What does the intellectual who became world famous for a thesis that later turned out to be spectacularly wrong do?
Of course he keeps writing.
At the age of forty, Francis Fukuyama gained world fame for his conjecture, with the collapse of the Soviet Union the global political conflict and with it history ended.
Of course, this thesis appealed to American audiences, but French and Germans could also enjoy it, as it helped a continental European form of historical philosophy to its contemporary right.
In two famous footnotes of his Hegel commentary, Alexandre Kojève was the first to use the formulation of the "end of history", albeit with an ironic break.
The essay from which Fukuyama's book of the same name emerged in 1992 was already in the summer of 1989,
before the fall of the wall, it was published in a magazine.
For a brief moment, the philosophy of freedom seemed able to prove its prophetic power.
His assertion that liberal western democracy is the “final form of human government” became plausible.
But it soon became clear that nothing would come of it.
Fukuyama wrote other books, on the history of the political order, on the end of human nature or on the critique of identity politics, but their success is likely to be due to the enduring fame of this one book.
Consequently, the promise of the old one is also under the title of his latest work: "By the author of 'The End of History'." If he now returns directly to the topic of the future of the liberal order, one would also have to deal with the fate of the expected his own thesis, which Fukuyama has repeatedly addressed in interviews, but apparently never quite systematically.
that this debate should be avoided.
The fact that the old book doesn't even appear in the bibliography isn't the only disappointment the new one has.
Fukuyama attempts an apology for “classical liberalism”, which, in his reading, is characterized above all by the protection of individual rights, an effective state authority and the primacy of decentralized politics.
For Fukuyama, the crisis of contemporary liberalism is primarily caused by neoliberalism, from which he dutifully distances himself.
The problem, however, does not lie with liberal models, but with how these have been “taken to the extreme” or “to the extreme” by economists and market admirers.
Both formulations can be found again and again in the book – excellently translated by Karlheinz Dürr – and they actually describe his entire theory.
Fukuyama provides nothing more than a simple model of liberal moderation,
He can't help it
Other challenges and criticisms of liberalism are also described and defused according to this scheme in the book: group-related identity politics of all kinds, the philosophy of John Rawls - whom Fukuyama accuses of not being interested enough in individual merit and with his concept of neutrality that liberalism is defenseless to do - or the post-colonial criticism, for which he needs just three quarters of a page to deal with.