With evolution comes the possibility of devolution, though, and Fukuyama opens with the sobering observation that even though that democratization did in fact occur, much trumpeted by neonconservatives certain that the spread of capitalism had everything to do with that victory, we’re witnessing much back-sliding: “a ‘democratic recession’ emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century.” Given that so much of the international dealings of the United States has concerned the putative spread of democracy and nation-building, and given that the U.S. Just so, his latest study-the first volume, he advertises, of two-describes, in the widest terms, the evolution of the political order that led to the widespread democratization of the globe at the end of the 20th century. Then as now, he defied easy categorization: Some were inclined to view him as a hard-right conservative, but Edmund Burke probably would have called him a liberal.

Sweeping, provocative big-picture study of humankind’s political impulses.įukuyama ( Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States, 2008, etc.) is best known for the post-Hegelian end-of-history thesis he advanced at the conclusion of the Cold War, a thesis often quoted and caricatured but not widely understood.

The origins of political order