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Long before Francis Fukuyama was one of the world\u2019s most famous political scientists, he was a New York City kid, living in a ninth-floor Stuyvesant Town apartment as the only child of a theologian and potter.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a very avant-garde, liberal environment,\u201d he says, when we meet downtown on the publication day of his latest book. Fukuyama\u2019s father was a Congregationalist minister who campaigned for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, getting to know the likes of Cornel West.\u00a0\u201cDo you know Judson Memorial Church?\u201d Fukuyama asks.\u00a0\u201cThat was our church when I was a kid.\u201d Judson was not just a place for worship, but also a major arts venue, where a young Francis encountered the Judson Poets\u2019 Theater, which \u201cscandalized everybody, because they did these programs with a lot of nudity and that sort of thing.\u201d It was there that he attended his first-ever wedding, in the early \u201960s, between a Black man and a white woman. When the minister asked if anyone had objections, Fukuyama says, \u201cThis other white woman gets up and says, \u2018Yeah, I have an objection. I\u2019ve been living with the groom for the last six months!\u2019\u201d (Fukuyama\u2019s mom told him that weddings weren\u2019t usually like this.)<\/p>\n
This mixture of understatement and curiosity is classic Fukuyama, and anecdotes like this dot In the Realm of the Last Man, his 13th and, he tells me, last book. Unlike his previous works of accessible, if dense, political theory, this book is a memoir.<\/p>\n
The 73-year-old soared to fame in the final years of the Cold War by proclaiming the \u201ctriumph of the West, of the western idea.\u201d As one authoritarian regime after another collapsed, he wrote that western liberal democracy would be \u201cthe final form of human government,\u201d in a 1989 essay that forever yoked his name to its four-word title: \u201cThe End of History?\u201d<\/p>\n
Fukuyama\u2019s frequently misunderstood thesis, later expanded on in a book released in 1992, posited that the principles that emerged from the French Revolution \u2014 liberty and equality \u2014 reflected central facts about human nature, and that liberal democracy, while imperfect, had best figured out how to govern societies with those principles in mind. Even at the time, he admitted that liberalism was not always the most exciting ideology, and some parts of human nature would remain unfulfilled. People would still, wrote Fukuyama, deliberately seek out \u201cstruggle, danger, risk, and daring.\u201d And, crucially, he said, events would keep happening \u2014 just not in the service of a superior political ideal.<\/p>\n
His well-timed provocations, and that memorable phrase, shot Fukuyama to improbable fame. His essay was \u201cthe hottest topic around\u201d when The New York Times Magazine met the \u201cunlikely celebrity\u201d in the fall of 1989. (The obscure journal that published it reportedly was outselling \u201ceven the pornography\u201d on newsstands.) Fukuyama became a fixture of C-Span, and his slogan<\/a> was \u201cbruited about in Washington think tanks, the press, and the academy.\u201d By 1997, he had become a \u201cglobal guru<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n After \u201cThe End of History?,\u201d Fukuyama launched a decades-long effort to understand states and institutions; wrote a dozen books on subjects like trust, identity, and biotechnology; and taught at George Mason, Johns Hopkins, and now Stanford. But his Instagram comments are a case study in how thoroughly a single idea can overshadow a long career. \u201cDo you think Ginger knows history ended?\u201d someone asks, in response to a photo of his dog; \u201cMr Fukuyama this contradicts your thesis as history is happening,\u201d another notes, below a California sunset. It\u2019s almost like the young scholar once made a deal with the devil: He would get almost everything he could ever want, but in exchange, people would make the same bad joke, forever.<\/p>\n In person, Fukuyama is a little smaller than I expect \u2014 not more than five-foot-five \u2014 but instantly recognizable. He wears a navy blazer, blue shirt, and baseball hat from a museum in rural Indiana. I\u2019d suggested we meet at the 9\/11 memorial, in part because those attacks felt like the end of the post\u2013Cold War moment in which Fukuyama made his name. The 25th anniversary was still three days away, but ground zero was already swarming with police. Fukuyama \u2014 \u201cFrank,\u201d as all who know him pointedly refer to him \u2014 had already been at the Freedom Tower once this year, to inaugurate a \u201cTyranny Tracker\u201d from the Human Rights Foundation, one of many \u201chuman rights, democracy, advocacy\u201d organizations with which he is involved. \u201cIt feels like pretty ancient history,\u201d he tells me, of 9\/11. He had witnessed the smoke rising from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where he had an office as a newly appointed Johns Hopkins professor.<\/p>\n Liberal triumphalism was rattled after the attacks, and Fukuyama became a soft target for critics from both the left (Tariq Ali dismissed his victory lap for the West as premature) and right (conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer accused him of underrating the threat of Islamic extremism). In the following years, he would break dramatically with the neocons while also distancing himself from liberal identity politics. But the constant drumbeat of critique might be why he seemed pleasantly surprised to note that most reviews for his new book have been positive \u2014 with a few exceptions, like Yale legal scholar Sam Moyn, \u201cwho has been criticizing me my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n As we stroll past the 9\/11 memorial and the the continent\u2019s largest manmade waterfalls, he tells me that the recuperative project of his book is not just about that never-ending bad joke about history ending, but also \u201cto talk about a few things that were more personal\u201d \u2014 without getting too, well, personal.<\/p>\n Instead of long tales of the past, the book has brief chapters \u2014 some as short as three pages \u2014 with titles like \u201cLearning to Love Bureaucrats\u201d and \u201cThe Best Way to Live.\u201d They dart from recaps of his previous books to observations on human nature to anecdotes about meeting people like Muammar Gaddafi and Julia Kristeva. Fukuyama\u2019s deadpan narration, subsuming both personal history and world events, can be anti-sentimental to the point of comedy. \u201cThere is nothing beautiful in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains,\u201d he writes at one point.