Francis Fukuyama

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0:36Adam Tooze: Hi, and welcome to Ones and Twos, FPs economics podcast. Every week we take a couple of data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FPs deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us as always is FPs economics columnist and Columbia University professor Adam Twos this week in New York. Hi, Adam. Hi, Ken. So we have one data point for you all this week, and that is based on Francis Fukuyama's memoir that was just released called In the Realm of the Last Man. The data point is 1989. That is the year that Francis Fukuyama, at the age of 36 years old, he was a State Department planner at the time.

1:19Adam Tooze: And it was that year that he delivered a conference paper arguing that liberal democracy had won permanently as humanity's ideological endpoint. A few months later, of course, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet collapse followed not too much long thereafter, all of which seemed to vindicate Fukuyama's thesis. And here we are 37 years later and Fukuyama's published that memoir I mentioned. and he tries to account for everything that's happened since that landmark paper he delivered that ultimately became a book. Fukuyama, though, recounts, among other things, how he became estranged from his own intellectual circles, how he became a kind of neoconservative apostate, recanting his support for the Iraq War and also laissez-faire economics.

2:14Adam Tooze: And in some ways, Fukuyama seems like a representative intellectual of this entire era, which is why it struck us as an apt book to discuss. And to start off with Adam, obviously Fukuyama is famous for that end of history thesis. And I'm curious, yeah, how does that original statement stand now in light of this memoir he just published?

2:39Cameron Abadi: I mean, I was impressed and not a little charmed by the robustness with which he sticks to his guns and I thought this memoir for those who are curious who maybe read or have read the 89 or the early 90s book that came out of the essay anyone who was curious about where Fukuyama went afterwards with his thinking and maybe didn't want to wade through the many books that he's written which are very weighty this is a great place to drop in on his thought and I do recommend it in that way. And as you say, it's a great read through the last 40 years or so of American, last 50 years really of American political history.

3:25Cameron Abadi: Fugueram was born in the early 50s to a Japanese American family, worth saying much more about that. So he trained in college in the 70s and then moved his way through the American policy and academic establishment, a kind of think tank university life. but yes the end of history thesis you know for those who aren't familiar with the story with the idea it has a kind of inherent implausibility to it and it courts that and owns it and faces up to it because the idea is okay what do you think history is well there's different ways of thinking about history it could be cyclical it could be inherently meaningless but a very powerful brand of thinking about history indelibly associated with the name of Hegel the German philosopher of the late 18th, early 19th century, the period of Napoleon, the late Enlightenment, Romanticism, is that history is, if you'd like, the working through of a problem, and namely it's about the question of freedom and how it works its way out into human institutions, how you might be able to bring together the logic of commercial society from 18th century Adam Smith type diagnosis, the logic of enlightenment thinking, which reaches its climax in Kant for German idealists, and the classical images of stability and political order that we associate with classical Greece and the polis, and how under these modern circumstances you could get back there is one way of thinking of Hegel's problem.

4:53Cameron Abadi: And Hegel thinks of history as working its way towards a resolution of that question. and Fukuyama owns that and says right this I think is the best way to think about historical development as the working through of problems and in his essays in 89 in the book in early 90s he said look I think we you know we should face the fact that under any reasonable construction of human nature and this is an element that he adds which is not as powerful in thinkers like Hegel, but in anthropomorphized, you know, human-like readings of Hegel, because Hegel can have a very unhuman feel, like you can project the story of the development of a human personality into Hegel, and the great Russian interpreter of Hegel, Kostunjo Kojev, did this in a famous lecture series in the 30s that Fukuyama picks up on.

5:45Cameron Abadi: Anyway, long backstory, if that is your view of the development of humanity through history, you might say that a rule-bound, law-bound, participatory, if not democratic, market economy with a free movement of ideas and the free unfolding of science is the answer to this question of how we reconcile Enlightenment, commercial society, political order in the best possible way. And so the argument is not that other things don't happen in the world and that there aren't other places which aren't on this timeline, but the argument was that there are certain places which have converged to a stable set of answers to these questions.

