Francis Fukuyama

His paternal grandfather fled the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and started a shop on the west coast before being incarcerated in the Second World War.

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 (河田敏子), 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.

Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer.

His family moved to State College, Pennsylvania, in 1967.

Fukuyama 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 but 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 at Harvard for his thesis on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East.

In 1979, he joined the global policy think tank RAND Corporation.

Fukuyama lived at the Telluride House and has been affiliated with the Telluride Association since his undergraduate years at Cornell.

Telluride is an education enterprise that has been home to other significant leaders and intellectuals, including Steven Weinberg, Paul Wolfowitz and Kathleen Sullivan.

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:

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Authors like Ralf Dahrendorf argued in 1990 that the essay gave Fukuyama his 15 minutes of fame, which would soon be followed by a slide into obscurity.

However, Fukuyama remained a relevant and cited public intellectual, leading 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 Fukayama'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 towards postmodernism.

Postmodern philosophy had, in Fukuyama's opinion, 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.

Fukuyama is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle and become the final form of human government, an assessment met with numerous and substantial criticisms.

In his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity (1995), he modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics.

Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.

Fukuyama was the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University from 1996 to 2000.

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.

Until July 10, 2010, he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. He is now Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and resident in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford.

In the 2011 book, 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 be accountable.

The 2014 book is the second book on political order, following the 2011 book The Origins of Political Order. In this book, Fukuyama covers events taking place since the French Revolution and sheds light on political institutions and their development in different regions.

In August 2019, he was named director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford.

Before that, he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.

Previously, he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.

He is 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.

In 2024 he received the Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration.

Francis Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States.