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The End of Order
- GenresPolitics
Paperback
Published January 1, 1997
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About the author
Francis Fukuyama
116 books2,230 followersYoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born 27 October 1952) is an American philosopher, political economist, and author.
Francis Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, a second-generation Japanese-American, was trained as a minister in the Congregational Church and received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago. His mother, Toshiko Kawata Fukuyama, was born in Kyoto, Japan, and was the daughter of Shiro Kawata, founder of the Economics Department of Kyoto University and first president of Osaka Municipal University in Osaka. Fukuyama's childhood years were spent in New York City. In 1967 his family moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where he attended high school.
Fukuyama received his Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy under Allan Bloom. He earned his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, studying with Samuel P. Huntington and Harvey C. Mansfield, among others. Fukuyama has been affiliated with the Telluride Association since his undergraduate years at Cornell, an educational enterprise that was home to other significant leaders and intellectuals, including Steven Weinberg and Paul Wolfowitz.
Fukuyama is currently the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, located in Washington, DC.
Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies is largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Fukuyama predicted the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism.
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
He has written a number of other books, among them Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. In the latter, he qualified his original 'end of history' thesis, arguing that since biotechnology increasingly allows humans to control their own evolution, it may allow humans to alter human nature, thereby putting liberal democracy at risk. One possible outcome could be that an altered human nature could end in radical inequality. He is a fierce enemy of transhumanism, an intellectual movement asserting that posthumanity is a highly desirable goal.
The current revolution in biological sciences leads him to theorize that in an environment where science and technology are by no means at an end, but rather opening new horizons, history itself cannot therefore be said to be, as he once thought, at an end.
In another work The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order, he explores the origins of social norms, and analyses the current disruptions in the fabric of our moral traditions, which he considers as arising from a shift from the manufacturing to the information age. This shift is, he thinks, normal and will prove self-correcting, given the intrinsic human need for social norms and rules.
Francis Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, a second-generation Japanese-American, was trained as a minister in the Congregational Church and received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago. His mother, Toshiko Kawata Fukuyama, was born in Kyoto, Japan, and was the daughter of Shiro Kawata, founder of the Economics Department of Kyoto University and first president of Osaka Municipal University in Osaka. Fukuyama's childhood years were spent in New York City. In 1967 his family moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where he attended high school.
Fukuyama received his Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy under Allan Bloom. He earned his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, studying with Samuel P. Huntington and Harvey C. Mansfield, among others. Fukuyama has been affiliated with the Telluride Association since his undergraduate years at Cornell, an educational enterprise that was home to other significant leaders and intellectuals, including Steven Weinberg and Paul Wolfowitz.
Fukuyama is currently the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the International Development Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, located in Washington, DC.
Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies is largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Fukuyama predicted the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism.
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
He has written a number of other books, among them Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. In the latter, he qualified his original 'end of history' thesis, arguing that since biotechnology increasingly allows humans to control their own evolution, it may allow humans to alter human nature, thereby putting liberal democracy at risk. One possible outcome could be that an altered human nature could end in radical inequality. He is a fierce enemy of transhumanism, an intellectual movement asserting that posthumanity is a highly desirable goal.
The current revolution in biological sciences leads him to theorize that in an environment where science and technology are by no means at an end, but rather opening new horizons, history itself cannot therefore be said to be, as he once thought, at an end.
In another work The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order, he explores the origins of social norms, and analyses the current disruptions in the fabric of our moral traditions, which he considers as arising from a shift from the manufacturing to the information age. This shift is, he thinks, normal and will prove self-correcting, given the intrinsic human need for social norms and rules.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 25, 2019
Quite horrifying when he starts saying that women should be put back into subservient roles in order to stop the poorly evidenced decline in his abstractly defined 'social capital'. He states that men are inherently irresponsible, so surely it would make more sense for men to be the ones put into subservient roles? But anyway, the whole thing is poorly evidenced, even at one point he puts in a graph supposedly showing how Japan has avoided this 'end of order' because the male-female earning ratio hasn't changed, but the graph shows that Japan has the second lowest male-female earning ratio and it has declined similar to how it has in other OECD countries, completing negating his point.
At various points he shows a complete misunderstanding of genetics, genes pass down from both parents to all their children, the don't go from male to male and female to female, so saying that men are inherently this or women inherently that would have to be controlled by the tiny part of the second X chromosome that only women have, which to my knowledge has never been demonstrated and certainly Fukuyama doesn't do it here.
He later claims that gender differences are huge (and references and uncited 'legion' of evidence for this ), as opposed to 'racial' differences. In fact, there are legions of evidence for 'racial' difference, except that these 'racial' difference all stem from socialisation and socio-economics, not genetic differences, and there is even less genetic difference between a man and a woman of the same ethnicity. But the thought that these gender differences could be socialised seems not to cross his mind. If someone wrote similar horrid things about a racial group, he would be an intellectual outcast, but because of Fukuyama's End of History, he is well-respected in sociology, he too should be confined to the dustbin of history.
For sexists who want to read a pseudo-intellectual defense of their horrific views, this is a good one, for anyone interested in well-reasoned, well-evidenced argument, not so much.
At various points he shows a complete misunderstanding of genetics, genes pass down from both parents to all their children, the don't go from male to male and female to female, so saying that men are inherently this or women inherently that would have to be controlled by the tiny part of the second X chromosome that only women have, which to my knowledge has never been demonstrated and certainly Fukuyama doesn't do it here.
He later claims that gender differences are huge (and references and uncited 'legion' of evidence for this ), as opposed to 'racial' differences. In fact, there are legions of evidence for 'racial' difference, except that these 'racial' difference all stem from socialisation and socio-economics, not genetic differences, and there is even less genetic difference between a man and a woman of the same ethnicity. But the thought that these gender differences could be socialised seems not to cross his mind. If someone wrote similar horrid things about a racial group, he would be an intellectual outcast, but because of Fukuyama's End of History, he is well-respected in sociology, he too should be confined to the dustbin of history.
For sexists who want to read a pseudo-intellectual defense of their horrific views, this is a good one, for anyone interested in well-reasoned, well-evidenced argument, not so much.
Displaying 1 of 1 review