Tom Holland and Francis Fukuyama

Marxism, football and Trump’s demise: Tom Holland and Francis Fukuyama in conversation

TOM HOLLAND: The title of your latest book, a book of interviews, is After the End of History. This alludes to what I guess must still rank as your most famous book and I wonder: is the fame of that book a burden? Do you feel like a famous rock star whose fans want him to play the greatest hits?

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: You know, it is really only when I meet up for interviews with journalists who want to talk about very general types of topics that the issue comes up.

TH: Since it is the title, could we just nail down what you mean by ‘the end of history’? You think of it as kind of a process rather than an end.

FF: First of all, it’s not my phrase, it comes from Hegel, and Karl Marx also had a concept of the end of history, and for all three of us history really means not events but something like modernisation or development. The end of history, as it was posed by both Hegel and Marx, accepted the fact that we were living in a progressive historical world in which things change over time, so the question is: where is that process leading us? Marx’s answer was to a communist utopia. Hegel, I believe, properly understood and argued that it would lead to a kind of liberal society, and my argument was simply that the Hegelian view of this seemed to be more likely to come true than the Marxist one.

TH: One of the things that struck me about the book, reading it through, is your honesty. You say: ‘I would say that more has happened in the past few years that was unanticipated, at least by me and most of the people I know, than in the previous 20 years.’ Were you thinking of Trump’s election?

FF: Yes, and also what Trump’s election reveals about the state of American democracy.

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