Fukuyama, Thiel, and the Revenge of the Last Man

In his new memoir, Francis Fukuyama attempts to redeem his thesis about the end of history. But Peter Thiel’s ongoing quest to escape government oversight and wrest control of the future from democratic majorities makes a mockery of his argument all over again. NEW YORK—In the Realm of the Last Man, the title of Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s new memoir, is an unmistakable reference to his 1992 bestseller The End of History and the Last Man. The reason he chose it, Fukuyama explained, was that people had ignored his famous book’s warning that “democracy could break down in the future because of some of the intrinsic stresses within a liberal order”—stresses born of the discontent of those whose desire for recognition exceeds what liberal democracy can satisfy. Yet this claim is an opportunistic twisting of what was only a passing speculation in his celebrated book: that future individuals facing “no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name” might, out of sheer “boredom” rather than systemic “stresses,” choose to “struggle against the just cause” of liberal democracy. But liberal democracy has been in retreat for at least two decades. To salvage his career-making thesis that history had ended, then, Fukuyama now asserts that we all just misunderstood him. Who is this “Last Man” whom Fukuyama’s readers ignored? Fukuyama borrowed the term from Friedrich Nietzsche, casting the modern version as a political eunuch whose libido has been sapped by the consumer comforts of a “post-historical” world—one in which liberal democracy and capitalism no longer have ideological rivals. Fukuyama’s Last Man has none of his forebears’ passion for political struggle or new world orders. To be sure, he has aspirations—namely, to make money. But this focus is an unmitigated blessing for his liberal-democratic fellows. Not only does the successful money seeker, according to Fukuyama, “create wealth which migrates through the economy,” but he is “kept out of politics and the military,” where his “restlessness” might otherwise lead him “to propose innovations at home or adventures abroad, with potentially disastrous consequences.” Continue Reading