Francis Fukuyama

In this course

Fukuyama appears primarily as a foil in the course's critique of technological determinism and teleological thinking about human progress. His "end of history" thesis—the idea that liberal democracy and capitalism represent humanity's final political-economic form—is positioned as an apocalyptical worldview that the readings explicitly reject as limiting to our ability to imagine alternatives. By invoking Fukuyama alongside Kojève, the course uses his work to establish what kind of fatalistic, endpoint-driven reasoning must be abandoned in order to open experimental space for thinking about technology, governance, and social organization differently.

Background

Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and international relations scholar. He is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which controversially argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and Western free-market capitalism may represent the final step in humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle and the final form of human government.

Mentioned in 1 reading