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>> humankind over the centuries has seen an evolution. we go from hunter gatherers to agricultural societies to principalities up to the industrial revolution. and there is a process which social institutions become more complex. they develop certain features. marx said this process would culminate in a utopia. i think most progressive intellectuals for the one or 50i years actually believed in the end of history but they thought ulit was communism. my argument was we did not seem to be going that this is before the collapse of the soviet union. the idea was there did seem to be a process of modernization there was people wanted to live in modern societies the kind of modern society we seem to be ending up that was liberal democracy and capitalism not socialism. in a sense we are getting off the strain of history one stop before the where the commonness of the marxist get off.

stuart professes btk you were talking in 2006 about you 1992 book the end of history and the last man. do what you say about liberal democracy does it stand up today? >> actually yes that clip was remarkably coherence. since 2006 i think we have seen a lot of regression in the progress of democracy all over the world. freedom house attracts global democracy has noted we've had 17 consecutive years of decline of the aggregate amount of democracy. i think the world really looks different in ways than it did back then. the question i was trying to raise is not was going to happen in any given decade or short term. but really the longer market.

i think there's still an open question as to what kind of destination we are heading to as our society modernized. >> again you are referencing your book from 1990 to the end of history and the last man. i want to reach your most recent book which came out last year called liberalism and its discontent. quote i am writing this book and a period when liberalism has faced numerous critiques and challenges and appears to many people in old and worn out ideology that fails to answer the challenges of the time. nonetheless liberalism has survived past challenges and its durability reflects the fact it has a practical, moral, economic justifications that appealed to many people especially after they have been exhausted by that violent struggles and by alternative political systems. where would you rank the threat

to classical liberalism today? >> i think it's pretty severe. maybe not as severe as the ones we have endured in the 1930s and 40s when we had stalinism and fascism as active enemies or even the 1960s and 70s you had a lot of coup d'état's and authoritarian takeovers. i do think the threat is pretty severe. the geopolitical dimension is important. we have not got russia and china which have consolidated authoritarian states. russia just launched an invasion of a neighboring democracy trying to prove democracy would not work in that part of the world. china has been arguing western democracy is in some kind of

terminal decline. so you've got the external challenge and you've got the internal challenge of populism in the united states first and foremost. you have politicians in a political movement that really attacks the liberal part of liberal democracy, the rule of law does not want to concede elections and is not interested in peaceful transfer of power. i would say it yes, we are in a very difficult phase right now. if we do not fight back against this it is going to get worse. quick sticking with the liberalism and its discontent, you talk about national populace on the right and progressives on the left. what is the definition of each of those d terms? looks well, i think the populace nationalism denies the fundamental liberal premise that all human beings are

fundamentally equal in moral terms. there is an inherent human dignity that transcends your skin color, your gender, other kinds of attributes that deserve to be protected by a rule of law by giving you rights that the state needs to observe it. i think a lot of nationalists would say it and said no, that's not good enough we are not just generic human beings. we are hindus or we are hungarians, we are some particular subset of human beings and we have a special status that deserves recognition above that of other people. this is not the first time this has come about, liberalism itself got its start in the 17th century after 150 years of continuous work there in europe between protestants and catholics over how they would use religion toio define a

particular quality of the early liberals said we need to get beyond that and recognize the fact that regardless of our religious concessions we are human beings it is that characteristic that we need to preserve and we need a system that allows people with diverse views with the good life way of living together. and so that is a recurrent threat. it was religion in the 17thli century. it was nationalism in the 19th and early 20 century. so there are these movements that reject the liberal presence and i think that is really what is attacking liberalism from the right. the threat from the left is a little bit different. i think many progressives in the united states and other advanced countries believe liberalism

really does not serve the ends of social justice in terms of racial equality, gender equality, equality of sexual orientation in the sort of thing. and they need something faster. they need a system that's more decisive that will protect the rights of marginalized groups and therefore they are willing to discard certain liberal principles freedom of speech probably first and foremost. i think between the two threats the one coming from the right is much more present. it's backed by a lot of geopolitical power and state power in many instances. i think you see a liberal tendency on thehe sides. >> host: the summa leaders use in your book who perhaps natural populace called putamen, would you put modi in there as well