6:22Cameron Abadi: And they are, broadly speaking, that set. So rule of law, democracy, freedom of ideas, market economy, that kind of vision of the post-Cold War world. And he hasn't budged from that. He really hasn't. He basically believes that that still is the central set of issues. Where he's shifted is a bit of logic and a bit of kind of narrative balance and we'll keep coming back to this in the course of this conversation I'm sure but one element is to say look okay that idea which you get from mainstream American social science not just from highfalutin Hegelian philosophies of history the market economics and democracy and state building and the rule of law all go together as a single package, and therefore we would expect them to converge in the transition of Russia towards market democracy and China as well.

7:16Cameron Abadi: That was oversimplified. In fact, there are the different tendencies which may or may not go inside, but we shouldn't jump to conclusions about this. And even when they are realized, there are fundamental problems to do with questions of delegation and procedure, which can subvert the real intent behind that convergence. and then more fundamentally and this is where he really takes up his older ideas also in the title of this book what comes after the end of history people after will go on living what comes after and as Fukuyama was clear-headed enough to see the German philosophical argument goes on in the 19th century and if it were to be the case that we had reached the end of history what then would be the status of it's man this is 19th century gendered language but really humanity the idea is that in the age of the last man, we live in a time in which time, in a sense, has lost its point because it's no longer about the surging, thrusting search for answers to fundamental questions.

8:15Cameron Abadi: And so what are we then left with? Well, then we're left with vanity. We're left with the pursuit of the, you know, the satisfaction of this impulse equals thimos, the desire for, and often a very exaggerated desire for respect and recognition and acknowledgement. And rather than reading so much the derailment of the last 20 to 30 years of the Western Liberal Project as a refutation of the fact that that was the trajectory of history in this version, what Fukuyama very calmly says is the stakes are low. You know, they act as though what we're talking about is bringing America back to greatness, but no one really takes it seriously.

8:55Cameron Abadi: Putin sounds off and of course he also launched a war, but really what is this about? Is this a serious political project? No, no, no, no, no. So in fact, what we're witnessing here is precisely what you would expect from a kind of zombie politics conducted under the condition of the end of history, and by people who don't really maybe quite know it, but actually are just a bunch of last men, men preoccupied, people preoccupied, above all, with this vain pursuit of recognition. And I think would even read identity politics and these kind of phenomena as expressions of the state of the last man and so then maggot's reaction against identity politics then itself becomes a form of this and so we live in this it's a way of making sense of the bizarre weird unreal surreal post truth kind of world that we're in because in the end after the end of history things don't matter in the same way as they used to.

9:55Cameron Abadi: The dots don't join up. We lose a kind of coherence. So this is how I read this memoir. Surprisingly, I thought, robust defense of the original position.

10:06Adam Tooze: Yeah, he's clearly at pains to say, and clearly has always been at pains to say, I think that's what he sort of suggests in the memoir, that this idea of the end of history does not mean the end of problems, like does not mean the end of even kinds of conflicts because he has this idea of a kind of remainder of anthropological need or philosophical anthropology that does not get integrated into political life. And that's this Theimos idea. And that will always generate conflict. It just, I guess in his terms or in Hegel's terms, take your pick, it's not properly political at that point because it doesn't, it's not producing history in his viewpoint.

10:54Adam Tooze: I think there's a whole nother set of questions that I'm not sure he adequately deals with whether there are other ideological models now that are substantively different than liberal democracy that are on offer in the world. And I think he's kind of a little dismissive in discussing, say, China or Russia's models and whether they are actual alternatives. But this kind of other underlying anthropological point that there is a kind of need for recognition that people have that is not necessarily generating politics or history, but will always kind of generate conflict, I think is a really useful idea to have.

