Francis Fukuyama: The End of History author on democracy under threat

0:02This is a global production. If I say the name Francis Fukuyama, there are probably two responses. The first is who, and the second is, ah yes, the end of history. He is the chap who contended very powerfully that history had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of liberalism. If you're in the first category, it's your lucky day. You're about to find out more about one of the most interesting thinkers of the last 50 years. And if you're in the second category, you're wrong. that is not what he actually contended or argued although almost everybody i know is of the opinion that he did that's just one of the reasons why this is such a fascinating interview with an absolutely fascinating man if you're a big fan of full disclosure i wonder if you could make a list of the guests with whom i appear to display signs of intellectual insecurity and possibly try a tiny bit too hard to establish that i do know what i'm talking about honest let me know what you think afterwards let me know your thoughts let me know actually whether you agree with me that the man's a stone-cold genius francis wikiyama welcome it's a fascinating life even before we get to the seminal and and influential work about which i knew next to nothing previously um i i mean we should probably begin with the with the tricky bit which is the widespread misinterpretation certainly of the later chapters of your most famous book, The End of History and The Last Man, I sense a sort of resigned disappointment with some of the ideas that have taken hold that don't actually do much justice to what you wrote.

1:44Well, you know, on social media, every week, you know, I post a picture of, you know, my wife and said, I thought it was the end of wives. how do you think of yourself because political scientist is uh it's it i mean it covers an awful lot of territory do you have an idea in your own head of of what you were put on this earth to do well uh it was not to be a bureaucrat i tried that and i didn't like it i guess it's really to write books because uh you know i've now done 11 of them and uh i think it's it's it's a good experience because I actually teach myself a lot in the course of writing these books.

2:25And what are you trying to find out when you sit down to write? Well, it depends. I mean, I've been interested in this question of history, you know, with a capital H. And I've learned a lot of history as a result of, you know, doing this. I think the main thing for me is although I'm a political scientist, I wander off into a lot of fields like evolutionary biology, sociology, anthropology. And I really think that you can't get a full view of what human society and human behavior is like unless you escape these disciplinary boundaries. And that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to get a full view of why humans human.

3:04That's right. That's right. And also cross-culturally, I taught myself a lot about China and India and the Middle East in the course of writing these different books. So So your heritage is Japanese, although your upbringing wasn't really. It wasn't Japanese at all. My father was also born in the United States. His father came over around the time of the Russo-Japanese War early in the 20th century to escape impressment there. But, you know, I grew up in New York City. There was never a Japanese-American community there. So I really never felt, you know, particularly rooted in that particular ethnic group.

3:43When did this curiosity first manifest itself? Because it's quite a huge field, isn't it? Humans, human behavior. Well, I guess it started when I wrote the essay, The End of History with a question mark at the end. And it became, you know, widely read. And I got a lot of offers to turn it into a book. And it's that point where I saw there's a real opportunity. I had 13 months to write it. So I said, I'll write it in six months. And I'll give myself seven months just to read. And that was great. I mean, this is something I've done with all of my books is just to sit down and really teach myself something about, you know.

4:28So, for example, there's been a lot of writing on the question of history. Is there such a thing as progress? And I could go through a lot of that literature very systematically in a way that, you know, I wouldn't have as a regular academic. Because you had the space and the time to do it. Yeah. And you didn't have the pesky business of teaching. That's right. Or students knocking on your door every 20 minutes. That's right. I want to go back further than that because there was a sort of shift, wasn't there, after you moved to Paris. But, I mean, let's start with your first schools. Did you shine immediately when you got to school?

5:00It was a very intellectual household, I think. Lots of weighty conversations. Yeah. So my father had a PhD. My mother came from an academic family. We always had a lot of books. Actually, it's kind of relevant to the cultural background because Japan in my mother's generation, So her father was one of the intellectuals that was sent to Germany before World War I to learn about European culture and to help Japan catch up. He came back with the library of Werner Zombart, the German social theorist. And I still have part of that library. I have the three-volume original first edition of Karl Marx's Das Kapital.

