“It’s a different kind of world we’re living in now”—Interview with political scientist Francis Fukuyama

In 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published the tremendously popular and highly influential best-selling book, The End of History and the Last Man. At the risk of oversimplifying, it essentially argued that the struggle between ideologies was at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy and the free market after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Now at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, Fukuyama talked in this Zoom interview in mid-August with the Bulletin’s executive editor, Dan Drollette Jr., about how his thinking has evolved and changed since then—and in other ways, stayed somewhat the same regarding some premises.