts?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, they acknowledged the importance of the state, but I would say that this was still a subject that was largely ignored by mainstream political science, and that’s something that continues up to this day.
Political scientists would much rather study the legislature rather than the executive branch. There are relatively few political scientists that build their careers around studying public administration, the organization of the executive. The people that look at that are administrative lawyers, and I’ve spent a lot of my time in recent years reading a lot of administrative law because those people understand the way that the American state operates.
They do it from a very normative standpoint, but nonetheless, they are in the weeds. So, for example, you ask an American political scientist, “Who is it that makes decisions on refugee status in the United States?” And it turns out these are ALJs. They’re not Article Three judges.
They’re members of the executive branch. In theory, they have for-cause removal protections of administrative law judges. It turns out they’re very important in Trump’s effort to deport undocumented immigrants because they’re the ones that hold hearings over refugee status. How many political scientists pay attention to ALJs?
And it turns out that one of the consequences of overturning Humphrey’s Executor, as the Supreme Court did earlier this year, is that it removes the protected for-cause removal status of all these ALJs. So the Trump administration has been busy firing as many of them as possible that are too lenient in the way they judge asylum cases.
Political scientists aren’t paying attention to this stuff. It’s one of those concrete issues about how the government works that is very important. In the last few years, a set of issues that I’ve been very interested in is infrastructure. I’m a big fan of Ezra Klein’s Abundance movement, and one of the big issues right now is one that people aren’t paying a whole lot of attention to.
If you want to build things in the United States, you’ve got to clear away a lot of the administrative undergrowth that has accumulated over the years around bills like NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act or the Endangered Species Act or the Historical Preservation. These are all mini NEPAs.
And the administrative lawyers are all over this. This is their bread and butter. But relatively few political scientists could, for example, identify what exactly is it in NEPA that makes it so toxic for building projects. So again, it’s true that at some very high level, you have political scientists that acknowledge the importance of the state.
But understanding the way the actual state works at a granular level is something that is not very common in political science to this day. You know, public administration used to be one of the four main branches of political science up until, I believe, sometime in the 1960s when it was either ejected or it ejected itself as a separate discipline.
But there’s this long history of social scientists not taking public administration seriously as a field. I got to know Paul Volcker. Towards the end of his career, he established an organization that I’m still on the board of called the Volcker Alliance, which was dedicated to trying to revive the study of public administration.
Most elite schools do not have a school of public administration. Stanford doesn’t have one. Harvard doesn’t have one. Yale doesn’t have one. Because a lot of social scientists think that the study of executive branches is beneath the dignity of a true social scientist to study something like this.
That’s what I mean by not taking the field seriously within the field of political science.
jmk: It was really interesting for me to hear you say in the book, and even just now, you’re talking about how passionate you are about public administration. And it still comes across surprising to me because when I read your work, I feel like you’re focused on theory and concepts and conceptual approaches to political science.
You refer to people like not just Hegel, but Rousseau and many other thinkers within your books at a very high level, a very theoretical level. Focus a lot on political theory within every one of your books. And yet you defined yourself as being much more focused on practical approaches to political science within your academic professional life.
That surprised me. It makes some sense because, I mean, I’ve read other work from you that focuses on the bureaucracy and the nitty-gritty parts of the state, but it’s still difficult for me to get away from the persona I think of you within your books compared to the one that you apparently do on your daily approach to political science.
Francis Fukuyama: No, it’s worse than what you described. I mean, I built a whole master’s program here at Stanford built around implementation, basically where I teach students that it doesn’t matter what policies you advocate, if you can’t implement them in real world circumstances, you might as well forget about it.
Because you can approach politics at such an abstract level that you’ve got great ideas, but the real world is not affected by it. And so I think that you need to do both. You need to start at the high level philosophical grounding for these ideas, but you’ve also got to pay attention to how things work in practice and give people a path to implementing those high level ideas, in the here and now.