and possibly former president trump? >> yes, definitely modi and trump are charter members of that liberal group. modern india on that liberal basis it's unbelievably diverse society by task, biogeography by language. liberalism is a doctrine that seeks to allow diverse populations to live in peace. all human beings should be treated fairly and equally. his hindu nationalist party is trying to do is shift that national identity to one that's based on hinduism basically muslims and christians who make up a significant part of the indian population. i think this is a real formula

for a lot of violence. india has alreadynd experienced was pushing a similar kind of agenda. i think of a case of donald trump he does not say this quite so explicitly. he has given permission for white nationalists to say we do not accept this diverse multi racial multicultural america as the true america. there is another older america that was founded on common religious christian values. that had a certain racial definition. that was the kind of america that he and a lot of his followers have eroded. so again he's got something less than universal understanding of who it is that gets a dignity in the world that's one of the things that's currently with

american politics. quick's francis, term and the meaning that comes up often in your writing is political decay. when you use that term what do you mean? >> so political decay is not something i've always used. it does not appear in my 1992 book because i just was not aware of this process. but basically political decay occurs when you create a modern state that is functional. but it gets undermined especially elite groups that seek to capture to make use of it for their own purposes, to protect their positions. and it is the tendency of human institutions to get overly rigid. human beings are rule following creatures. that is when the characteristics

that simply built into human nature. once you get a set of rules that people follow andow they want to continue following them. but the environment changes, things do not work so well but what look like a good set of rule in an earlier age no longer become functional but then you are trapped in the system because you are unable to change it. barring war, collapse, crisis. that i think it's a situation that america is facing right now. very old constitutional order that has served it very well for more than a couple of centuries. but that order really has bigw. problems the system does not seem to be able to correct itself.f part of it is we have a constitution it's very hard to amend but also americans get used to doing things in certain ways and they cannot imagine changes to those institutions. they define themselves by and as

a result the system begins to decay and it becomes much less effective. see what i want to write a quote from robert george of princeton university this is may of thiss year. he was quoted on twitter as saying if polls are to be believed there has been a precipitous decline in american's belief in the importance ofan patriotism, religion, marriage, family, and community. values that broadly speaking have throughout our history united americans despite our many differences. by the authority vested in me by absolutely no one i have declared june to be fidelity month a month dedicated to renewing fidelity to god, spouses and families, our country and our community. i don't know if you saw that when he made that statement but what is your reaction?

>> yes, robby is a friend of mine we served together on president george w bush council. counsel.we have disagreed abouty things ever since then. i would say you've got to decide a lot of the things robby talks about there. i think for example belief in god's happening there is a lot of data that shows at least in terms of fidelity to institutionalized religion there is been a big change that's much less religious than the preceding generation. some of those declines are class based. if you think about something like a marriage or bringing children up in a single-parent family one of the very unfortunate things happening in the society is actually for well-to-do people meeting people with highere educations, professionals actually those

institutions have gotten stronger an epidemic of divorce in family breakdown across the country and 80s and early 90s but for well-to-do people the trend has been in the opposite direction. instead of latchkey children you know have got helicopter parents much too devoted to their children for their children's own good. but for working-class people people with lower levels of education that decay has continued for that's when the big divides in the society there is a drug crisis, and opioid an opioidcrisis that hits workis people then more educated people are more immune too. upon the sources of polarization. patriotism is a complicated issue. i think there is a deep problem because americans i had thought when i was growing up had

actually come to an understanding of national identity was up very good place i thought to be after the civil rights movement there was a divorce between what defined in american in the race or gender. it really centered around liberal values. i think that is what allowed me as a third generation descendent of japanese immigrants to regard myself as fully american. i hate to say in the last decade on number of americans have been retreating from thatea understanding of american identity. they want to relocate it in a particular race orul ethnicity. one of the problems with patriotism is you have to define what is the country was the national identity to which you are being patriotic? the left and the right, red,

blue we both believe in the constitution but they actually believe in very different understandings of what the american constitution implies. and that means what is patriotism, evoke a trunk during the generally sixth riots said okay, patriots go express yourselves. but that's not the meaning of patriotism anyone on the other side of that divide would find remotely acceptable. so do american soul of their country? i think yes but which country do they really love? that is something that has not deteriorated it just split in terms of very different understandings of what america is and what it represents very quick so professor when it comes to identity politics and critical race theory which you