11:32Adam Tooze: And from his memoir, I take it that he traces this back to one of his big introductions to intellectual life, which came in college, when he went to Cornell University and he took a class or I don't know if it was multiple classes now off the top of my head, but with Alan Bloom, a kind of storied professor there, political theory, who himself was a student of the professor Leo Strauss. And I'm curious what you think Fukuyama took away from that education with Bloom and from, you know, Strauss indirectly. I mean, it seems to me like he's really at pains to say that that history and philosophy have a depth that he um is intent on always preserving in his kind of political and policy analyses you know almost a kind of skepticism of all received wisdoms that that he encounters after after

12:30Cameron Abadi: you know encountering these figures at college yeah fascinating moment this in american intellectual history, public service announcement for those who aren't immersed in this kind of thing, you might easily get your blooms muddled up because Fukuyama's trajectory goes from Cornell to a brief stint at Yale to Harvard. And at Yale, there is not Alan Bloom, but Harold Bloom, both Harold Bloom and Alan Bloom, unrelated, born in the same year, I think, 1950, both prominent figures in this sort of Cold War era American discourse, one in political theory, that's Alan Bloom, who was the Strauss and the other in literary criticism at Yale, and that's Harold Bloom.

13:11Cameron Abadi: Both have a kind of, and I'm going to drop the analogy at this point, but it's worth saying I think that both are concerned with the canon, they're both concerned with the formation of Western culture and Western civilization from these grand institutions of North American higher education, because Alan Bloom ends up at Toronto and at the stints of Chicago, so it's that kind of upstate New York, Midwestern kind of intellectualism. And Alan Bloom for Fukuyama is a kind of touchstone, I think, as you say, quite rightly, of a kind of intellectual seriousness of a commitment also to a rather tragic view of the unreconcilable relationship between philosophy and politics.

13:55Cameron Abadi: And this is a tension, I think, for Fukuyama in his relationship with people like Alan Bloom, because though he culturally, in his search for profundity, perhaps also search for identity, having grown up in a family that was multiply disrupted by World War Two, by its Japanese American identity, by its encounter also with Christianity, searching for a kind of secure founding for his own identity is deeply attracted by the seriousness of figures like Alan Bloom, Leo Strauss that he never met, but by way of Bloom was heavily influenced by. And yet at some level, he's far too much of a Hegelian for either of them, I think, Alan Bloom or Leo Strauss, because both of them are quite committed to the idea that politics and philosophy are fundamentally at odds, that they will not reconcile, right?

14:46Cameron Abadi: that there is something about the deepest truths of the world which is not amenable to power, that is not amenable to politics, that requires a kind of retreat, that requires also a kind of mind, which Fukuyama, who comes across as a very modest person, whose desire for recognition doesn't articulate itself in needing to be chosen as one of the elect, as the great philosophical minds that Alan Bloom and Leo Strauss both, in a rather obnoxious way, kind of selectively cultivated. So Fukuyama's not there, right? He's a worker bee. He wants to be in the process of policymaking. He ends up at Rand.

15:25Cameron Abadi: He's somewhat surprised, I think, himself to end up as a tenured high-status professor in lots of very fancy institutions. And there's a real, there's a deep disjuncture here. But the cultural patina and the cultural force and the insistence on the binding logic of Western Civ, of course, exposes, if you like, in the reverse mirror, a kind of incoherence in the position of the Straussians and Bloom as well. Well, for Fukuyama, it's perfectly obvious that this has immediate practical implications, for instance, in everyday politics and the resistance of identity politics, a deep skepticism, and some readers may find it unattractive in Fukuyama, a refusal to back away from questions of human nature.

16:11Cameron Abadi: right, Fukuyama is insistent on this is a central problem of all thought, including modern thought, as a progressive problem as well. In other words, our understanding of human nature has been changed by science, which he then lays out for us, his understanding of what it is, behavioral psychology, evolutionary psychology, you know, has taught us that we need to know. So there's a sort of independence of mind also in the distance that he has, but a common sense, exactly as you put it, of a kind of depth perception that is crucial to navigate the world. And then adherence, right, the loyalty, a kind of fidelity to certain sorts of culture of knowledge that are precious and that should be preserved and passed down.

