What Francis Fukuyama Is Seeing at 'The End of History'

Odd Lots

In this episode of Odd Lots, host Joe Weisenthal speaks with political theorist Francis Fukuyama about his seminal essay 'The End of History?' and its

Key takeaways

• Liberal democracy is not a permanent state but one that can be taken for granted and eroded over time.
• The decline in global freedom since 2008 reflects deeper societal exhaustion and disillusionment, particularly after the U.S. lost its status as a model liberal democracy.

Main topics

• The End of History thesis in modern context
• Rise of illiberalism and democratic backsliding

Notable quotes

"The most important phenomenon that I hadn't anticipated is the importance of generational change."

"You have a couple generations since the fall of the Berlin Wall that have grown up without any knowledge of what communism really was."

Conclusion

Fukuyama's reflections underscore that liberal democracy remains fragile, shaped by

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) AI is entering its most consequential phase where scale, safety and sovereignty will determine who leads and who lags. Join Bloomberg Tech in London on November 2nd and 3rd as global leaders across business, finance and policy examine the defining trade-offs shaping the future of AI. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Salesforce, and supporting sponsors, IDA Ireland and Schneider Electric. Learn more at BloombergLive.com slash Tech London. Speaker 5 (0:32) Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Speaker 4 (0:48) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Traci Alloway. And Speaker 3 (0:52) I'm Joe Weisenthal. Speaker 4 (0:53) Joe, both you and I did international relations at university slash college, as you would say. Speaker 3 (0:59) At college, at uni. And yeah, it helped us a lot. It got us where we are here right now. Speaker 4 (1:04) Yeah, I think today's guest, pretty much anyone who did any sort of political science or IR degree, or maybe even, I don't know, some undergraduate syllabus or something like that, this... author, this person, was definitely on the syllabus in the early 2000s and probably still is, right? Speaker 3 (1:22) Almost certainly still is. You know, I did all the reading back when I was in college. You know, it wasn't, even though I was, I did get a degree in it. Technically, by the way, I don't know if I've ever said this, technically at Texas, the degree was called government, which included poli sci and IR. You've been Speaker 4 (1:38) lying to me. It's sort Speaker 3 (1:39) of a little. Subtle. I had no choice. That's what it was called. Speaker 4 (1:43) Insight into Joe's upcoming political ambitions. That's right. Speaker 3 (1:46) But, you know, like a lot of the stuff, including the work of our guest today, I like went back and reread several years ago because I guess at the time, early 2000s, it felt a lot like theory. And then suddenly, like over the last several years, it's like, oh, this isn't just. This might help explain the world or a thing is going on in the world that I need to revisit and changes are afoot, etc. So I revisited the work. And so even though it was a long time ago, it feels fresh in my head. Speaker 4 (2:13) Yeah. So I've already given it away. But today's guest is, in fact, Francis Fukuyama. He is a professor at Stanford, author of the new book In the Realm of the Last Man, and author of famously both an essay and a book called The End of History. And The Speaker 3 (2:29) Last Man. And the last which is really key, which is really key. Speaker 4 (2:32) So a lot of people think about the end of history is this idea that like, well, liberal democracy has won out and we're never going to have wars or conflicts or struggles ever again. And that wasn't quite the message. And we should talk about why it kind of, I don't know, got framed in that way. But I think this whole topic. clearly is very relevant at the moment because we just had local elections in Germany earlier this month. And it's kind of a reminder that there is this lingering feeling or possibility that maybe people don't actually like the liberal order. Maybe they don't want it. Speaker 3 (3:09) Totally. It certainly seems you can point to a lot of things. We don't need to go down the list. But various ideologies they would call like illiberalism of some form or another seem to be. on the march, and there's this sort of anxiety about why and whether the people who have spent a lot of time upholding the various institutions that we associate with Western democracy or liberal democracy, entities like the EU or free trade agreements, the degree to which... It feels like people are exhausted, like that there is this effort to hold it up, but there is this sense of exhaustion, maybe resignation and so forth. The one other thing I'll say before we get into it, you know, like I remember I mentioned this once or twice, but this is a thing that sticks out to me, like in middle school or maybe my first year of high school, Speaker 4 (3:56) learning Speaker 3 (3:57) about the Cold War. Speaker 4 (3:58) And it Speaker 3 (3:59) was taught in U.S. history classes. And we're talking like 93 here. As if it was like it might as well have been World War One. It was already taught as like history. Rear window. And now look at 20, you know, from 2026, I was like, oh, that was literally just the day before the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. But already by that point, so many of these global questions were being taught as if they had finally been settled. Clearly nothing is settled. Speaker 4 (4:26) No, that was the total vibe in Speaker 3 (4:27) the Speaker 4 (4:27) early 2000s, right? At university. It was done. And yet here we are in 2026 and it seems things are very much not finished. So without further ado, we do in fact have the perfect guest, Francis Fukuyama. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Thoughts. Speaker 2 (4:42) Thanks very much for having me. When Speaker 4 (4:44) you look at something like the recent German local election, the far right party Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany got a majority. How do you fit something like that in your framework? Is it, well, this is... natural rejection of liberal democracy of the sort that I write about in this book in the realm of the last man or is this just a sort of bump along the evolution of liberal democracy? Well, Speaker 2 (5:11) I don't think anybody knows Which of those alternatives is the right one? I think that liberal democracy has had some pretty bad moments earlier in the 20th century. The 1930s was pretty bad with communism and fascism both threatening it. The 1970s and the oil shocks also led to a lot of pessimism about the future of democracy. So it could be that we're going simply through a period like that. I think probably the discontent is a little bit more extreme this time. Freedom House says that the aggregate level of freedom in the world has declined now for the last 20 years, since about 2008 or so. And I think that one of the reasons for being more pessimistic is really what's happened in the United States, because... For the entire post-World War II period, the United States was the model liberal democracy. My Chinese students 20 years ago all said they wanted China to be like the United States. They don't say that anymore. And I think that the rise of a populist movement within the leading liberal democracy in the world is a big signal that something deeper is afoot and that that discontent really reflects some underlying social changes. Speaker 3 (6:26) I'm glad you brought up your students, because actually that was sort of what I was going to ask first is having been a professor for several years, setting aside international students or any students. You know, like I said, when I first learned that there was this thing called the Cold War, it was just like history was settled. It had come to an end. Now, I don't think we were taught in high school that history had come to an end, but we were taught that this. these big questions had kind of come to an end and kind of irrelevant, kind of like in the past. And I'm curious if you've seen the evolution of your students taking your courses, what you've observed about how they view that period of time, why they're interested in it, and if their interests have changed. Speaker 2 (7:10) It's discouraging getting older. The Cold War is history. 