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Francis Fukuyama
80 quotes
“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.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No regime—no “socio-economic system”—is able to satisfy all men in all places. This includes liberal democracy. This is not a matter of the incompleteness of the democratic revolution, that is, because the blessings of liberty and equality have not been extended to all people. Rather, the dissatisfaction arises precisely where democracy has triumphed most completely: it is a dissatisfaction with liberty and equality.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On The Colbert Report (2 May 2011), answering the question of who Americans should be scared of now that bin Laden is dead
“The Left’s identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Against Identity Politics" (14 August 2018), Foreign Affairs
“The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close. The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more progress that has been made toward eradicating social injustices, the more intolerable the remaining injustices seem, and thus the moral imperative to mobilizing to correct them.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Putin told the Financial Times that liberalism has become an “obsolete” doctrine. While it may be under attack from many quarters today, it is in fact more necessary than ever. It is more necessary because it is fundamentally a means of governing over diversity, and the world is more diverse than it ever has been. Democracy disconnected from liberalism will not protect diversity, because majorities will use their power to repress minorities.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In situations of de facto diversity, attempts to impose a single way of life on an entire population is a formula for dictatorship.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t is hard to see how the discarding of liberal values is going to lead to anything in the long term other than increasing social conflict and ultimately a return to violence as a means of resolving differences.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have been a... classical liberal for most of my life...”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do want to defend liberalism... in theory and I want to talk about the ways that it is being threatened... today and... some of the consequences...”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here are two justifications for [liberalism]. One... is pragmatic and the other... is moral.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pragmatic justification is that liberalism is... a political doctrine that seeks to enable societies to govern themselves over diversity. It arose in the minds of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf... as a result of the European wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the ... a third of the population of central Europe were killed in a bloody struggle between different Christian religious sects, and the pragmatic part of liberalism was to take final ends [defined by religions] out of political discussion... and to lower the sights of politics to defend life itself, and not "the good life"... as defined by a particular sect of a particular religion.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]herefore tolerance of diversity, of people that don't believe the same thing that you do, has always been at the core of this pragmatic project to enable diverse populations to live with one another.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the 19th and early 20th century the issue had shifted from religion to nation. You had mixed ethnic populations throughout Europe, and as Europe began to reorganize itself on a national, or a cultural, or an ethnic basis, you had two bloody... World Wars that... undermined the magnificent European civilization of the 19th century... Liberalism was called upon in the aftermath... to enable Europeans to live together in ethnically diverse societies. That was the origin of the European Union... an effort to move beyond Nationalism, to a new form of .”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]hat liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress. There was stability. There was human freedom. There was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal, and therefore free society...”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]fter World War II, liberal rights were not something that were only deserved by white Europeans. ...[T]here was a recognition that the black and brown peoples being held in colonial bondage could not consistently be held in that bondage, because liberalism was a universal doctrine. ...[T]hat's the other respect in which we can defend liberalism, a moral one.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[L]iberalism is... a protection of human autonomy.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of universal human dignity ultimately comes out of Christianity... the view that all human beings are equal in the sight of God because they have the capacity for moral choice. As Western thought developed in the 17th-18th centuries, this took on a secular form under thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Immanuel Kant or Georg Hegel, who argued that human equality is... based on human autonomy.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Kant's words, human beings are uncaused causes, and therefore have infinite value, and a liberal regime protects that autonomy by giving people rights... [T]he right to speak, to organize, to associate, and ultimately to have a share of power by being able to vote. ...[T]his is ...the moral status, the dignity that life in a liberal regime that does respect individual rights, gives us, and it is one of the reasons that to this day, people do not want to live in authoritarian countries that do not recognize the fundamental dignity of their... citizens.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[F]or both the pragmatic... and... moral reasons... liberalism became the dominant doctrine of the 20th century, and should... continue to be defended....”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here are defects and gaps in a liberal society that are constantly being filled by other longings and... structures... that sometimes end up undermining that liberal project.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[O]ne of the problems... both on the left and the right is that the... individual autonomy protected by liberalism tends to take more and more extreme versions... and... becomes self-undermining.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[O]n the more conservative side... Liberalism has been associated with... the right to own private property... one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies, and that right is... what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The second failing of liberalism comes directly out of the fact that it attempts to lower the horizons of politics. Liberal societies do not want to tell you how to live. They do not want to define "the good life" because that is the source of conflict, but as a result liberal societies tend not to satisfy these very deep human cravings for community, because... there's something wrong with the basic liberal premise that we all start... as ed individuals. We're not self-interested individuals.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fundamentally we are highly social creatures. We feel a big sense of and discomfort when we are isolated from our fellow human beings. ...[W]e seek community in different ways. There's a right wing... and... a left wing version of this.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]his has been going on in other countries... including in the United States, where there has been a deepening polarization between a red... and a blue America that is defined partly by... these feelings of loss of community with regard to both religion and nation.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a left wing version of this longing for community... because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality, and therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is... hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition, and of rights, but it is not delivering... and therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to the specific groups.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he liberal world order that emerged, that... has these pragmatic and... moral dimensions has been severely challenged in the last few years, and the sources of this challenge are numerous. One is the rise of overtly authoritarian states like China and Russia. They have consolidated their rule. They seem to be stable internally, and they are increasingly seeking to project their power and influence, their model... across international borders.