In the Realm of the Last Man

From the celebrated author of the international bestseller The End of History and the Last Man and other books on the most important political questions of our time, comes a strikingly personal intellectual memoir. Francis Fukuyama, a leading public intellectual, is well-known for his landmark, bestselling works of political philosophy and history. Here, for the first time, he charts his political and intellectual evolution across five transformative decades. We follow him from the circle of students around the conservative intellectual Allan Bloom at Cornell, into the halls of power in Washington and at the RAND Corporation, and into private conversations with world leaders from Muammar Qaddhafi to China’s powerful elite. Fukuyama touches on his family’s story, including his relatives’ internment during World War II along with other Japanese Americans. And, in surprisingly personal terms, he reflects on the experiences that led him to reevaluate his own thinking, most notably his dramatic public break with the neoconservative movement over the invasion of Iraq. More than a conventional memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man is personal history as political history—the story of a life that illuminates the troubled fate of democracy and liberalism over the last fifty years. Returning to and developing the concepts that have been central to his work—recognition, thymos, trust, identity, human nature, institutions, and the Last Man—Fukuyama brings the depth and richness of personal experience and pathbreaking scholarship to illuminate the crises of the twenty-first century. Urgent, brilliant, and essential, Fukuyama’s In the Realm of the Last Man reveals a major thinker grappling in real time with the convulsions of history, and looking ahead to our possible future.