9-11 is history. Even the rise of Donald Trump now is history. It happened, you know, when I was... seven years old. So things move. But I think that the most important phenomenon that I hadn't anticipated is the importance of generational change. For my generation, I think the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism was the big defining event. And that's certainly what inspired me to write the end of history essay, the first one. But now we've come full circle where a lot of people that actually lived through or in those countries now want to reverse that outcome as in the Sachsen-Anhalt election. And I think that it indicates that liberal democracy actually is something that is easily taken for granted. You know, you have a couple generations since the fall of the Berlin Wall that have grown up without any knowledge of what communism really was. And I think that one of the biggest things that makes people like liberal democracy is the opposite, is living under a dictatorship. If you live in a communist dictatorship, you know, I mean, the joy that Eastern Europeans felt when communism fell was really tangible because they didn't like, you know, being surveyed and imprisoned, you know, for speaking out. And nobody experiences that in Europe or the United States or has not experienced that certainly for the last generation. And so it's very easy to assume that the good things about liberal democracy, the peace and the prosperity are just naturally there and we don't have to worry about them. And therefore, you can think about, you know, the EU as the biggest dictatorship in the world rather than a real dictatorship. Speaker 4 (8:59) Can I just ask before we get into more current events, but the end of history, I touched on it in the intro, but a lot of people interpreted that to be quite literally the end of history. So liberal democracy won, globalization won, everyone was going to trade with each other and we weren't going to have any more wars or conflict and things like that. And I am certainly guilty. in the past on this podcast of using end of history as a sort of byword for globalization. What do you attribute that misinterpretation to? Was it the zeitgeist of the end of the Cold War at the time you wrote the book in 1992? Was it people just were too lazy to read the last six chapters? What was going on? Speaker 2 (9:42) Yeah, well, it's a little bit of all of those. The end of history was not my phrase. It was a phrase of the German philosopher Hegel. who understood history with a capital H the way we understand today something like modernization or development. And so the idea is that human societies evolve over time and they evolve in a progressive fashion. And so the question was, in which direction were they evolving? And that's the end, its end in the sense of goal or termination point. So the question of the end of history was, what kind of society emerges at the end of this long evolutionary process? Now, for about 150 years, the Marxists took Hegel's concept of history and said the end of history is going to be communism. By the late 1980s, after Gorbachev and Piri Stryka, it seemed to me that they were never going to make it, you know, that communism was really off the table. And therefore, if there was an end of history, it was a stage just before you got to communism, which was what the communists called bourgeois. democracy and a market economy and capitalism. And so for me, that was the resting point that we seem to be arriving at. What they didn't understand in the title, and I guess this is my fault for picking these words, but it was the end of history and the last man. The philosopher Nietzsche was the one that talked about the last man because he hated the idea of there being an end of history because for him, the victory of English liberalism would be a boring, flat world where nobody had aspirations. Everybody was fed, clothed, happy. but content in that happiness, just like a cow grazing in the field. Cows Speaker 4 (11:28) seem pretty happy. Yeah, well, they are happy, Speaker 2 (11:30) but for Nietzsche... For a man. Human beings had a pride that shouldn't be satisfied just by peace and contentment. You should want something more. You should want to dominate and so forth. And I think that's the unhappiness that I was talking about back then in that... part of the book. And I think that's what's driving a lot of the extremism in the world today. Speaker 4 (11:54) The first ever essay I wrote when I was doing my international relations degree was we were allowed to choose our own topic. And I chose like a Nietzschean interpretation of international relations, which I thought at the time was just me being like an insufferable university student. But then I'm sure I was. I'm sure I was. But then I read End of History or the Nietzsche reference. And I was like, maybe I'm on to something. Speaker 3 (12:19) Maybe. Maybe you're onto something. Okay. One interpretation of many of the political events that have transpired, I suppose, is that people got bored, right? And so there's obviously more than the German election. There is the election of Donald Trump and there's Brexit and actually like a million other things that we could cite. Within what we call liberalism. We grew up with or learned to like celebrate differences among people and that this was important and pluralism and difference and diversity and all these things that were like internalized as positive. But I sometimes wonder, is there like a contradiction in the sense like we value pluralism and difference, but maybe some people really are different. In the sense that like, no, like they really want they really like want a different order or they really want to live in a distinct culture that maybe is like less oriented towards the market, etc. Really more energized by the idea of like cultural homogeneity or something like that. From the sort of liberal perspective, how do you think about like difference? Because. Things like migration, et cetera, seem to be one of the through lines for all of this sort of illiberal, the rise of illiberalism. No, Speaker 2 (13:34) that's exactly right. I think right from the beginning of liberalism, one of the charges has been it weakens community. It weakens the