5:48How did he end up with Zombart's library? I don't know. He was an economist. He was an agricultural economist. And he, I don't know who he studied with, but he, you know, wanted to acquire European books to bring back to Japan. They're now actually sitting in the library of the municipal Osaka Municipal University. he founded the economics department i think when he got back at kyoto yes university so it's fair to say that yours is yours was not a household or an upbringing where academic ambitions were either frowned upon or or or uh or rare well you know my grandfather was actually a bit like me he was a public intellectual he um was actually this is shiro kawata yeah shiro kawata and he was actually an early supporter of feminism.

6:38He wrote several books on women's rights, and this was in the 1920s and 30s where those kinds of progressive ideas were frowned upon because you have this rising militarist government in Japan. When did you discover, can you remember how old you were? Because it's a wonderful thing to discover that a family member, a grandfather, has not just an intellect but also a visionary. Well, I didn't fully appreciate him until I was older. I visited Japan for the first time when I was probably like in my early 30s. And I connected my cousin is also a university professor. He was also the president of a Japanese university.

7:19And it's actually through him that I got to know a lot of that family history. So when you get to school, I presume that your, I mean, just your basic intelligence became very clear very quickly. Uh, well, yeah, it depended on the school. I went to a private school in New York city. That's not of a piece with Marxist. No. No. And then, you know, when I was in high school, my father got a professorship at Penn state. So we moved from New York city to rural Pennsylvania. That was a very, that was quite a culture shock. A different experience. But did you do, I mean, what enthusiasms did you develop first?

7:58I was struck also by the observation that um when you went to school in in uh um when you went to middle school middle school at riverdale country school a predominantly jewish class would have had the descendants of grandfathers who'd fled the other side of the that's right that's right is that i mean i don't want to be a cod psychologist but that's the kind of thing that perhaps pricks an interest in the broader ebb and flow of history the fact that two descendants can end up in the same classroom having come from completely opposing sides of an actual literal battlefield. Yeah. And also, I think intellectually, you know, that class of Jewish students would have come from themselves very academic or very well-educated backgrounds.

8:43And so there was a strong emphasis on scholarship. I was actually elected to the student council because my fellow students regarded me as the smartest kid in my class. When I got to State College, I fell to the bottom of the social hierarchy because there it was all football players and cheerleaders that were the popular ones. That's when you get to Pennsylvania. So that's State College, Pennsylvania, did not set a particularly high premium on your skill set. No. Was that hard? I mean, did that? No, no. I mean, I found a niche. It was in it was the late 1960s and hippieism was just coming into vogue.

9:22And so I kind of associated with the theater crowd that, you know, started to grow their hair long and started to smoke marijuana and all that stuff. You had ambition at this point? I mean, because you're talking about Vietnam civil rights protests, did you get involved in student radicalism at all? Not heavily. I did go to one big anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington, when I was an undergraduate. But already I had started to turn more conservative under the influence of some of the early teachers I had at Cornell. Okay. Again, I'm jumping a little bit ahead to when you get to university. I'm just trying to work out who you were when you came to consider your options for college.

10:06I was a very conventional liberal, I would say, at that point. My father was quite liberal. He was very involved in the civil rights movement and kind of anti-Vietnam War activity. He was a minister in a very, so American Protestantism, the mainline churches, his was the congregational church. It was one of the original churches in like the three churches in New Haven. On the green there are all congregational churches. And, you know, it was congregational ministers that were very involved in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War. and they continued that up until, you know, the 1960s when they were opposed to the Vietnam War and so forth.

10:53Did you have clear ambition at this age? I mean, there's two thoughts occur to me. Did you have any idea of what you wanted to do when you grew up because you graduated at 17 and did religion play much role in your life? No, no. Not at all. Did you reject it? You have to understand that my father's form of religion wasn't very religious. Liberal protestants at that point very live and let live uh yeah i mean it uh for him you know the civil rights movement was his religion uh and you know i believed in that stuff as well but we he was never pious in a in a strict sense we went to judson memorial church which at that time was a very avant-garde uh church in greenwich village uh new york the first wedding i ever attended was with an interracial couple where at the moment where the minister said, if anyone has any reason for this couple not to be married, let them speak now forever, hold your peace.

11:50And a woman got up and said, yeah, I object to them getting married. I've been living with the groom for the last year and he never told me he was going to marry this woman. So my, you know, it was that kind of, it was that kind of ambience in New York that I grew up in. And did you have any idea when you applied to Cornell or when you went to Cornell, what you wanted to do afterwards, what you wanted to do with your degree. I was heavily into literature at that point. I read a lot of, you know, heavy novels and existentialism, you know, seemed at that point like something, you know, really sexy.

