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Francis Fukuyama

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The End of History and the Last Man Paperback – March 1 2006

by Francis Fukuyama (Author)

4.4 727 ratings

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Ever since its first publication in 1992, the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. "Profoundly realistic and important...supremely timely and cogent...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world." —The Washington Post Book World

Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.

Print length

464 pages
Language

English
Publication date

March 1 2006
Dimensions

13.97 x 2.95 x 21.43 cm
ISBN-10

0743284550
ISBN-13

978-0743284554
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Review

"Awesome...a landmark...profoundly realistic and important...supremely timely and cogent...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world."

-- George Gilder, The Washington Post Book World

"Bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant. Until now, the triumph of the West was merely a fact. Fukuyama has given it a deep and highly original meaning."

-- Charles Krauthammer

"Clearly written...Immensely ambitious...A tightly argued work of political philosophy...Fukuyama deserves to have his argument taken seriously."

-- William H. McNeill, The New York Times Book Review

"Provocative and elegant...Complex and interesting...Fukuyama is to be applauded for posing important questions in serious and stimulating ways."

-- Ronald Steel, USA Today

"Extraordinary...Controversial...A superb book. Whether or not one accepts his thesis, he has injected serious political philosophy into the discussion of political affairs and thereby significantly enriched it."

-- Mackubin Thomas Owens, The Washington Times

About the Author

Francis Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, and Mosbacher DIrector of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Dr. Fukuyama has written about questions concerning governance, democratization, and international political economy. His book The End of History and the Last Man has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are 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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; Reissue edition (March 1 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743284550
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743284554
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 358 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 2.95 x 21.43 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #27,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #38 in Modern Philosophy (Books)
- #73 in Political Philosophy (Books)
- #87 in Political History & Theory (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 727 ratings

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Francis Fukuyama

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Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, and Mosbacher DIrector of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Dr. Fukuyama has writtenon questions concerning governance, democratization, and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are 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 book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment will be published in Septmer 2018.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, and was a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Francis Fukuyama is married to Laura Holmgren and lives in Palo Alto, California.

March 2018

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Chris

intégrité du produit et célérité de la livraison

Reviewed in Canada on March 7, 2020

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c'est exactement ce que je voulais.

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S.T.

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on January 25, 2018

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A dense read, but an interesting (if outdated) thesis.

Reviewed in Canada on August 18, 2016

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A good read.

Reviewed in Canada on May 2, 2018

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Excellent product.

Reviewed in Canada on January 30, 2017

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A+

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MR G. Rodgers

Is this as good as it gets?

Reviewed in Canada on April 15, 2002

This is a book with a certain fame or notoriety, not least due to its title. Having finally read it, I can appreciate its appeal and yet am perplexed at why it has been misinterpreted so widely, and why such a badly-written and ill-thought-out work has been taken so seriously.
The danger of a book like this is that it can reinforce or pander to some people's prejudices - after the fall of Communism we in the West did deserve a metaphorical pat on the back, but that's a long way from just kicking back as saying "well folks, this is as good as it gets". A cursory reading of "The End of History" would no doubt assure the armchair warriors that all's well with the world now the Reds have gone.
BUT, Fukuyama is not so sure as that. He puts forward an hypothesis about the triumph of liberal democracy (this is what human history has been leading up to) but utterly fails to prove that hypothesis. That's not to say that the hypothesis is not worthy of thought and debate - Fukuyama is at least to be congratulated for that. What I found less satisfactory was the quality of argument and analysis found in the book, and I'm no professional historian or philosopher. Just two among many examples - Fukuyama classes the USA and Great Britain as a "liberal democracies" from, respectively, 1790 and 1848: utterly astounding. I was equally perplexed by this:
"A century of Marxist thought has accustomed us to think of capitalist societies as highly inegalitarian, but the truth is that they are far more egalitarian in their social effects than the agricultural societies they replaced". Well so what? Last time I was in Rome, I noticed they were no longer throwing Christians to the lions.
Yet the main problem I found was that Fukuyama's paradigms were themselves utterly conventional, causing him to either miss or duck fundamental issues such as how the rise of globalism, multi-national companies and fundamentally undemocratic super-states such as the European Union will affect liberal democracies. Is democracy a dispensable item provided we have material wealth - voter turn-outs might suggest this - or is this a real and new "internal contradiction"?
So, congratulations to Fukuyama for opening the debate. Beware of people who regard this work as some sort of Bible. Read it carefully and be prepared to plough your way through a lot of ropey analysis.

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Kat

Bourgoisie Rubbish

Reviewed in Canada on December 16, 2022

Utter rubbish.

