Francis Fukuyama > Quotes

“To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard”
― Francis Fukuyama

“It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“But supposing the world has become “filled up”, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.”
― Francis Fukuyama

“Perhaps when you're young you think that something must be profound just because it is difficult and you don't have the self-confidence to say 'this is just nonsense”
― Francis Fukuyama

“Human beings are rule-following animals by nature; they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value. When the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs. Those institutions are supported by legions of entrenched stakeholders who oppose any fundamental change.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon, but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense, freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature or according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself. The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are “masters of the universe.” (They will believe this, however, only in bull markets.) But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question. One suspects that some people will not be satisfied until they prove themselves by that very act that constituted their humanness at the beginning of history: they will want to risk their lives in a violent battle, and thereby prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to themselves and to their fellows that they are free. They will deliberately seek discomfort and sacrifice, because the pain will be the only way they have of proving definitively that they can think well of themselves, that they remain human beings.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“For capitalism flourishes best in a mobile and egalitarian society”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Most people living in rich, stable developed countries have no idea how Denmark itself got to be Denmark—something that is true for many Danes as well. The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between socalled "interest groups" that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“The effect of education on political attitudes is complicated,
for democratic society. The self-professed aim of modern education
is to "liberate" people from prejudices and traditional forms
of authority. Educated people are said not to obey authority
blindly, but rather learn to think for themselves. Even if this
doesn't happen on a mass basis, people can be taught to see their
own self-interest more clearly, and over a longer time horizon.
Education also makes people demand more of themselves and for
themselves; in other words, they acquire a certain sense of dignity
which they want to have respected by their fellow citizens and by
the state. In a traditional peasant society, it is possible for a local
landlord (or, for that matter, a communist commissar) to recruit
peasants to kill other peasants and dispossess them of their land.
They do so not because it is in their interest, but because they are
used to obeying authority. Urban professionals in developed countries, on the other hand, can be recruited to a lot of nutty
causes like liquid diets and marathon running, but they tend not
to volunteer for private armies or death squads simply because
someone in a uniform tells them to do so”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmatic agenda.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

“Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance.5 In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“For Hegel, by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

“I argued earlier that clientelism is an early form of democracy: in societies with masses of poor and poorly educated voters, the easiest form of electoral mobilization is often the provision of individual benefits such as public-sector jobs, handouts, or political favors. This suggests that clientelism will start to decline as voters become wealthier. Not only does it cost more for politicians to bribe them, but the voters see their interests tied up with broader public policies rather than individual benefits.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

“و لا شك في أن الأمريكي الذي تربى على أفكار هوبز و لوك و جيفيرسون و غيره من الآباء المؤسسين الأمريكيين سيرى في تعظيم هيجل للسيد الأرستوقراطي الذي يخاطر بحياته في معركة من أجل المنزلة مفهوماً يعبر عن الثقافة الجرمانية "التيوتونية”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“لقد إتضح في أواخر القرن 20 أن نظامي هتلر و ستالين إنما كانا طريقين فرعيين للتاريخ لم يوصلا إلى شيء، و لم يكونا بديلين حقيقيين للتنظيم الإجتماعي البشري”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“ACCOUNTABILITY TODAY As noted in the first chapter, the failure of democracy to consolidate itself in many parts of the world may be due less to the appeal of the idea itself than to the absence of those material and social conditions that make it possible for accountable government to emerge in the first place. That is, successful liberal democracy requires both a state that is strong, unified, and able to enforce laws on its own territory, and a society that is strong and cohesive and able to impose accountability on the state. It is the balance between a strong state and a strong society that makes democracy work, not just in seventeenth-century England but in contemporary developed democracies as well.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“و قد كان الفشل المطرد الذي صادفته الشيوعية في سعيها في التغلغل إلى العالم النامي، مع انتشارها في دول هي على وشك الدخول في المراحل الأولى من التصنيع، موحياً بأن "إغراء الشمولية" هو كما وصفه والت روستو "مرض المرحلة الانتقالية" أو هو حالة مرضية ناجمة عن احتياجات سياسية و اجتماعية خاصة في دول تمر بمرحلة معينة من التطور الاجتماعي و الإقتصادي.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means. This legal apparatus, serving as a substitute for trust, entails what economists call “transaction costs.” Widespread distrust in a society, in other words, imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

“What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that
capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially
available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the
Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth
process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers
capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided
that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“An industrial policy worked in Taiwan only because the state was able to shield its planning technocrats from political pressures so that they could reinforce the market and make decisions according to criteria of efficiency—in other words, worked because Taiwan was not governed democratically. An American industrial policy is much less likely to improve its economic competitiveness, precisely because America is more democratic than Taiwan or the Asian NIEs. The planning process would quickly fall prey to pressures from Congress either to protect inefficient industries or to promote ones
favored by special interests.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

“The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing to older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class as their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the “Wrong Address Theory”: “Just as extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

“When the middle class constitutes only 20–30 percent of the population, it may side with antidemocratic forces because it fears the intentions of the large mass of poor people below it and the populist policies they may pursue.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

“The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups.”
― Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

“but on Hegel, his "idealist" predecessor who was the first philosopher to answer Kant's challenge of writing a Universal History. For Hegel's understanding of the Mechanism that underlies the historical process is incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist. For Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. Hegel's Universal History complements the Mechanism we have just outlined, but gives us a broader understanding of man—"man as man"— that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man