<\/p>\n The book floats stoically, sometimes nihilistically, above his accomplishments. \u201cMy life has revolved around different forms of intellectual activity,\u201d he writes, but \u201cit is often very hard to understand what if anything I\u2019ve accomplished as a result.\u201d He tells me he does not believe there will be a \u201cFukuyama school\u201d in 50 years. He is far more proud of his former Stanford students who work in local politics \u2014 an Oakland councilwoman, a Houston judge. The only thing close to a brag he utters was that he helped make Shop Class As Soulcraft, the 2009 book about manual trades, into a best seller by reviewing it for the New York Times.<\/p>\n In his book, pleasure comes up in relation to \u201clearning how to hand-dovetail drawers and case pieces\u201d and \u201cpurchasing equipment,\u201d pointing to his sustained entanglements with his hobbies: photography, woodworking, metalworking, programming computers, motorcycles, hiking. He gets obsessed with these things, he said on a recent podcast, \u201cjust like Trump is obsessed with his ballroom.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the unexpected libidinous moments in the book are in service of them. When Fukuyama describes discovering his father\u2019s stash of Playboy magazines, it is mainly to tee up a spread on high-end cameras \u2014 shot \u201cas beautifully as that of any of the women in the issue \u201d \u2014 which sets him on a lifelong photography obsession.<\/p>\n In contrast, he writes almost nothing about his long marriage or three children, who show up most memorably as the recipients of beds he constructs out of wood.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t think that everyone wants to hear about what a great personal life I\u2019ve had,\u201d he tells me, of those omissions. \u201cThere\u2019s not much drama there.\u201d (I later realized we were meeting on his 40th wedding anniversary.)<\/p>\n Fukuyama does excavate some new personal terrain in chapters about his family\u2019s history with Japanese internment during World War II, pieced together through documents he unearthed only two years ago, including his grandmother\u2019s and aunt\u2019s letters from the camps. Both they and several other family members were interned in Arkansas and Colorado in the 1940s. But he emphasizes that they bounced back, studiously avoiding any connotations of a trauma plot. What happened to Japanese Americans was \u201cnot the worst victimization in American history,\u201d he maintains. He has also \u201cnever liked\u201d the term \u201cAsian American.\u201d Whenever other kids drew attention to his Asian heritage, his father told him to \u201cjust say you\u2019re an American. You\u2019re as American as anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOn the other hand,\u201d he now admits, \u201cit does make me sensitive to certain things,\u201d like recent attempts to eliminate birthright citizenship, \u201cwhich I actually take pretty personally, because my mother was in the United States on a student visa when she had me, and if Stephen Miller and Trump had their way, I may not be a citizen.\u201d (Fukuyama\u2019s paternal grandfather owned a hardware store in L.A.\u2019s Little Tokyo; his mother grew up in Kyoto and emigrated in 1949 to study at the University of Chicago.)<\/p>\n In fairness, Fukuyama\u2019s rejection of the biographical goes far beyond his ethnicity; when I asked if growing up in Pennsylvania had any bearing on his interest in Shaker furniture, he replied, \u201cEverybody starts with Shaker, because it\u2019s just easy to build.\u201d<\/p>\n The heritage that elicits the most emotion from him is his intellectual one \u2014 above all, his Cornell mentor, Allan Bloom, the charismatic classicist and author of The Closing of the American Mind, who pulled Fukuyama into his orbit when he was an undergraduate. There\u2019s also Bloom\u2019s teacher, the German Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 philosopher Leo Strauss, and the Machiavelli scholar Harvey Mansfield, now 94, with whom Fukuyama would do a book talk in Cambridge. They are a vanishing type: conservative intellectuals, Great Books men.<\/p>\n But Fukuyama cannot get too emotional even about that, shrugging, \u201cYou couldn\u2019t possibly teach a classic western-civilization course anymore, because it\u2019s too narrow.\u201d At 73 years old, he continues to surprise. He no longer considers himself conservative at all. \u201cI want universal health care,\u201d he says. This is a different-sounding Fukuyama from even a few years ago, when he mounted a somewhat lethargic defense of the status quo in Liberalism and Its Discontents. Today, he sounds, at times, like the left-wing critics of liberal individualism, saying that \u201cwho you think you are is the kind of embedded society that you live in.\u201d<\/p>\n Once the heat of the afternoon burned off, we strolled toward a Labor Day rally on Liberty Street. \u201cI used to have a Harley, like those police,\u201d he tells me. But he had recently given up motorcycles, after getting into four accidents. He had also given up strenuous hiking, as it had become harder, with age, to carry a heavy pack up a mountain, and his wife had convinced him to give away his pickup truck, a Chevy Colorado, largely on aesthetic grounds. And, he declared serenely, \u201cwe\u2019re kind of at the end of photography,\u201d both as his personal hobby and as a form.<\/p>\n Fukuyama is, as ever, calm about all of this. But human nature abhors a vacuum; few can tolerate \u201cliving in a world without struggle,\u201d as he wrote in 1992. If books and bowback chairs and hiking and so much else in Fukuyama\u2019s life are indeed over, the ground has likely been cleared for something new. And maybe the past, even for Fukuyama, is not quite over. He couldn\u2019t resist snapping a photo of the labor rally before descending into the Oculus. A few days later, he posted a photo from the mall too, captioned: \u201cBack in New York, just in time for 9\/11.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Long before Francis Fukuyama was one of the world\u2019s most famous political scientists, he was a New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5301,119070,10404,12306,9,11,10,18065,132180],"class_list":["post-354497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-9-11","tag-cold-war","tag-encounter","tag-liberalism","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-political-science","tag-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}