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But there has also been the rise of populist movements within existing liberal democracies, and particularly within the United States and Britain, which were... the leaders of the neoliberal revolution... in the 1980s...”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[F]inally, and... somewhat belatedly, there is the growing of a left that... has now been energized and is increasingly vocal... in certain quarters of the cultural community, in the arts and the universities, in Hollywood, in the media... where in some versions it also engages in a kind of illiberal... politics.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he election... on November 3 [2020]... illustrates a lot of these clashing forces. ...[T]hat election was the most important political fight ...in my lifetime. It's important not just for the United States but... for the rest of the world, given the role that the United States has historically played in maintaining that broader liberal international order.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The polarization has a number of different roots. The economic... fact that many working class voters have been left behind by the prosperity of globalization. ...[T]he more important division is a cultural one ...the feeling on the part of many populist voters, that they are not being respected by the elites that are running the country... [H]ere, all of the identity issues... play themselves out.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So today... red and blue voters rely on a completely different set of facts. ...[P]olls ...suggest that a substantial... majority of Republican voters believe that the Democrats... stole the election, and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president... [W]hen you don't have a common factual basis, you... reinforce the kinds of filter bubbles that people have started to move into.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]hile Trump is not going to be president, Trumpism is going to survive. ...[T]he Democrats need to look very very carefully at those election results because ...the Republicans did well not necessarily because people love what they represent, but because they don't like what the Democrats represent... [U]nless they sort out what that is, they are going to continue to lose elections.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[L]iberalism... has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's also been attacked from the left by people... I teach students at Stanford, and many of them think that liberalism is... the doctrine of their parents' or their grandparents' generation, but it's really not relevant to Gen Z younger people who are impatient for social justice and social change that liberalism is not providing.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]hat's... the crisis. The number of liberal democracies measured by... Freedom House in its annual survey of freedom around the world has been in decline for 16 straight years, and the biggest declines recently have been in the two biggest liberal democracies, India and the United States. So... we're dealing with a big global problem.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So let me start by just going back to basics in explaining why liberalism is a desirable form of government, or set of ideas to live under... [T]here's basically 3 reasons. One is practical, one is moral and one is economic.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now the argument that I make in my book is that part of the current disaffection with liberalism is not from any of its basic principles, but... is the result of certain deformations of liberal principles that were carried to extremes that led... to bad outcomes... [T]here's a move in this direction on the right and... on the left.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 12:25 Ref: Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022)
“[I]n a liberal society you're not going to agree on the deepest... moral frameworks, but you are going to agree on factual information, and... if you can't agree on factual information it's very hard to deliberate in common... [on] what needs to be done in the future, and that's the situation we now face.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The final thing... the question of the nation, and the role of the nation in liberalism... [T]here would seem to be a tension between liberalism's belief that all human beings enjoy... the same basic set of human rights, and the fact that we are divided up into s, in which the authority to enforce those rights is territorially limited. ...[T]his contradiction can be bridged because... there is a liberal form of national identity which is not only possible, but... necessary if a liberal society is going to succeed.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A right exists in theory... [A]ll human beings have the same set of rights, but rights need to be enforced by the state. It needs to rely on the coercive power of the state... its army, its police force, to actually make those rights something real that citizens can enjoy, and the enforcement power is not universal. ...[W]e wouldn't want to live in a world in which every liberal state wanted to enforce liberal rights in every other state in the world.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We need a good alternative to Trumpism. There is a majority in favor of that, but... the other party is really not providing that alternative in a very clear way.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is an unquestionable relationship between economic development and liberal democracy, which one can observe simply by looking around the world. But the exact nature of that relationship is more complicated than it first appeared, and is not adequately explained by any of the theories presented up to this point. The logic of modern natural science and the industrialization process it fosters does not point in a single direction in the sphere of politics, as it does in the sphere of economics. Liberal democracy is compatible with industrial maturity, and is preferred by the citizens of many industrially advanced states, but there does not appear to be a necessary connection between the two. The Mechanism underlying our directional history leads equally well to a bureaucratic-authoritarian future as to a liberal one. We will therefore have to look elsewhere in trying to understand the current crisis of authoritarianism and the worldwide democratic revolution.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The form that a future left-wing challenge to our present liberalism may take could be considerably different from those with which we are familiar in this century. The threat to liberty posed by communism was so direct and obvious, and the doctrine so discredited at present, that it is hard to see it as anything but totally exhausted throughout the developed world. A future left-wing threat to liberal democracy is much more likely to wear the clothing of liberalism while changing its meaning from within, rather than to stage a frontal attack on basic democratic institutions and principles. For example, almost all liberal democracies have seen a massive proliferation of new “rights” over the past generation. Not content merely to protect life, liberty, and property, many democracies have also defined rights to privacy, travel, employment, recreation, sexual preference, abortion, childhood, and so on. Needless to say, many of these rights are ambiguous in their social content and mutually contradictory. It is easy to foresee situations in which the basic rights defined by, say, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were seriously abridged by newly minted rights whose aim was a more thoroughgoing equalization of society.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While we do not, for now, have to share Nietzsche’s hatred of liberal democracy, we can make use of his insights concerning the uneasy relationship between democracy and the desire for recognition. That is, to the extent that liberal democracy is successful at purging megalothymia from life and substituting for it rational consumption, we will become last men. But human beings will rebel at this thought. That is, they will rebel at the idea of being undifferentiated members of a universal and homogeneous state, each the same as the other no matter where on the globe one goes. They will want to be citizens rather than bourgeois, finding the life of masterless slavery—the life of rational consumption—in the end, boring. They will want to have ideals by which to live and die, even if the largest ideals have been substantively realized here on earth, and they will want to risk their lives even if the international state system has succeeded in abolishing the possibility of war. This is the “contradiction” that liberal democracy has not yet solved.”
Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source