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Stacey Margaret Jones

A philosophical work about the world around us

Reviewed in Canada on September 17, 2002

"The End of History and the Last Man" by Francis Fukuyama has an apocalyptic-looking cover and a title that needs explication. But the book is not a doomsday scenario, quite the contrary, as the explanation of the title will show.
Fukuyama, who is Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, published this work of political philosophy in 1992, and in it, he explains in a logical, well-considered progression why he believes that liberal democracy is the final resting point of progressive history, but that that very liberal democracy can render humanity as less than what it could be - comfort seeking, self-involved, "men without chests."
The book, which could be subtitled "I Love Hegel and Why You Should, Too," builds on Hegel's idea that there is a Universal, progressive History. This is to what Fukuyama is referring when he says that History has reached its end; he doesn't mean that nothing else will happen, but that the progression of History toward a universally beneficial system of government has culminated in liberal democracy. He defines liberalism - "Political liberalism can be defined simply as a rule of law that recognizes certain individual rights or freedoms from government control" and he defines those rights in three classes, civil rights, religious rights and political rights. He defines democracy as "the right held universally by all citizens to have a share of political power, that is, the right of all citizens to vote and participate in politics."
His concentration on Hegel arises from Fukuyama's contention that we've been very conditioned by Karl Marx's influence to believe that most social and political problems come from economic and class differences. Fukuyama disagrees, saying that conflict comes from Hegel's theory that some people will risk their lives for prestige, or recognition. He writes that the aristocracy was created by such people - people who risked their lives for prestige and were able to enslave others. He writes that liberal democracy resolves the tension between slave and master because it makes the slaves their own masters.
But he cautions that Nietzsche believed in war and conflict as a way for humanity to express its passions, and that without conflict (Fukuyama says that liberal democracies do not attack each other), humans will become soft, meaningless, passionless, "men without chests." Fukuyama does not advocate that people become "last men," even though in this volume, he believes the End of History is being reached.
I read this book because Thomas L. Friedman faulted it for "not going far enough" in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization," but I wouldn't agree with that. Friedman clearly owes a lot to Fukuyama, directly or indirectly, and the roots of many of Friedman's ideas are explicated very elegantly here.
I find this book difficult to write about because it contains so many interrelated and complex ideas that are truly fascinating, including Fukuyama's views on the role of science in reaching the End of History. (In fact, in a newer book, "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution," he writes that the End of History may not have been reached because the End of Science hasn't been reached. So reads a review of this book on the Web.)
I highly recommend this book. It really stretched my mind in new directions and helped me to see the world and our current governmental systems in new ways. His integration of key philosophical work and thought with political history was fascinating and had a ring of truth.

One person found this helpful

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Walt Bloom

Beyond Hegel's & Fukuyamas's End of History

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2023

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Less than a year after the end of the Cold War when the former Soviet Union collapsed on the last day of 1991, Simon & Schuster’s Free Press division published the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man by then 40-year-old Japanese American professor of political science Francis Fukuyama. The author’s forward-looking conclusions and concerns, which were based on his deep knowledge of the literature of political philosophy from Europe’s Age of Enlightenment, made it something of a publishing sensation. As I’ve learned this year after self-publishing HOW THE JEWS HIGH-JACKED HISTORY (HTJH-JH), which is available for purchase at Amazon.com, it isn’t easy to attract readers to a book on the history of philosophy (or in my case the history of religion) and politics. Nevertheless, having read, re-read, and quoted from Fukuyama's The End of History, I can assure you that it is a scholarly masterpiece which continues to be well worth the read in its updated 2006 edition.

Informed by more than 30 years of history since 1992, I begin this critique with what Prof Fukuyama unequivocally got right. In the concluding 5th part of his book, which is entitled “The Last Man,” he contemplates Friedrich Nietzsche’s deep contempt for both Christianity and democracy. To understand the origin of this contempt, one must recall that Nietzche was the sickly son of a Lutheran pastor who died of a brain ailment (stroke?) at the age of 36 in 1849, and that Friedrich spent the last ten years before his death by stroke in 1900 in a state of extreme mental distress and under the doting, manipulative, and intensely antisemitic care of his younger sister Elizabeth. Consequently, as Fukuyama explicates Nietzsche’s political philosophy,

“Nietzsche’s last man was, in essence, the victorious slave. He agreed fully with Hegel that Christianity was a slave ideology, and that democracy represented a secularized form of Christianity. The equality of all men before the law was a realization of the Christian ideal of the equality of all believers in the Kingdom of Heaven." [p.301]

Looking farther back in HTJH-JH, I trace the idea of the rule of law transcending the rule of the King from the story recorded in the Holy Bible’s 2 Kings 23. In it, Judah's pious King Josiah reads publicly from a new book of the law - that is, an update of the Torah. As the Hebrew Bible tells what scholars assure us very likely is a factual recounting, that book was handed to Josiah in 621 BCE under the false pretense that it had been authored by Moses and “discovered” in the First Temple during renovations by a leader of the Temple priesthood who had raised him from childhood. But as Prof Fukuyama goes on accurately to summarize regarding Nietzsche's adamantly anti-Christian ideas,