write about as well, how do those fit into what we are discussing right now? >> 's been a huge shift in self understanding of what it means to be a progressive or a person on the left. for most of the 20th century it was defined and very broad class terms. karl marx had a version of this the fundamental divide was bourgeoisie basically pure working-class who are oppressed and so forth. i think as time went on in the second half of the 20th century that understanding of marginalization and oppression began to be much more rooted in tespecifics that had been marginalized. there's a completely appropriate recognition the working class was a very different experience for white people than it was for african-americans. certainly the differences in

workplace experiences between men and women were very different therefore you had to define inequality and much more specific terms that has to do with identities that were not shared universally across society but applied to particular groups. now in terms of the next book i wrote, liberalism there is a very liberal understanding of identity or rather there is a liberal way of interpreting identity. martin luther kingg said african-americans are being mistreated, treated as second-class citizens. what we want is to be able to enjoy the same rights that white people enjoy. that is exactly a liberal understanding p of dignity. i think there is a different understanding that basically has become more entrenched in recent

years. these differences are much more essential. they are not things that can be overcome. they really define who you are as an individual and that leads to a very different kind of identity politics in which these circumstances you have no control over. what skin color you are, what gender you are, and so forth. they become the things that most ouidentify you. on that becomes a problem and a liberal society because it seems your group membership is what's really important. that is what's going to determine the way the state treats you. how you're going to get a job, you get into a university and the sort of thing. that becomes an illiberal understanding of human society. see what i want to read a quote from former president barack obama. this was from earlier this month on cnn.

quote it is very hard to sustain a democracy we haveai such concentrations of wealth. and so part of my argument has been unless we attend to that party list to make people feel more economically secure and we are taking more seriously the need to create ladders of a stronger and safety net that has adapted to these new technologies and the displacements are going on around the world, if we don't take care of that that is also going to fuel the kind of mostly far right populism that it can also potentially come from the left that is undermining democracy because it makes people angry and resentful and scared. >> yes, i agree completely with that. it is funny i agree with most of these broad statements of principle that obama has made both as president and subsequently. i think in a democracy you have

to worry about not just the quality of formal rates but substantive equality. social economic differences become too extreme. people get very resentful and lose faith in the legitimacy of the system. they're a good deal of what was driving the populism's about the right and the left in the 2000 tens was the growth of inequality that in turn was the byproduct of what's called neoliberal economic policies that have been pursued beginning in thead late 70s through the 80s and 90s that created a lot of inequality. and thehe solution is you need more redistribution. you need protections that equalize outcomes and not simply opportunities like obamacare like the affordable care act that tried to provide a certain

minimal level of healthcare for all americans. that is something every other modern democracy provides for its citizens except for the united states up until daca was passed in 2010. and i think in general the more expansive welfare state, more protections for people that does redistribute from rich to poor, that would go a long way to securing people's belief of legitimacy and democracy. think the social democracy that grew up in europe in the post-world war ii period was represented by the american new deal and great society and so forth. they were very important in anchoring democracy. i have absolutely no quarrel with that. i think the problem however is that i am not sure -- of the

problem is just economic inequality you can remedy that through some fairly easy policies.in we have been in the process of doing that. you can raise taxes on rich people and you can use that money to provide more healthcare, more education, more social benefits. the problem igh think right nows the resentments and the polarization between red and blue is not simply about economic inequality. if it were you could fix that problem fairly easily. and if that were the real driver of the populist upsurge shouldbeen bernie sanders rathen donald trump.st should have taken the form of more state intervention in the economy. more protection. it took this curious othern. fom in which it was cultural that

rose to the floor like hostility to immigration the fights over crt and national identity. and right now what is defining the republican party is not so much economic. they were actually okay not dismantling social security and that sort of thing but what is really driving the passions are these cultural issues that may have been triggered by economic inequality. but they are kind of separate also. i think that is why simply more social protections is not going to field the problems that exist in our society. >> host: since the publication of your book in 1992, the end of history has your political views involved in any way? >> oh of course.