16:56Adam Tooze: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, my sense was also that he really has a feeling that politics needs to have stakes. Like it is embedded in some kind of broader, deep historical sense of stakes. And that's really what motivates him. But that could also cut in multiple directions. I mean, what those stakes could or should be, I think that's interesting because, you know, as he recounts his own biography, the directions in which it takes, I think are in the memoir's own terms, or maybe a little like under explored. I mean, he, I did not know that he started out studying in a graduate program after leaving Cornell.

17:38Adam Tooze: He entered a comparative literature graduate program.

17:41Cameron Abadi: Yeah, he had brushes with all of the French greats, with Barthes, with Derrida, with Foucault.

17:47Adam Tooze: Yeah, seemingly that was his intention, was to devote his life to studying those figures of lit theory. And then he seemed to have a kind of some kind of what I would call like an aesthetic turn against them. I mean, it was almost like There was a rejection of what he took as their ethical viewpoint, what he describes as a nihilism of this kind of strain of comparative literature and deconstructionism that he felt compelled to reject.

18:19Cameron Abadi: Yeah, and also a kind of insistence on plain speaking, right? There's some rather, I think, inadequate, I don't know whether they're willfully naive sort of criticisms of the rhetoric and the language of people like Derrida and Foucault and Bart as he just literally calls it bullshit.

18:36Adam Tooze: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

18:37Cameron Abadi: And I mean, I think that's cheap and there's more to be said. But for him, it seems to be quite grounding, right? And he goes from there then to, off to the Kennedy School, essentially in Harvard to do not just political science, but international relations.

18:53Adam Tooze: Yeah, I think his thought was originally that he would do political theory, but in preparing to enter a graduate school, he describes reading the works of Winston Churchill, which I thought was fascinating. And he was so swept up in the memoirs of Winston Churchill that he decided upon entering then Graduate School for Political Science that he would be devoting himself to international relations. And I thought there was something very telling about this rejection of deconstructionism and its nihilism and the attraction to the moral seriousness, as he describes it, of Winston Churchill. And I'm curious what you make of that and what that might be revealing about his own temperament.

19:36Cameron Abadi: Yeah, it is very interesting, isn't it? Like Churchill is obviously a touchstone for all sorts of different types of conservative. Fukuyama was, you know, born into the high point of Churchilliano in the 1950s, when Churchill becomes a huge transatlantic celebrity. and you can see how he would be a kind of stepping stone to a neoconservatism that would that would make sense church is obviously also the epitome of a you know scholar statesman a brilliant writer an extraordinary prose stylist in his own way and i couldn't help thinking and the memoir doesn't exactly dot the i on this but the alignment of the text makes clear that i think Also, Fukuyama has been on the journey and coming to terms with his own family's past because part of the family were internment camp.

20:29Cameron Abadi: His mother's side, a very distinguished Japanese scholar, founder of one of Japan's leading economics department. His uncle was actually got out of the internment camp, these horrible camps that the Japanese Americans were put in without any kind of due process. His uncle volunteers to serve in the American military and ends up in Germany marrying a German woman. So his family has this history that is sprawling over the World War II and Cold War world. His uncle apparently has a at least platonic relationship with the widow of Sun Yat-sen, the family of distinguished and brilliant Chinese women that are married across the hierarchy of the Chinese Republican elite, including Chiang Kai-shek.

21:17Cameron Abadi: So it's a remarkable, and I think maybe what's happening for Fukuyama in this turn to international relations to international history, and above all, it's filtering through a grand narrative like that of Churchill's, and for whom the Pacific War is really a sideshow, by the way. So it takes you also out of the drama of America's clash with Japan and its extreme racialized violence. So if you as a Japanese-American are going to deal with World War II, Churchill would be where I would go as well. You don't want to be going to Pearl Harbor and Midway and Hiroshima. And just John Dower's kind of take on that war as a racial war by America against Japan as much as Japan's own campaign of conquest.

21:59Cameron Abadi: So I think that all makes sense that you end up with this. Fukuyama is a very European character in an interesting way. I've always thought his end of history thesis is really about the Federal Republic of Germany. clearly not about the United States which is so far behind the curve of the end of history but you know the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn Republic, this is a pretty fair you know approximation of Fukuyama's view so I think World War II serves as a point and that's also then where his neo-conservative politics comes in because he's basically trying to grasp Soviet strategy in the Middle East but in the end as he says in the memoir I was part of the hawkish side of that conversation.