12:24So that was the kind of stuff I read when I was in high school. And I thought I would continue that when I got to college. So you were going to write the great American novel then? Something like that. Yeah. What happened when you got to college? Well, I met Alan Bloom. To do classics. Yeah, well, I didn't start that way. I met Alan Bloom, the political theorist and the author of The Closing of the American Mind, which was a big bestseller in the late 1980s. He hadn't gotten to that point when I met him. It was right on the heels of the big Cornell crisis when the whole university was shut down over protests, over the treatment of black students and the Vietnam War.

13:03so it was really a pretty turbulent time in on american campuses you know four students had just been shot at kent state university by you know national guardsmen and uh there was a lot of polarization you know in the country at that moment right if i think blum had sort of half shut the door on cornell as a consequence of the he he resigned in protest because he thought that the administration was being too weak in the defense of academic freedom and came back to teach this one course. Yeah, he had a contractual obligation. Okay. Why was this final seminar on Plato's Republic so important in your intellectual development?

13:45Well, I think that a liberal education, and Bloom wrote and argued this, really needs to expose you to big ideas. And Plato's Republic is a discussion between Socrates and a couple of young Athenians about what is justice. And they go through possible definitions of justice. And, you know, it's kind of an exemplar of the sort of philosophical reasoning that I think lays at the foundation of Western thought, you know, use of reason and reasoned arguments to ask big questions and to try to answer them. I suppose I'm a bit mystified by how this could have had such a deep impact on you, how it could have almost taken you by surprise.

14:32It's just because your studies hadn't gone in that direction before. Well, Bloom was a student of Leo Strauss who had a very particular concern, which was modern relativism. He said that the Western project began with the philosophical attempt to use reason to understand the human condition. But by the time you got to philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, they basically, the tradition had collapsed on itself because they argued that there is no truth. There is no overarching way of understanding the human condition because human reason is not sufficient. And, you know, Strauss felt that that That was a big crisis because, among other things, if you say God is dead, it opens you up to all sorts of other possibilities like Nazism.

15:26And both Nietzsche and Heidegger were associated with Nazism for not accidental reasons. Once you deny, for example, the Christian idea of the equality of human beings, then why shouldn't the stronger rule the weaker? And that was really the conclusion of a lot of Germans in the early 20th century. And why did this ignite young Francis's thinking so much? I had never been exposed, I guess, to philosophical ideas in that kind of a direct way before. And also it opened up a questioning of basic assumptions about liberalism and democracy, which... Why? Well, because, you know, from Strauss's perspective, you had to think about them in contrast to other ways of understanding, you know, political regimes.

16:20And they were not necessarily the best. You had to really question all of the premises that, you know, you would start with as an American liberal. As in the best way to run a society is not necessarily the way that everybody currently thinks it is. That's right. In terms of liberal democracy. I suppose other philosophers, people like John Rawls and the veil of ignorance and coming into just maybe if we did things like this. That's what excites you, the idea, my God, things don't have to be like this. That's right. That's right. And that's the moment that your life begins to head in the direction it subsequently followed.

17:00And also, I think it created this respect for writers in the Western philosophical tradition and the way that that thought had evolved through the early moderns, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and then getting into Hegel and the German idealists. I mean, this is an incredibly rich tradition and one that I had not really been exposed to previously. So the 19th century continental philosophy, which sought to create moral codes absent a God, that seems to me to tie together some of the things that we've just been talking about. Yeah, absolutely.

17:47it's just sort of as if entire vistas are opening up in front of you and if you have an inquiring mind and you actually want to get to conclusions you want to be able to write something that fits all of the conditions that you've studied thus far that's why you spend seven months reading before you actually spend six months writing a book yeah uh the other thing about strauss is that And he argued that many philosophers wrote esoterically, meaning that the surface meaning that you would think that they were conveying was not necessarily their deeper understanding because they wrote under authoritarian regimes and they couldn't speak truth to power in many respects.

