Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose.
Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program, and Mosbacher Director of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, all at Stanford University.
Fukuyama’s most recent book is Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018).
His two-volume analysis of political order—The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay—appeared in 2011 and 2014. Other books include Our Posthuman Future (2000), The Great Disruption (1999), and Trust (1995).
His book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) has appeared in over twenty foreign editions.
Freedom to Fail
In my recent post on bureaucratic autonomy, I noted how the CDC was too risk averse during the Covid crisis. As Michael Lewis explained, this tendency stretched all the way back to the Ford Administration, when the CDC director was blamed for alarmism regarding a possible swine flu epidemic. The
Tribute to Dorothy Fields
Dorothy Fields, arguably the greatest American songwriter and lyricist of the 20th century, was born this day on July 15, 1904. While her name may no longer be familiar, the songs that she wrote with composers like Jimmy McHugh and Jerome Kern—tunes like "I Can't Give You Anything But
Covid and Bureaucratic Autonomy
The Covid pandemic has raised in an acute way the question of how much autonomy the political authorities in our government should grant to the bureaucratic experts that work for them. A simple-minded principal-agent model would say that in a democracy, the people are the principals who elect representatives—the
Material Objects and Virtual Objects
In my recent post describing my long-term hobby of making furniture, I noted that woodworking was broadly speaking a pretty low-tech activity in which nostalgia for old technology played an important role. While this is largely true, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be linked to the virtual
2034
2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Eliot Ackerman and James Stavridis (New York: Penguin Press, 2021) imagines a future war between the United States and China that takes place in the eponymous year, much like Peter Singer’s Ghost Fleet. Admiral Stavridis had a highly distinguished military
Trust Science?
This week brought a startling development in the debate over the Covid epidemic. President Biden signed an executive order commanding the U.S. intelligence community to renew its investigation of the virus’ origins. This follows on an admission by Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, that we do not know
Just In Time
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled “Auto Makers Retreat from 50 Years of ‘Just in Time’ Manufacturing.” It noted that the Covid pandemic, the semiconductor shortage, and the burgeoning U.S. conflict with China were forcing American auto makers to rethink the lean manufacturing technique first developed
Building Furniture
As you may have figured out by now, I like to build physical objects. My day job has always involved creating intangible things—books, articles, teaching, lecturing—and it is very satisfying to create objects that you can touch, sit on, and use in daily life. I built the beds