22:37Cameron Abadi: I was part of the group that were worried about appeasement and read Churchill as a critic of appeasement and argued for not necessarily all-out aggression or massive escalation of nuclear threats, but certainly somebody who understood the need for a buttressing of America's position in the Cold War. So in the line of a Mishheimer, a Huntingdon, all of these people who are beginning to think through logics of conventional deterrence in the 70s and 80s as well. Anyway, so I think I see him squarely sitting in that realm. He's done quite a lot of military consulting over the course of his career.

23:14Cameron Abadi: He apparently built an armored warfare simulation on a computer. So that sounds very 70s and 80s military revolution, revolution in military affairs kind of think tank world.

23:27Adam Tooze: We're taking a quick break right here, but we will be back in a second to continue talking about Francis Fukuyama's new memoir.

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24:52Adam Tooze: You're putting your finger on something here though that I found actually really, that I found really strange about the narrative he was giving and specifically how the kind of intellectual narrative lines up with his biographical narrative and family history that he also includes in the book and that you were just mentioning because clearly he feels like politics needs to have a kind of moral dimension in order to be valuable. That's what he's the sign of this being steeped in Alan Bloom and Leo Strauss seems to involve. And he talks about being in this Cold War period where clearly he also felt like there were moral stakes involved, understandably, at that point in history in ways that are maybe today a little hard to recover what exactly that may have felt like at that time.

25:37Adam Tooze: But if you were looking for moral stakes and given your own family history of internment by the United States government, one could imagine that could have been turned inwards as a kind of skepticism of the United States, not to say a rejection of the United States, but a kind of like, you know, inward turning criticism that he doesn't take up at all. Instead, he becomes a kind of Europeanized figure somehow without describing how he kind of intellectually makes that leap or biographically makes that leap. I just thought that was interesting. I mean, because there were other moral paths available to integrate this intellectual viewpoint to him.

26:17Adam Tooze: It struck me.

26:18Cameron Abadi: Including his father's, right? Yes, precisely. is a liberal theologian who played apparently a widely unrecognized but non-significant role in the civil rights movement and was recognized as such by black activists. And obviously an unusual position for a Japanese-American to be in. One thinks of the Jewish minority as key link. But as you say, it makes perfect sense for people who had suffered the abuses that the Japanese-American had to position. And he describes Fukuyama, the awkwardness of his relationship with his father, who's clearly appalled by the fact that his son has shifted so far to the right in the 70s and 80s.

26:56Cameron Abadi: So you could absolutely, American politics offers you plenty of different options for a kind of moral narrative, including a Hegelian one. I mean, Martin Luther King, Cornel West, these people are deeply steeped in German idealist philosophy and see that as an organic relationship to the black freedom struggle in the United States. and an essential way. You could literally have done a Cornel West and been a student of Gadamer's. And instead you do American minority experience that translates into a series of alignments with Leo Strauss. But he doesn't, you know, the nice thing about Fukuyama is he's a man of balance.

27:34Cameron Abadi: So he doesn't jump the shark here, right? So he's kind of back and his heroes ultimately, as he says, in later life, he's discovered social theory. And its origins in 18th century, again, European Enlightenment thought. And his heroes are Alex Esther Tocqueville and Max Weber and figures like this, that he will hurl against ignorant, condescending American neoclassical economists like Robert Solow. I mean, he's no pushover Fukuyama. There's some great one-liners in here where he's at a dinner with Solow and Solow's sounding off about casual empiricism. And Fukuyama's comeback is, well, yeah, my favorites to Max Faber and Alex Sista-Toxville, undoubtedly casual empiricists.

28:15Cameron Abadi: It's like, ooh, you know, that would have been a good moment to witness.

