A review of In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir by Francis Fukuyama; 304 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 2026)

I.

Over the past 37 years, Francis Fukuyama has written countless words, but he has been answering for four. His 1989 essay for The National Interest was titled “The End of History?” and it argued that there were no longer any systematic alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy. That essay appeared months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the time Fukuyama published his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, the Soviet Union had dissolved. Now that communism and fascism had been vanquished, it did seem as though there were no appealing or sustainable ideological challengers to liberal democracy left.

As the title of Fukuyama’s new memoir suggests, its author remains preoccupied with his most famous work, but he doesn’t recapitulate its argument in detail. Instead, he focuses on its most overlooked aspect. The reference to the “Last Man” comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared his contempt for “democratic man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Fukuyama summarises Nietzsche’s view that this type of person—conditioned by the comforts of modernity and the “slave morality” of Christianity—is a “creature without pride or a striving to be something better, content with petty pleasures and material well-being.” Fukuyama worries that liberal societies naturally produce such people, which is why he argued in 1989 that the “end of history will be a very sad time.” The “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” required by existential ideological conflict, he wrote, were bound to be replaced by “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

In the Realm of the Last Man revisits the notion of thymos, a Greek word that refers to our need for recognition from other people. This impulse takes two forms: isothymia is the desire to be recognised as equal, while megalothymia is the desire to be recognised as superior. While the latter is a “necessary motivator of any kind of human excellence,” Fukuyama writes, it is also what drives “narcissists and tyrants.” Central to Fukuyama’s thesis is the idea that the struggle for recognition is a basic human need and the primary driver of history. While liberal democracy meets this need better than any other system, it does not provide the same sense of meaning and purpose as the great life-and-death ideological battles throughout history. These are the battles for which Nietzsche and other anti-liberal thinkers are nostalgic. When Fukuyama writes “perhaps [the] prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again,” he is emphasising the natural discontentment with liberalism.

The End of History is a thoroughly Hegelian hypothesis, which supposes that history has a sense of purpose and direction. Unlike Marxists, who believe that history would inevitably produce a dictatorship of the proletariat and a workers’ utopia, Fukuyama contends that history culminated in the victory of liberal democracy in the “realm of ideas or consciousness” (although this process is “as yet incomplete in the real or material world”). This did not, however, mean an end to national and international strife and conflict. The Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève believed that history had ended with the global expansion of liberalism after the French Revolution, and that belief was undisturbed by the wars, atrocities, and threat of nuclear annihilation that followed. “Progress in history,” Fukuyama writes, “is neither uniform nor linear. For [Kojève], none of the perturbations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries served to undermine the truth of the principles of the equality of freedom first articulated in the French Revolution.”

But Fukuyama also takes Nietzsche’s misgivings about “democratic man” seriously, and this leads him to a bleak conclusion:

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

Fukuyama argues that the chaos and political instability in liberal democracies over the past decade are the result of this urge to struggle for the sake of struggling, even if that meant struggling against peace and prosperity. The same urge helps us to understand the authoritarian assault on liberal democracy led by figures like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

II.

Over the past decade, Fukuyama has been trying to solve a political puzzle. “The United States and its fellow liberal democracies in Europe and Asia are as politically free and materially prosperous as at any time in human history,” he writes in In the Realm of the Last Man. “Our problems are ones of extraordinary affluence, rather than material deprivation or gross injustice.” So why have many citizens of liberal democracies turned against the system that has bestowed such historically unprecedented gifts?