Politics

The Rebirth of History and the Last Man

Francis Fukuyama's new book tackles transhumanism, the urge to struggle, and what happens when people jump willingly back into the swamps of history.

Ronald Bailey | 10.5.2026 4:20 PM

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In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir, by Francis Fukuyama, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $29

In his thirties, Francis Fukuyama was pursuing a respectable but low-key career as a RAND Corporation analyst and State Department bureaucrat focused on the Soviet Union. His breakthrough into the public sphere came in the summer of 1989, when his essay "The End of History?" appeared in The National Interest.

At the time, I was a producer at the PBS foreign affairs show American Interests. As a child of the Cold War, I was thrilled by his claim that we may be witnessing "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." This bold statement seemed confirmed by the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.

Since then, Fukuyama has been one of America's leading public intellectuals. Now he has written a charming and stimulating memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man. The book covers everything from his grandparents' time in a World War II internment camp to his break with prominent neoconservatives over the misbegotten invasion of Iraq; the career it reveals is an inspiring example of how a rigorous liberal education sharpens a relentlessly questing mind. He credits his encounter with classicist Allan Bloom for instilling in him the passion to pursue the big questions: "What is the best way to live, what makes for the highest form of human happiness, what is the nature of justice, what is natural and what is conventional in human affairs." Fukuyama is entirely correct when he observes, "An appreciation for truly philosophical thought is a gift of inestimable value that remains with you for a lifetime."

But even as the book covers all these topics, it keeps coming back to ideas that Fukuyama started sketching in that 1989 essay and has expanded upon in countless works since then.

Fukuyama's argument that humanity had reached the end of history rested on his reading of the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, who argued that the mainspring of history is humanity's drive for recognition, dignity, and respect. In his interpretation of Kojève, Fukuyama adapted Plato's tripartite division of the human soul into logos (reason), eros (desire) and thymos (spiritedness). Fukuyama contends that thymos is the true psychological driver of history, distinct from basic physical survival or economic calculation. Human beings, he noted, are the only creatures that willingly risk death in the service of abstract ideals.

The "end of history," for Fukuyama, is achieved with the universal........

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