i wrote nine books after the last of history of last man you can trace that evolution through those books. i just don't consider myself as much of a conservative anymore as i did back when that book was written. i would say a lot of that was in reaction to to real-world developments that i thought had their roots in conservative ideas and lent a very bad outcomes. the first was the iraqt war. i originally thought getting rid of saddam hussein was a good idea but as we are closer to the war became more and more skepticalec this would work out well and sure enough it worked out much worse than even i anticipated at that time. it did a lot to discredit the idea of democracy and certain american democracy. it is still the case in the

global south when the united states complains about the russian invasion of ukraine, a lot of people especially arab world turn around and say you did the same thing to iraq so who are you other than a big hypocrite. that was one. the other was the financial crisis in 2008 which i think was driven by a certain interpretation of market fundamentalism that taken a hole again was a dominant conservative idea of margaret thatcher, ronaldof reagan and a lot of the american for that period of time. these were both ideas is simply did not work out. it seemed to me at that point things are not going to work out you have to readjust the way you think about thet world. d my view. now, the other thing that i began to think about that was

more perhaps academic than political, the first is this issue that we have already mentioned, which is the idea of political decay. when i wrote "the end of history and the last man," i had this concep move forward may be you move backwards a little bit but ultimately it would allow you to go forward, and i didn't really anticipate the idea especially in the united states that you could i have a rapid and pretty catastrophic decay in the way that our institutions work. but perhaps the most important insight that i developed, and this is something i worked out of the course of these volumes i wrote on the originsvo of political order had to do with the role of the state.

i didn't appreciate how important just having a state was and i think this is a cognitive problem for many americans because americans assume the state is always going to exist and for many of themr they think that you have to protect individuals from the state, that the main problem in politics is constraining the state and they don't understand that if you don't have a state, you're going to end up in a really bad situation and i think that this was driven home by our experience with in afghanistan and iraq, where you had a collapse of state institutions in both countries. the united states was then responsible for creating order of that kind of chaos, and we had no intellectual resources to figure out how to build a state in that a society where the state doesn't exist where you basically have rule by armed

militia and civil war and horrible violations of basic rights. if you don't have a state, you can't protect people's security and the right to simply live securely so that started a whole train of investigation kind of academic investigation on my part because i realized that is a political scientist, at least in that period we didn't have a lot of resources to understand where the states came from because like a lot of others we didn't assume it is a question of what do you do with it, how do you limit it and so forth so that was the origin of these books where i wanted to go back not just to greece and rome and earlier human civilizations in my origins.

i go back to try to understand how societies create order and in that process at a certain point maybe 8,000 years ago you've got the first states appearing, mesopotamia in the nile valley, the yellow river valley and china and the valley of mexico and that in a sense was a big revelation of the early process of state building. how it was the states came about that might have some implications for what you might want to do in places like iraq and afghanistan. there's a much longer discussion of what happens when you get to the state because i think the distinction between having a state, which is basically at the friends and family of the ruler that impose their will on the rest of society in a modern state where the ruler believes

that he or she is a public servant that is meant to serve the interest of the whole society and to do that in an impartial wayal is a further evolution of political institution that is extremely difficult to bring about and has happened in a relatively small handful of societies and it's something that we didn't appreciate the difficulty ofty creating a state that has low levels of corruption for the services and public goods effectively. that's something that is much harder to bring about. we have mechanisms for holding elections and checking with they are relatively free and fair but it's much harder to get to that modern state. so this is a problem that i labeled of getting to denmark

where unlike bernie sanders, but i like about denmark is not that it's a social democracy, but what is remarkable is that they got very clean and effective government but states that deliver things the state is supposed to deliver on. healthcare, education, security and the like and the question of getting to denmark is something that i hadn't appreciated in the difficulty. that is one of the things i learned in the years after i wrote and it's kind of been the subject of a lot of academic work and resources that i've done in the years since. >> thank you for joining us on this independence day weekend for the conversation with author and prevents professor knows

mentioned he's written nine books since 1990 to the end of history book. we are going to be focused on the four of them. the origins of political order from three men times to the french revolution came out in 2011. the follow-up to that political order and political decay from the industrial revolution to the present day came out in 2014. identity, the demand for dignity and politics of resentment, 2018 and liberalism and its discontent came out last year. if you would like to participate in this conversation, (202)748-8200 for those of you and that you stand central time zones, 748-8201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones and if you can't get through and still want to make a comment, try the text number (202)748-8903. if you send a text please include your first name and a cy

if you would. we will also scroll through the social media sites so that if you want to make a comment on social media, you can do so there. you first appeared on booktv's in-depth program in 2006 and 17 years later we are pleased to have him back to talk about his updated work. in the origins of political order, doctor fukuyama, you talked about three things, the state, rule of law and accountable government. what are those? >> i think those are the foundations of any modern just political order. the state is a power institution about generating the social powers to protect the community, provide security both internally and external. you can enforce laws and deliver

