Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama
Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyamais an American political scientist, political economist, and author. Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued 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 become the final form of human government. However, his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperitymodified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth27 October 1952
CountryUnited States of America
Neoclassical economics ... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time.
To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard
It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master
Fixing the Middle East is only part of the problem. It is a West European problem, too.
the totality of U.S. military interventions have not left lasting, meaningful democratic institutions.
There is, ... no single global strategy that works in terms of democratic openness. Sometimes it happens from the bottom up and sometimes it happens from the up down, and to be successful it usually has to work in both ways. There has to be elite that wants change, though that desire can be supported and driven by popular participation. For example in Chile, the Philippines and Korea it required pressure on leaders on top to open up their systems and those pressures couldn't have come only from civil society. In Ukraine and Georgia on the other hand there was obviously a big push from below -- pressure in both directions is necessary. There is not one single strategy that produces democratic transition.
We wanted our own magazine, ... I don't think they copyrighted the word 'Interest.'
It's easy to misunderstand and abuse the role of culture,
I'm a tenured professor. But I'd get rid of tenure.
In general, Americans are not very good at nation-building and not very good colonialists.
The rationale for tenure is still valid. But the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold.
I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.
I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way.
I've always had a Marxist understanding of history: democracy is a result of a broad modernization process that happens in every country. Neocons think the use of political power can force the pace of change, but ultimately it depends on societies doing it themselves.