28:19Adam Tooze: You make a good point, though. Perhaps there was a kind of, in terms of his own family history, an Oedipal reason, you know, I hesitate to be psychoanalytic about it, but, you know, to not go down the liberal pathway that was perhaps available. I mean, as it is, he describes a kind of, again, revulsion at hearing the kind of lit theorists talk about Stalinism having a point and instead therefore turning to Winston Churchill. I mean, there were other availabilities in between, right?

28:49Cameron Abadi: Which is exactly right. You know, it's worth saying that Churchill, of course, has his sentimental moments about Stalin as well. Like, you know, oh my God, how could you possibly talk about murdering all those people that way from Winston Churchill? So yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting emotional portrait, I think, that we get. It's a good memoir in that sense. It's quite revealing.

29:12Adam Tooze: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Sometimes you have to read between the lines a bit, but I guess that's always the case with memoirs. And I guess for me, this also raises the question, in this kind of 1970s period, what exactly accounts do you think for him becoming a Republican in the first place? Because in terms of his commitments and beliefs, it seems like he could just as easily become a kind of centrist Democrat. I mean, he describes his dissertation work sort of in passing, and it's on the Soviet Union's history of intervention in the Middle East. But as he puts it, a kind of hesitant history of intervening, a kind of, one would think, a kind of skepticism of Soviet expansionism rather than, you know, sympathy for a kind of hardline policy on the Soviet Union at that point.

30:02Adam Tooze: He also describes, you know, what I took as a kind of skepticism of the deterrence theories of Alfred Wollstetter, who then went on to become a godfather of neoconservatism. So why be a Republican, say, at all, rather than, you know, someone else who he was very sympathetic with, Samuel Huntington, a centrist, social thinker, also like Fukuyama, but who was a lifelong Democrat. I mean, you know, it seems like he would have had a place, say, in that coalition and would have then warded off the break he eventually had to make with neoconservatism. So what do you think accounts for that?

30:42Cameron Abadi: Do you think that follows? I mean, I totally take, I think, the force of your question. And to my mind, it tempts me to just put my historian's hat on and say, well, you know, 50 years ago, things in American politics were just radically different. The choices were different. Nowadays, clearly no one of his mind and his intelligence could possibly be associated with the current Republican Party, which is no doubt a tragedy for many of his Republican friends. And he describes, you know, many of his people drifting into the never Trump, that kind of forlorn bunch of never Trump Republicans. In the 70s, this game played out completely different.

31:14Cameron Abadi: And you have a serious hort like Brzezinski in the Carter camp. And you have Kissinger, who's really a detente guy with the Republicans. so the lines are really muddy and in neoconservatism out of which after all foreign policy also emerges as a magazine and a platform because foreign policy is one of the platforms the magazine of course that we're associated with for this new thinking in american politics is called a cross party there are both republicans and democrats in that moment and i would situate fukuyama as i mean he doesn't really offer an explanation so i'm just going to say it sounds to me slightly opportunistic.

31:51Cameron Abadi: The Reagan administration comes along, the Carter things are bust, you're next up, you know, it's a moment in your career when these options open up. Why would somebody like him have a problem working with a James Baker, which is what he's doing in the late 80s, early 90s? I mean, if I had to pick an American statesman of that period, you know, I might take him over most of the Clinton crew. And that then goes further, I would say also that the disaster of neoconservatism is, after all, not just a disaster of the Republican Party. The Democrats voted massively for the war in 2003, which is the war which breaks Fukuyama's connection.

32:30Cameron Abadi: So to that extent, I think of Fukuyama like Obama as a kind of a symptom of the crisis within the Democratic Party. I mean, Obama's a symptom of the crisis within the Democratic Party, after all, because he gets elected from virtually nowhere to be the presidential candidate, largely on the strength of his distancing from the overwhelming majority of the party in 2003. So Fukuyama is quite insistent that he thinks that people should have seen the problems of state making, which is why he opposes Iraq, not the war and the violence and removing Saddam, but the hubris of state building. he thinks folks should really have seen that in the Clinton administration of the 1990s so my view is that sure he ended up on the conservative side and then as he says was quite unjustly in various ways associated with Wolfowitz and people like that at their most you know misguided and therefore has to make quite a sharp symbolic break at some personal cost though he quite sensibly downplays what it cost him as opposed to the population of Iraq.

