Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

by Francis Fukuyama,
The San Francisco Chronicle, October 29, 2014

With the publication of "The End of History and the Last Man" in 1992, in which he claimed that the end of the Cold War marked the permanent ascendancy of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism throughout the world, Francis Fukuyama emerged as one of our nation’s most prominent and provocative public intellectuals. Over the past quarter of a century, Fukuyama, who now is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies, has qualified his "end of history" thesis, distanced himself from neoconservatism, and written big books about big subjects, including the nature of human nature, the origins of social norms, the revolution in biotechnology and the development gap between Latin America and the United States.