Francis Fukuyama

Lore & Background

Fukuyama has been a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies since July 2010 and the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In August 2019, he was named director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford. Previously, he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, he had also been the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He serves as a council member of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, founded by the National Endowment for Democracy and was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation. He is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders. Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. His paternal grandfather fled the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and started a shop on the west coast before being incarcerated during World War II. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, a second-generation Japanese American, was trained as a minister in the Congregational Church, received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, and taught religious studies. His mother, Toshiko Kawata Fukuyama, was born in Kyoto, Japan, and was the daughter of Shiro Kawata, founder of the Economics Department of Kyoto University and first president of Osaka City University. Francis, whose Japanese name is Yoshihiro, grew up in Manhattan as an only child, had little contact with Japanese culture, and did not learn Japanese. In 1967, his family moved to State College, Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy under Allan Bloom. He initially pursued graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale University, going to Paris for six months to study under Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida; however, he became disillusioned and switched to political science at Harvard University. There, he studied with Samuel P. Huntington and Harvey Mansfield, among others. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard for his thesis on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle Eas

Reader's Guide

Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies was largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The book was an expansion on ideas expressed in an earlier article, 'The End of History?' published in The National Interest. In the article, Fukuyama predicted the coming global triumph of political and economic liberalism. Authors such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Luciano Canfora argued in 1990 that the essay gave Fukuyama his 15 minutes of fame, which a slide into obscurity would soon follow. However, Fukuyama remained a relevant and cited public intellectual, which led American communitarian Amitai Etzioni to declare him 'one of the few enduring public intellectuals. They are often media stars who are eaten up and spat out after their 15 minutes. But he has lasted.' Bernard Crick in his book titled Democracy spoke of Fukuyama's principle of 'the end of the world' as being a poor misreading of the historical processes involved in the development of modern democracy. According to Fukuyama, one of the main critiques of The End of History was of his aggressive stance against postmodernism. In Fukuyama's opinion, postmodern philosophy undermined the ideology behind liberal democracy, leaving the Western world in a potentially weaker position. The fact that Marxism and fascism had proven untenable for practical use while liberal democracy still thrived was reason enough to embrace the hopeful attitude of the Progressive Era, as this hope for the future was what made a society worth struggling to maintain. Postmodernism, which, by this time, had become embedded in the cultural consciousness, offered no hope and nothing to sustain a necessary sense of community, instead relying only on lofty intellectual premises. In the 2011 book The Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama describes what makes a state stable, using comparative political history to develop a theory of the stability of a political system. According to Fukuyama, an ideal political order needs a modern and effective state, the rule of law governing the state, and accountability. The 2014 book Political Order and Political Decay is his second work on political order, covering events since the French Revoluti

Did You Know?

• Fukuyama's Japanese name is Yoshihiro.
• His paternal grandfather fled the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and started a shop on the west coast before being incarcerated during World War II.
• He studied political philosophy under Allan Bloom at Cornell University.
• He initially pursued graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale University and studied under Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida in Paris before switching to political science.
• He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard for his thesis on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American philosopher, political economist, and author best known for his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man." — Francis Fukuyama "Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up." — Francis Fukuyama "The more progress that has been made toward eradicating social injustices, the more intolerable the remaining injustices seem, and thus the moral imperative to mobilizing to correct them." — Francis Fukuyama "In situations of de facto diversity, attempts to impose a single way of life on an entire population is a formula for dictatorship." — Francis Fukuyama