“The liberal democratic state did not constitute a synthesis of the morality of the master and the morality of the slave, as Hegel had said. For Nietzsche, it represented an unconditional victory of the slave. The master’s freedom and satisfaction were nowhere preserved, for no one really ruled in a democratic society.” [p.301]

A few pages later (on p. 328), the good professor backhandedly fingered Donald Trump as the obstreperously Megalomanic kind of character who might upend early 19th century German political philosopher Georg Hegel’s implicitly Left-leaning political ideals following the American and French revolutions. As Fukuyama explained, Hegel recognized the grounding of democratic ideals in the Judeo-Christian ethical concept of the universal equality of all men before the law based on our moral freedom (i.e., free will). Hegel further argued that the rise of democracies marked the demise of what he called earlier stages of history’s “master-slave relations” and thus, democracy was the natural end state of political evolution – and in that sense, the End of History.

Indeed, the great strength and lasting academic value of Fukuyama’s book is how clearly and concisely he introduces readers to aspects of political philosophy that continue to undergird political arguments of the present day – including ideas of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke which remain the backbone of conservative liberalism (and no, as Prof Fukuyama explains at length, that is not an oxymoronic self-contradiction). In addition, he goes on to highlight an assortment of subtleties that influence the relative strength and weaknesses of democracies and the ways in which they are organized and can decay.

By the time he wrote his "Afterword" to the 2006 edition, historical events had not yet transpired to inspire Prof Fukuyama to warn of the rise of a new axis of authoritarian leaders that would include Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Kim Jung-un of North Korea, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran who are now collaborating to challenge the hegemony of the Western democracies of the US and EU which seemed secure at the end of the Cold War. Neither did he write of anticipating the rise of Right-wing, authoritarian, political parties in democratic nations as epitomized by Trump’s MAGA movement in the U.S.A.

On the other hand, in his "Afterword" written some 5 years after the shock of the fall of the Twin Towers in NYC on 9/11/2001, Fukuyama did identify Islam as the first of four “challenges to the optimistic, evolutionary scenario that he lays out in The End of History” (p. 347). Nevertheless, the good professor wisely steered clear of the potentially calamitous intellectual sholes associated with political discussions of Zionism. Indeed, the closest he came in The End of History to sharing such politically polarizing thoughts is the following:

“Orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Islam, by contrast, are totalistic religions that seek to regulate every aspect of human life, both public and private, including the realm of politics. These religions may be compatible with democracy – Islam, in particular, establishes no less than Christianity the principle of universal human equality – but they are very hard to reconcile with liberalism and the recognition of universal human rights, particularly freedom of conscience and religion.” [p. 217]

What Prof Fukuyama is not saying, there, speaks every bit as loudly as what he says. But having also read and greatly enjoyed and benefited from his later works including The Origin of Political Order: From Prehistoric Times to the French Revolution (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2015), it appears to me that he wants nothing to do with writing about the enduring religious controversy being expressed in today’s Israel-Hamas war which has been with us since long before the British and American, Christian evangelical, post-WWII creation of the Jewish State of Israel. You can learn more about that seminal evangelical influence in Bart Ehrman's Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End (2023), which I reviewed in my Blog post {here} at historyhighjackers.com on Nov. 10, 2023.

For those interested in reading unbiasedly between the political lines, I know of no wiser nor more knowledgeable source than Francis Fukuyama, who is both largely detached from our world’s current, authoritarian-friendly move to the far Right and from its Christian evangelical and Muslim sponsored religious conflicts in the Middle East. In my following Blog post at historyhighjackers.com, I'll review Prof Fukuyama's Liberalism and Its Discontents (2021). In it, he presents a nearly up-to-date analysis of the causes and dangers associated with world-wide threats to the West's liberal democracies which have arisen in the intervening years.

BomBom

Exceeded expectations

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 12, 2023

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Arrived very quickly and much sooner than predicted by Amazon.
Quality was better than announced too!

Mário Castro

Bom livro

Reviewed in Spain on March 5, 2022

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Bom livro.

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Gabriele V.

Qualità e materiali di stampa mediocri

Reviewed in Italy on January 8, 2022

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La mia valutazione non è riferita all'opera stessa, bensì alla qualità di stampa che considerò mediocre. Sia la copertina che le pagine stesse del libro sono realizzate con una carta estremamente sottile e di bassa qualità, e ciò è la causa della facilità con cui il libro si rovina.

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Samved Iyer.

Greatly Analytical

Reviewed in India on January 6, 2021

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So perspicacious has Fukuyama been in his book that there is little ground for an outright repudiation of his hypothesis. There indeed are unmistakable indicia of the world's gradual gravitation towards liberal democracy; not C.B. Macpherson's interpretation of a liberal democracy as democratic socialism but a democracy rooted in classical liberal or neoliberal principles. He also discerned most possible criticisms of his hypothesis and has addressed them with ease. The only question to which I find no sufficient addressal, his cognizance thereof notwithstanding, was the manner in which such democracy could possibly triumph over the virulent resurgence of the political Left. A compelling read, nonetheless.

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