33:35Cameron Abadi: But I think of him as really diagnosing a joint problem of neoconservatism, which is actually a kind of bipartisan project of US politics from the 80s onwards. And all of this is just symbolic of the fact that American politics in that period at the elite level was a very different beast from what it became, really from the shock jock, you know, late 90s onslaught on Clinton through to Sarah Palin and then through to, you know, the Tea Party and all of that in the 2010s. So at that point, you know, they really have moved into a different position. The parties left him and not the other way around.

34:13Adam Tooze: Yeah, his kind of late career focus on the state and on political order, I think is really a key to understanding his political temperament and is ultimately his conservatism. You know, as distinct from his affiliation with the Republican Party, I do think he's temperamentally ultimately deeply conservative in the sense that he really believes that order in the form of the state has primacy in politics over any kind of emancipatory politics that people would want to pursue. And so then even the capacity for emancipation, that potential that humans have is really secondary for him to that idea of creating and establishing and pursuing order first.

35:03Adam Tooze: And so whether that places him in which party, I guess, is a secondary question. And now I think he's, I guess, would be affiliated with Democrats in his late life. But I do think maybe the one thing that I thought was touching in a sense in the memoir was, I'm not sure you use so many words, but it did seem like he essentially admitted that his political choices and affiliations that earlier in his career were products of socialization. Like he was loyal to certain friends he met early on. You know, he talks about Paul Wilfowitz as someone who mentored him maybe early on in his career when he arrived in Washington.

35:37Adam Tooze: And so, yeah, it was almost like these are this is the the friends he had via Alan Bloom and the broader circles he was in. And so those were the people he was going to go work with. And, you know, there's something I think I actually do think there is something where he is transparent about his own motives there a bit in how he discusses that.

35:54Cameron Abadi: And I also appreciate his self-awareness about his own intellectual development. So this turned to social theory, which he admittedly just wasn't familiar with until the 2000s and 2010s. And then also to go to your point about a kind of fidelity to a certain milieu, I mean, he himself describes his major works on the questions of political order, which really bring out this preoccupation first and foremost with the problem of the state. he describes them as an updating and development of Samuel Huntington's work his political order in changing societies which is a critique of the modernization theory which Fukuyama had used quite extensively in the 1989 essay on the end of history and so there's a really serious organic development of his thinking which as you say is kind of backstitching over associations and intellectual milieu and connections that go all the way back to the the 1970s and to Harvard in that period.

36:51Cameron Abadi: And I completely agree that what happens is you end up with a story that has a really quite classical structure, which is that human nature in some senses is the problem. And it is quixotic and driven by these urges, which if one simply attempts to realize them straight ahead in terms of freedom, don't lead anywhere good. And so the wise way, I think wisdom is probably a key term here, the wise way to organize political projects, centers not on, as it were, the straight ahead realization of human urges and human nature, but on order on that problem. And that problem itself is real, because how do you do order without producing proceduralism?

37:33Cameron Abadi: How do you, that's kind of losing yourself endlessly in procedural issues? How do you actually achieve delegation? Because in complex societies, you must. in the face of the fact, and this comes out really strongly, that there is a fundamental urge in human beings not just to realize themselves individually, but to realize themselves through family networks, through kinship networks, through patrimonialism. And that idea of modernity as being a fragile project of order superimposed on the recalcitrant identity, which includes the impulse to coagulate social order at a lower and less abstract level, namely the clan, the family, is one he articulates well before the appearance of Trump on the scene, who in a normally grotesque caricature fashion exemplifies that.

38:28Cameron Abadi: So I agree, there's a really fascinating kind of intellectual loyalty and persistence here, which really makes the memoir interesting to read.

38:40Adam Tooze: Yeah, and the other aspect of the memoir that is, I think, interesting and not entirely explained explicitly is the many chapters of the book that are interspersed throughout the book describing Fukuyama's own commitment to craftsmanship and craftsmanship of a literal kind. He makes furniture. He describes making furniture over many years and acquiring the wood and the tools and losing the tools over time and then reacquiring them to build furniture in his home. And this is not furniture that becomes a business. It's not furniture that then is otherwise part of his career. but it's something clear that very much matters to him.