18:28And it made you stop and read more carefully books that modern people had kind of rejected, saying, you know, well, this is just historically interesting, but, you know, not something to be taken seriously. Because if you were writing, for example, behind the Iron Curtain or a previous equivalent of that, then you're obviously writing differently from how you were writing in America. Absolutely. And you can find, if you look hard enough, the things that are not explicit. Absolutely, yeah, that was the basic idea. And, you know, Strauss had a view that ultimately philosophy was not compatible with political order because philosophers would always question, you know, the gods of the particular society that, you know, they lived in just as Socrates did and was killed for it.

19:21and therefore you know you couldn't as a philosopher be completely honest and it's completely different from the post-enlightenment view where reason and politics you know can go together and and will solve everything eventually we could find the right questions um you had a sort of Plato's symposium of your of your own as far as I can tell under the influence of of Alan Bloom and in in a if I've understood it correctly in a kind of um in a house at Cornell where visiting academics would break bread with students. That's right. I mean, an extraordinary hothouse of intellectualism. Yeah, it was called Telluride House.

19:58There was a Telluride Association that was founded by a somewhat eccentric robber baron that had made a fortune in electric power in Colorado. And he created a self-governing student association where he felt that you couldn't actually learn self-government unless you actually did it. So, for example, we had an endowment, and I was the chairman of the investment committee when I was an undergraduate and managed to lose one out of the$4 million in the endowment in the big market decline in 1972. That was, I mean, an incredible baptism, really, into extraordinary high-level thinking. And Bloom became very close.

20:48Yeah, so I became close. But French postmodernism hit Cornell like a freight train in the early 70s. So we had several professors. So Derrida and – Yeah, well, one who had been a student of Jacques Lacan, another had been a student of Derrida. We had Michel Foucault visited, Cornell, Julia Kristeva, a whole bunch of French luminaries. And that was the other pole of kind of modern thought that appealed to me at that point. Well, it's the third pole, isn't it? Because you've got your father's liberalism, which is what you were carrying when you arrived at Cornell. Yeah, that's right. And then you've got Bloom's.

21:28What word do you use to describe Bloom's ideology? Well, he's a Straussian. Yeah, okay. And then you've got the French arriving as well. So how evenly split were you? How did you feel the shifts inside? Well, I then decided I would, I graduated early and I spent half a year in Paris and I attended Derrida's. At that point, he was such a rock star. So he had this big lecture at the École Normale. Roland Barthes had a smaller seminar and I went to both of those. And then I actually sat down and read through their books, which is the point at which I decided I actually couldn't continue down that path.

22:08I'd been accepted into the comparative literature department at Yale, whose luminaries at that time were Paul de Maun and Jeffrey Hartman. And they were, you know, full into French postmodernism. but by the time I arrived there I had decided I couldn't do this for you know for the rest of my life and so I had a kind of unhappy year at Yale and applied immediately to political science departments but you couldn't do this for the rest of your life because you had concluded it was I don't think you used this phrase until a little later in your life you'd concluded that it was all total bullshit yes yeah i mean that's quite precocious well you look i mean foucault made his career around denying the possibility of master narratives and you know derrida was a deconstructionist who wanted to take apart the apparent structure and therefore the wisdom that lay behind you know great authors and show that they didn't understand what they themselves were talking about and yet they all believed in a master narrative which was basically marxism uh you know they a lot of these people were you know julia kristeva uh in the kitchen of telluride house told me that stalinism really had a point and it just seemed to me that if you don't believe in master narratives you know you shouldn't believe in stalinism either and are these i talk a bit about ego because of these ideas that hijack you or ambush you do you think who am i i'm just you know i've only got one degree and i'm now essentially calling time on on some of the greatest thinkers of our age whether they should be or not is is immaterial isn't it was there ever any sense of um being awed i i suspect not yeah i i guess uh i felt that there was the well this is true of loom as well there's a cultish quality you know he had a circle of favorite students but there was certainly a cultish quality around these post-modernists like derrida uh you know people would be waiting out in the corridors you know trying to get into his lectures because he was so popular.

24:29And I guess I felt that even at that young age that, you know, there was something quite not right about that kind of intellectual stardom. Oh, okay. There was a slight irony there, given that you went on to become something of an intellectual star. But I think the key objection is that it had, in your words again, it had nothing to do with the world, what they were doing. Yeah, that was actually also something quite important because, yeah, it was so abstract and so divorced from any kind of real world concern that, you know, I just felt it wouldn't be fulfilling to study that. So what are you now, 21, 22?

