Susan Sontag once observed that “great writers are either husbands or lovers”. Husbands, in her telling, are reliable, intelligible and decent. Lovers are moody, selfish, often unbearable. Husbands clear your mind; lovers steer your imagination. The distinction works even better for political thinkers: Habermas is a husband, Derrida a lover. When they write about themselves, lovers write confessions — think Rousseau and De Quincey. Husbands write reflections: Raymond Aron or Karl Popper.
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama is a classic husband. His memoir In the Realm of the Last Man evinces no sentimental education; it is the story of an intellectual journey. Those pages devoted to his family and to life as a Japanese-American in the years after the second world war are essential for understanding the sources of his liberalism and, equally, his sensitivity to its fragility. America gave his family the chance to pursue its happiness; the same America stripped some of its citizens of their basic rights the moment it felt vulnerable and under attack. His liberalism has never been innocent but is fortified by an aversion to relativism.
In 1974, fresh out of Cornell and headed to graduate work in comparative literature, Fukuyama spent several months in Paris studying with the era’s towering French theorists — Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and their respective circles. A student of Allan Bloom, Fukuyama had been intellectually formed by classical political philosophy and so was jolted by turning up at ground zero of postmodernism. What he learnt from this flirtation with French theory is encapsulated by a conversation he had with literary scholar Julia Kristeva, who assured him that “Stalin had a point.” Paris taught him what he did not want to be. He bolted from post-structuralism (and never looked back) for the Rand Corporation and security studies, convinced that in an age defined by Mutually Assured Destruction, strategic analysts like the flinty realist Albert Wohlstetter were among the few sane people around.
Fukuyama became a celebrity at the age of 36 on the strength of a book few had read, many had misread, but on which everybody had commented. The End of History and the Last Man (1992) was defined by its title. It was a mouthful, and while its author was preoccupied with the fate of the last man, everybody else was arguing about the end of history. The half of the title that was ignored was the half that mattered.
Fukuyama borrowed “the last man” from Friedrich Nietzsche and used it to raise a worry about what liberal democracy does to the human spirit once it triumphs. But it was the “end of history” message that made him a household name. And he adroitly handled the unexpected fame by ignoring it, turning it into a source of intellectual independence. While others unfailingly asked whether he still believed history had concluded, he was asking himself different questions.
Fukuyama presents himself as an intellectual artisan — a person who excels at woodworking and builds his own furniture — and a classical social scientist for whom ideas are hypotheses to be tested. “I always preferred photography to painting,” he writes, “because the photograph recorded something that someone actually saw.”
The most dramatic passages of his memoir describe Fukuyama’s break with his neoconservative milieu over the war in Iraq. Much of the argument is familiar from his earlier America at the Crossroads (2006), but here he is explicit that dissent within one’s own circle — not disagreement with one’s opponents — is the core of what it means to him to be a liberal. While the born-again critics of the war are preoccupied with what went wrong, he asked what we got wrong.
It also allows us to read In the Realm of the Last Man less as a personal memoir than as an inner monologue of post-cold war liberalism. Critics still interpret “the end of history” as a triumphalist celebration of the west’s victory. But Fukuyama reminds us that the American zeitgeist of the late 1980s was declinist not triumphalist. The intellectual bestseller of that moment was Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, an anatomy of imperial overstretch. Against that background Fukuyama’s optimism was the contrarian position — and nowhere was pessimism more at home than in the neoconservative circles to which he then belonged. Nostalgia is what politics does when the future is unavailable. And when the future does return, it returns as a threat.
The transformations of 1989 were decisive in Fukuyama’s formation, and instrumental in how modern liberalism came to define and to perceive itself. Fukuyama interprets what happened in eastern Europe as a universal moment, a convergence that brought the world politically together.
But as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz foresaw in 1995, the emerging international order would be defined not by convergence and the wholesale adoption of western models but by an obsession with identity and difference, in which “a stream of obscure divisions and strange instabilities” would rise to the surface. For him, the post-cold war world had to confront two central questions: “What is a country if it is not a nation?” and “What is a culture if it is not a consensus?”
Fukuyama struggles today with Geertz’s prescient concerns, and in searching for answers he has rediscovered the state as the indispensable institution of any liberal society. How can one be a liberal after the end of universalism, at a moment when the end of history has mutated into something unmistakably darker? To respond effectively, we must rethink 1989 — and conceive of it not as an end of history but the year that ended the future. What made the cold war exceptional was not the collision between two visions of the future but the fact that both antagonists were regulated by a single vision. Communism and liberalism were rival tenses of the same grammar. They shared the founding premise of modern politics: that tomorrow is not merely different from today but better, and that people have the power to shape it. The future was not a horizon but a project — or, more precisely, rival projects. Legitimacy was borrowed from a time that had not yet arrived. That is what made the 20th century at once so political and so murderous.
1989 settled the argument. What follows from a politics no longer disciplined by tomorrow is by now familiar. When the destination is settled, politics shrinks into administration, and the passions once invested in the future migrate to the past: memory, identity, restoration, the promise not of a better world but of a lost one. Nostalgia is what politics does when the future is unavailable. And when the future does return, it returns as a threat rather than a project — climate collapse, migration, artificial intelligence, war — something to be insured against and survived rather than built.
Fukuyama half knew this, and it is to his credit that the intuition is there in his title. The “last man” is not the one who arrives at the end of the story; they are the one with nowhere left to go. The mistake — ours, and partly his — was to file that insight under history when it belonged to the future. Read this way, the memoir is not the apologia of a prophet whose prophecy failed. It is the record of a moment when liberalism learnt to live in the present tense.
*Author is Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna, Chairman, Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia