In the Realm of the Last Man

One of the West`s most interesting public intellectuals` THE TIMES `None is more eminent or experienced than Francis Fukuyama` FINANCIAL TIMES In 1989, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama - then an early-career academic who had cut his teeth conducting research for Ronald Reagan during his years as California governor - delivered a conference paper that would go on to become one of the most celebrated - and controversial - works of political theory of our time: The End of History. By 2009, he had broken with his neoconservative mentors, from Allan Bloom to Paul Wolfowitz, after recanting his support for the `disastrous` invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the laissez-faire economics that produced the financial crash of 2008. But why did he change his mind? In this powerful political memoir, encompassing his father`s involvement in the civil rights movement and his own work on CIA contracts in the 1980s, Fukuyama analyses his life alongside the seismic political shifts of the last thirty years - from Bush to Obama to Trump, from the War on Terror to Russia`s invasion of Ukraine. Profound and provocative, this is an intimate portrait of one of the twenty-first century`s most important thinkers, an urgent study of contemporary politics - and a treatise on how the West can claw democracy back from the brink.