25:11Something like that. And are you, in the moments where you contemplate the future, your personal future, are you now thinking it's a life of academia, it's a life of the mind for me? I just haven't quite found my… Well, I wanted to go into something more real world related. That's why I decided to go into political science. The Cold War at that point was heating up in the 1970s. You had Ostpolitik, but you also had the Soviets intervening in Afghanistan and various places in the third world. And so it seemed to me that there was an international relations crisis that I felt was important to know about.

25:54This is quite a leap, isn't it? Absolutely. From comparative literature in Paris to feeling a real internal drive and urge to actually get your hands dirty with the nitty-gritty of modernity and reality. That's right. And once I decided to make that leap, I never looked back. Well, clearly you didn't. And it was an easy leap to make? You didn't? It was easy in the sense that in a way I was returning to the Straussian, you know, roots that I had developed at Cornell. I went to the Harvard Government Department. I studied with Harvey Mansfield there. And there were a lot of people in that department that were in political theory.

26:36However, I actually also decided I wouldn't do political theory myself. I got into Harvard under false circumstances because a friend of mine who's... I won't tell anyone. Yeah. A friend of mine that was teaching there already said, if you want to study theory, don't say you want to study theory because we have too many people that want to do that. Say you want to study national security issues because hardly anybody does that in the Harvard government department. So I falsely claimed that that's what I wanted to do. But then when I got there, I realized, yeah, that actually is what I want to study.

27:10And it's not hard to see why, is it, given what we've discussed so far? There's a crystallizing taking place at the moment, and it is somehow taking what you learned when you were studying Plato and applying it to real-world problems. Yeah, that's right. Thinking the world better. So I still did two fields in political theory, but I also did French politics, international relations. And I wrote a dissertation that was completely based on, you know, it was a Soviet and Soviets in the Middle East thesis that really had no political philosophy in it whatsoever. So what was it? It was a typical international relations theory, you know, trying to explain Soviet behavior.

27:59And nuclear weapons underpin an awful lot of this as well. Yeah, at that point, there were big arguments over arms control, over what kind of threat the Soviet Union represented. And I think it's at that point that I got sucked into this group that would later be known as neoconservatives that were very hawkish on Cold War issues. This is partly as a consequence of interning for Paul Wolf of its thing. Yeah, he was a very influential person at that time. I thought he was the smartest person. I had ever met. More smarter than Alan Bloom? Well, smart in a different way. Yes, of course. And smarter in a real world way.

28:40Yes. Crucially for you, I think. He did foreign policy and he really understood it and understood Middle Eastern politics and Soviet politics and that sort of thing.

28:57How highfalutin were your ambitions then when you moved to the US Arms Control and Disarmenment Agency. Do you see what I mean? Did you see yourself as someone who could perhaps bring peace to... Well, I told Bloom that I wanted to be the first Japanese-American Secretary of Defense. That's pretty highfalutin. So, I mean, that's a political ambition, but not power for power's sake. You actually thought that you could, because you'd thought so deeply about things and worked stuff out, you would eventually be in a position to actually impose the consequences of your thinking on human beings in a way that would make everything better.

29:37Yeah, I think that was the ultimate. You know, there was a moral narrative that was very influential in subsequent years, which was really about Winston Churchill, you know, that while England slept, he alone understood this rising threat from Nazi Germany. And he, in a very lonely way, tried to rouse his fellow countrymen to understand that threat. It was only after, you know, the threat emerged with Dunkirk and the invasion of France that his fellow Brits understood really that they were in a, you know, a very dangerous position. And he was vindicated in the end because, you know, the United States came to help and they eventually won the war.

30:23And, you know, that narrative is very stirring and inspirational. A lot of people during the Cold War felt that we were in a very similar kind of situation. And it led to, you know, a kind of moral, well, for some people, actually to a moral panic about, you know, the situation we were in. But also, it was a very stirring narrative that made you want to, you know, be the Churchill of your time. Now, it turns out that this was also, it had a very bad effect because George W. Bush in the Iraq war thought that he was Churchill. He had a bust of Churchill on his desk, and he thought that Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler, and that he was going to, you know, make a stand and stop, you know, this new Hitler from getting a nuclear weapon.