He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. His next book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, will be published in the spring of 2022.ĭr. His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was published in September 2018. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions.

In this short, clear account of our current political discontents, Fukuyama offers an essential defense of a revitalized liberalism for the twenty-first century.īooks will be available for sale at the event, or you can order one online.įrancis Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. The result, Fukuyama argues, has been a fracturing of our civil society and an increasing peril to our democracy. Conservatives complain that liberalism empties the common life of meaning.Īs the renowned political philosopher Francis Fukuyama shows in Liberalism and Its Discontents, the principles of liberalism have also, in recent decades, been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left: neoliberals made a cult of economic freedom, and progressives focused on identity over human universality as central to their political vision. Who counted as full human beings worthy of universal rights was contested for centuries, and only recently has this circle expanded to include women, racial and ethnic minorities, and others. In America, many people were denied equality before the law. It's no secret that liberalism didn't always live up to its own ideals. It emphasizes the rights of individuals to pursue their own forms of happiness free from encroachment by government. Developed in the wake of Europe’s wars over religion and nationalism, liberalism is a system for governing diverse societies, which is grounded in fundamental principles of equality and the rule of law. Francis Fukuyama’s new book is about the challenges to liberalism from the right and the left.Ĭlassical liberalism is in a state of crisis.

Liberalism and its discontents fukuyama