And the two end up related. One of the reasons you’ve got populism today is that many of our contemporary liberal democracies are stuck. They’ve accumulated so many rules and regulations that they can’t do things like build infrastructure, they can’t create new programs, they can’t administer a lot of the programs they have ’cause they are so complex.
And as a result, people get frustrated, and they want a strongman. The demand for people like Donald Trump or Elon Musk proceeds out of this frustration with the state that modern democracy… It’s not so much democracy. Modern liberalism has landed us where we basically have too much rule of law, and therefore, if you want to avoid this democratic backsliding that we’ve seen, you’ve got to go at some of the underlying causes, and one of them is the ineffectiveness of many modern governments to get things done.
jmk: You said it’s too much rule of law. Is it too much of the idea of the rule of law, or is it too much of our approach to the law?
Francis Fukuyama: No, it’s too much law. It’s too much law. We have a professor, Dan Ho, at the Stanford Law School. He’s had this long-standing project simply to catalog the number of laws that are on the books at a federal, state, and municipal level in the United States.
He says you can’t do it. There’s just too much of it. Even with big data techniques, there are too many laws to be able to navigate. This is something where AI can help a lot because it can scan a million rules on the books, and it can look for inconsistencies.
And so no human being can actually do that, but that’s what I mean by too much rule of law.
jmk: Now, Gorsuch had a book come out a few years ago talking about this. It wasn’t really an academic book. It was talking about practical experiences people have dealing with too much law. It reminded me very much of the traditional conservative approach to bureaucracy that is the mirror image of what Ezra Klein’s talking about from the left in terms of abundance, that we need to get rid of some of these regulations.
My concern is it feels like the regulations that the right wants to get rid of are not the same as the ones that the left wants to get rid of. Do you think that they can meet in the middle and make progress on this project?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, it depends on the issue. I think on something like infrastructure, they probably can.
In fact, there’s a big infrastructure bill that’s currently in the Senate that has bipartisan support because it basically will help build anything from a wind farm to a highway. No, I think the problem with Gorsuch is several-fold. You know, I agree in general that we have too much law, but he’s one of the strongest advocates on the court of the non-delegation doctrine, which is just completely nuts.
This idea that the Founding Fathers did not want Congress to delegate any authority to any other branch of government. Even the government that existed in 1789, you couldn’t run that way. They had to delegate to Alexander Hamilton the duty of cleaning up all the Revolutionary War debts and consolidating them, and so forth.
Congress couldn’t do that itself. But the idea that somehow you cannot delegate authority to administrative agencies in an era where you have NASA launching spacecraft around the moon, have the FAA controlling aircraft into hundreds, thousands of individual airports, you think Congress is going to do it by itself?
It’s ridiculous. So there are some big problems in his understanding of how any modern big organization has to operate.
jmk: Yeah, I mean, but that gets at my point that it feels like the right and the left are oftentimes talking at cross-purposes when they talk about regulation.
It feels like an area that there should be more agreement, especially as many on the intellectual left, at least the center-left, like Ezra Klein and Dunkelman and some others, are starting to talk about the need to deregulate certain areas of government so that the government can do more.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, one distinction is that people on the right have always wanted to deregulate, reduce rules affecting the public sector.
In my view, and I think in Ezra Klein’s view, an equally important area for deregulation is actually the government itself, because the government operates under a whole bunch of rules that the private sector would never, ever tolerate. And unless you reduce that burden, you’re not going to get effective government.
jmk: Yeah, and a lot of those rules were actually imposed by conservatives. OIRA is the agency that was established during the Reagan administration to put further constraints on the government doing exactly like you’re talking about.
Francis Fukuyama: And a lot of them have very unanticipated consequences. The Paperwork Reduction Act has vastly increased the amount of paperwork that government agencies have to go through.
So this is an area where you should be able to get some bipartisan agreement ’cause it’s not obviously tilted towards one party or the other. At some point, both the Republicans and the Democrats want the government to do something, and they both face common constraints that prevent the government from moving efficiently and expeditiously to solve problems.
