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Article 6.
NATIONAL REVIEW
Interview with - Francis Fukuyama: The Difficulty of Political Order
Matthew Shaffer

June 13, 2011 -- It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call Francis Fukuyama one of the most important thinkers in America. He’s a rare triple threat in public-intellectual life — maintaining high appointments in academe, producing popular books and magazine writing consumed by the chattering classes, and advising American presidents and foreign leaders directly. He combines expertise and influence with breadth: He’s worked on questions as imperial as American grand strategy and as delicate and abstract as bioethics. He’s most famous for The End of History and the Last Man, whose perennially misunderstood title is often jeered, but which defined a decade’s thinking about the post–Cold War world order and globalization. His latest book is Origins of Political Order, which traces a single story through several millennia and dozens of different cultures, empires, and societies — the story of how man emerged from tribal structures into a modern state. Fukuyama talks with NRO’s Matthew Shaffer, about the book and how his thinking about world order and America’s place in it has changed over the last 20 years.

MATTHEW SHAFFER: Origins is a historical work, as opposed to previous works, such as The End of History, and Our Posthuman Future, which were more theoretical. What, for you, is the prescriptive value of history?

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