Fukuyama v. Fukuyama

Liberalism and Its Discontents
by francis fukuyama
farrar, straus and giroux, 192 pages, $26

To the general public, Francis Fukuyama’s name is synonymous with the “end of history” thesis, which contends that since the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism, liberal democracy is the only ideology that has a universal appeal. His detractors often accuse him of triumphalism, but Fukuyama’s argument was more sophisticated than they realize. Liberal democracy, Fukuyama held, was the only regime that satisfied most of the perennial desires of human nature, although there would be delicate and difficult trade-offs. Yet, strangely enough, his new book contains passages that sound just like the caricature his detractors attacked. Fukuyama’s defense of liberal democracy has changed, and in ways that reveal a fundamental transformation of American liberalism itself. The nuanced account of human nature has vanished, swept up in the absolutization of an “inner self,” the recognition of which forms the core of the new liberalism. Yet the most astonishing aspect of the change is Fukuyama’s altered stance toward the revolution of unlimited technological progress. The elder Fukuyama disregards the brakes that his younger self was at pains to set up.