It’s just that it’s a different set of problems that they want to solve, but I do think there is a common interest in the methods that they turn to, to do that.
jmk: So within the book, we’ve talked about Huntington. Another giant of political science that you refer to as somebody who had a profound impact on you is Seymour Martin Lipset.
And Lipset is somebody who is still widely read today, but I feel like he’s fallen off from the way that the public remembers him. People outside of political science oftentimes don’t know who Seymour Martin Lipset was. Political scientists still generally do. He’s not quite as read as he used to be.
But I wonder what your thoughts are in terms of what we’re losing as we drift further away from some of these founders of the fields of political science, people like Huntington, Lipset, Dahl, Linz, others, that their ideas are becoming echoes within other people’s work rather than being remembered for themselves.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I would say that there’s a whole class of academics who would not be considered social scientists today, and almost all of those people that you mentioned would fall in that category because they don’t do social science as it’s currently considered as basically an engine for causal inference, which then requires a battery of very sophisticated quantitative techniques.
Currently, the dominant paradigm in the Stanford political science department is a randomized experiment. A very large number of PhD candidates are doing list experiments or various conjoint experiments, so on and so forth. None of those former greats in political science ever did a list experiment.
The problem with the current methodological focus on causal inference is that you can only infer a very narrow range of causes with the kind of certainty that is expected in that kind of endeavor. And the big questions are not subject to that kind of analysis. If you want to know why country A grows a lot faster than country B, you’re not going to be able to do a simple experiment that will demonstrate this is the set of three causes that lead to that result.
And one of the things that happens is that while that analysis is good for, let’s say, project monitoring, it’s not very good for answering big questions that exist in political science, which require a combination of conceptual clarity as well as a certain degree– Let’s put it this way.
They require empirical verification and grounding to the extent that that is practical. I think there’s even a statement in Aristotle’s Politics, something to that effect, that you want empirical certainty to the extent that it is possible and suitable in this particular area that you’re looking at.
And a lot of important political questions are not subject to that kind of analysis. If you think about the contributions of someone like Max Weber or Huntington or any of these people, they’re mostly conceptual. The categories that we think about bureaucracy, authority, Weber invented a lot of those categories that– even the category of bureaucracy itself is one that we owe to him.
American exceptionalism, which was Lipset’s lifelong study. There are a lot of empirical measures of American exceptionalism, but the idea of it and the ways in which disparate phenomena like the size of the welfare state and the legal regimes governing different aspects of American life, that they’re all related to one another in this basic American cultural fact of anti-statism, is not something that you would necessarily derive empirically, but it is an important conceptual idea.
So I think that there ought to be room in the current canon for what is probably better described as social theory as opposed to social science, and that people doing social theory should get as much honor as people that do social science. They’re the ones that create the questions that social scientists are trying to verify empirically.
jmk: Do you think that political scientists have gotten worse at asking those conceptual questions?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, it’s not that they’ve gotten worse. I think that the tenure system in most American universities creates a set of bad incentives for people to look at these broader conceptual questions because these days, if you don’t toe the line methodologically, you’re not going to get tenure in the best departments.
And so what you’re scrutinized for is actually not the questions that you are finding answers to, but the methodology you’re using to get to those answers. And that’s a problem.
jmk: How do you think Lipset would have approached issues that we’re facing today with democratic backsliding and others?
Do you think he would have had a different perspective on what’s happening?
Francis Fukuyama: I think his perspective would be very much like his student, Larry Diamond. Larry makes use of a lot of Lipset’s categories to understand democratic backsliding. There is a whole series of comparative political scientists, Steve Levitsky and Dan Ziblatt and so forth, who have made their name not through the kind of high octane empirical analysis that these days gets you tenure in a good department, but rather by applying a lot of the ideas of what is a democracy and what characteristics do you expect to contemporary situations on a comparative basis with a very detailed knowledge of a lot of individual country cases.