39:29Adam Tooze: And he similarly, he describes crafting computer code. And again, it's not explained what these chapters are doing interspersed through the book, but I do wonder how they're integrated into his broader thinking, because I wonder if they're his own expressions of that term thymos that we described, this desire for recognition that he sees at the kind of heart of human nature as well. And that he sees as, you know, inevitably driving conflicts of various kinds in our social lives. And it's interesting to me that, I don't know, this desire for recognition in his case is not kind of a public battle for recognition.

40:19Adam Tooze: recognition uh it's not through his career through battling over abstract ideas say in in in faculty lounges or in uh sort of public debates in some ways like his intellectual life is extremely moderate and he seems almost chagrined that he has to have this kind of public break with the neocons ultimately for the sake of honesty he does need to do it but he's not like pleased by it or you know reveling in it as one might if that were the source of one's thymos

40:48Cameron Abadi: But it's funny because it is private. And yeah, if you follow him on social media, apparently he has a very active Instagram account. My partner has actually interviewed him. And he's quite public about all of these activities. So to my mind, it's actually part of, I totally agree with your analysis, though, that this is part of his effort to think through what it means to live after the end of history. And how one then realizes different aspects of oneself. And I think it's very interesting that it's also deeply cultured, right? So it's about the development of technology as much as anything.

41:27Cameron Abadi: There's a passage in the book where he describes planing, like the things you use to smooth wood out, and how he's got one that was made in Alsace-Lorraine. I think before the Franco-Prussian War is the story about it. You can tell from the markings on the tool. And then when he talks about computers, he's much more dismissive of computer technology, which is basically plug and play most of it for the early PCs, which he learns to put together. But there's also a story for him of the development of this equipment as culture, as an ongoing process of progress and development. And then he lets slip at one point, and there's almost a sort of populist element in him of saying, and yeah, if you're in this business, you realize, you know, you should absolutely hate companies like Apple because they're a closed system.

42:18Cameron Abadi: You can't touch it. You can't break it open. You can't service it yourself. And in the end, therefore, exactly as you would suggest, this is a question of autonomy after the end of history. This is a place in which we reassert our individuality but also just our ability to function independently of the apparatus, independently of the mechanic and the machinery that's created by giant corporations. and it's interesting that he doesn't in the rest of his work really much elaborate that but implicitly a kind of resentment at that over articulated modernity might be thought of as one of the forces which destabilizes which destabilizes the end of history that he's you know insisting on as the frame that's interesting because yeah i imagine someone reading the book and then perhaps thinking, you know, Fukuyama himself has ended up as the last

43:14Adam Tooze: man that he warned about or that he evoked Nietzsche's warning about at the end of history. Again, this warning is that when our collective political life ends with this kind of ideological end point and agreement that people are potentially drained of thymos, of the desire for recognition and don't know what to do with themselves and maybe retreat somehow. And these descriptions of him making furniture on his own perhaps could be seen in that light, but you're describing it, I think, in more useful terms. I think, yeah, that is actually a kind of public act that is maintaining identity in the face of this broader social context.

43:59Adam Tooze: But yeah, I guess I wondered about that, how exactly that's integrated. He doesn't go out of his way to make this all explicit. Instead, he's kind of intersperses these chapters. Again, it makes for an interesting memoir. I do recommend it if people are interested. If they've not read it yet, you can check it out in your local bookstore, I'm sure. But I guess we'll bring this conversation to a close here. We'll be back next week with new data points and see you then.

44:31Adam Tooze: Ones and Twos is written and edited by Adam and me and produced by Claudia Tatey. The show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and Ones and Twos listeners. As always, we love getting listener feedback. You can leave voice messages on the Ones and Twos homepage on foreignpolicy.com or email us. That's podcasts at foreignpolicy.com. or you can tweet us. That's at onesandtwospod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening and we'll be back in your feed next week.

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