I didn’t write about this in the memoir, but very prominent in my mind. I remember meeting Juan Linz, shortly after I wrote The End of History. So like many older political scientists, he was very skeptical about this young upstart that became so famous ’cause of this book. But I remember talking to him where he started talking about Argentine politics, and he had the most detailed knowledge of the Argentine constitution, about the current political parties, about the way that they were currently maneuvering that I just thought was incredible.
And he could do this for dozens of countries ’cause he carried that kind of detailed knowledge around with him in his head. And I thought that I wanted to be that kind of political scientist. And, to some extent, I’ve gotten there ’cause I travel constantly, and I know the politics of quite a few countries, but that is not something that’s going to get you tenure in a major university.
jmk: You mentioned Juan Linz talking like that. It doesn’t surprise me because when I read his work, he writes like these ideas are just popping out of his head. It reads like he’s just putting together a first draft, and he’s just throwing out all these very specific facts that are just ingrained as if he knows almost everything about certain political events for, I don’t know, a hundred-year span within Europe, Latin America, and possibly some other regions.
Samuel Huntington was the same way. It just reads very differently than people write today.
Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, and he’s also… I mean, Linz and Huntington as well also always had major conceptual categories by which they organized all of this knowledge. I think both of them were fundamentally comparativists.
And so when they talked about a phenomenon in one country, they could say where they saw that phenomena in half a dozen other countries. And yeah, that’s a skill that’s very important, and probably not adequately recognized.
jmk: So when you wrote The End of History, in your memoir, you note the fact that there was a lot of things that you didn’t know yet.
A lot of books you hadn’t read, particularly people like Weber and some of the older sociologists—reading your later work, I always assume that you’ve read that material early in your career. But you note that it was material that you developed later. You didn’t have that knowledge when you wrote The End of History.
It makes me think that there’s probably a lot of things that you probably didn’t know about democracy back then in 1989 that you do today.
Francis Fukuyama: Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. I was an IR person. I got my degree, my thesis was on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East, and all my formal graduate training had been in IR.
So I hadn’t taken a comparative politics course, and I had not taken an American politics course, during my whole formal education. The comparative politics started after I wrote the original essay, and I was trying to turn this into a book, and I said, “Who the hell do I read to learn about comparative politics?”
And so a good friend of mine said, “Oh, you should read Juan Linz and Al Stepan and this person and that person.” So I went through this intensive period of trying to catch up for these missing parts of my education. And then when I wrote my book, Trust, that’s when I started going back to these foundational sociological works, which I had resisted because my father was a sociologist, and I didn’t want to follow in his footsteps necessarily.
But I had inherited his library, and it turned out to be very useful because, again, they provided a lot of concepts that were extremely useful to me.
jmk: What is the biggest thing that you’ve learned about democracy since 1989 that’s really shaped your thought then?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, that’s a big question that’s hard to answer.
I think that one of the disappointing things that I’ve learned is really about the United States, because I, for a long time, had this idea that the US was different from other European democracies because the commitment to the foundational ideas in the United States was stronger than in other places.
You know, and the example that I had constantly thought about was the 1930s when many European countries succumbed to fascism, but the United States succumbed to Franklin Roosevelt and actually built a kind of modern welfare state under very trying economic circumstances. And I thought that that was something related to the basic values of the American people.
But watching events of the last decade, I’m not so sure that’s right. I’m not sure that that understanding of American exceptionalism is that powerful and that the United States may be a much more ordinary kind of democracy than I used to think.
jmk: Well, Frank Fukuyama, thank you so much for joining me today.
The book, once again, is called In the Realm of the Last Man. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Thank you so much for writing the book.
Francis Fukuyama: Okay, thanks for talking to me, Justin.
Links
Learn more about Francis Fukuyama.
Learn more about his memoir In the Realm of the Last Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026).
Learn more about the Kellogg Institute
Apes of the State created all Music
Email comments or questions to jkempf@democracyparadox.com
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