basic services, health, education, infrastructure and the like so that's the power institution. the rule of law fundamentally is a set of agreed-upon rules that limit the power of the state and so their rights are rooted in the rule of law and the fact that the state cannot do whatever it wants and if it is rule of law rather than by law it means that they are applied to the rulers as well as the ruled. in china they've got ruled by laws of the communist party and person at the top makes rules and enforces them against the rest of the society, but that person isn't subject to theth se rules that are pretty much exempt, and if you have a true rule of law that means everybody really has to follow the basic rules and finally the third pillarua is democratic accountability where the identity of the ruler is determined by the people through

free and fair elections so that the ruler represents at least the greatest part of the population so a modern political order is a balance on the one hand you've got the state that is a power institution and on the other hand, you've got the rule off law and democratic accountability that may try to limit the power of the state and i think the difficulty of achieving a good political order is the balance is hard to get at. you've got a very powerful state, but you don't actually have constraints on that so the ruler can do whatever he wants. they basically get to set the fundamental rules. on the other hand, if all you've

got our institutions of constraint and a very weak state that is a situation of many developing countries. you take something like afghanistan before the taliban took over they have something they labeled the group of law but the state wasn't capable of providing security that is the fundamental definition of power over territory and that's a disease that affects many so getting that balance right between having a state that has enoughe, capacity but also is constrained so it doesn't violate the rights of its citizens and reflects their will, that is what the real liberal democracy aims to be and is quite hard to get right. >> when it comes to liberal democracy what is your take on

religion? >> it's complicated because there is a relationship between the modern understandings and the religious origins. in christianity there is a belief in human universalism all human beings are creatures of god and equal in his eyes and one of the transformations that happens in the enlightenment is the doctrine becomes separated from its religious context and becomes an assertion about human nature in a secular form so really liberals believed and not universalism but didn't connect it to the religious origins and i think there's other ways that

it affects the functioning of democracy so for example the traditional understanding of why american democracy was so successful is the one that was actually outlined when he visited the united states in the 1830s and said they are very good at the art of association. you don't need a centralized state to get them to organize, they can do that in their communities and they form and learn citizenship by participating in voluntary organizations and certainly at the time he wrote the vast majority were bible studies, temperance movements of various sorts and the traditional argument for why is that it had

to do with a sectarian nature of the protestantism where you didn't have a centralized church, you had many competing churches and that's one of the reasons it was stronger in the united states abandon other developed democracies because people were not forced to join a church they didn't just lineup if they wanted the comfort that religion would give them then they could associate with whatever sector they wanted to and that created the ground for democratic citizenship andsh participation. if you want a recent example of this look at the civil rights movement. martin luther king was a baptist minister and a lot of the civil rights, civil society groups that organized people both african-american and white organized around their churches

to seek social justice so in that sense i think religion has been important. however, the basic tenet of liberalism is that we don't have one religion and we don't have a state that tries to impose a single religion on everybody. tolerance is one of the foundational principles of liberal societyty that is really what drove early liberals to create this form of government that basically was an agreement to lower the temperature of discourse by taking final end as defined by religion out of the public arena and relegatedna bak to private to belief so in that sense, religion is something that is not compatible with the modern understanding of the

liberal society. >> graduated from cornell, phd from harvard, worked at george mason and john hopkins for many years is now at stanford. let's take some calls. mike in new york, go ahead. >> good afternoon. i like the opinion and an analysis on what he believes china will do in the near term and also say for the next 25 to 30 years and i would like him to give his thoughts and an analysis the last ten, 15 years compared to imperial japan say 1900 through 1941. >> i think china has been on a roll for some time. it's modernization has been truly remarkable. it's one of the great economic

miracles of history that it goes from this extremely poor country to the second largest economy in the world in such a short period of time. i think that there is some evidence that they may have reachedac the peak and are now n the downside of the longer-term stagnation, but they've got a lot of momentum and they want to remake the world order in ways that may be favorable to them. i don't think that they are like the former soviet union where e they got this view that theres a certain ideology that has to prevail and everybody has to be like china and they don't care and i think many chinese don't think that most are capable of reallyly emulating them with the respect for bureaucracy and the kind of internal state

organization, but they definitely do want respect. they keep talking about the 100 years of humiliation which had beenen recognized as one of the greatest civilizations in the world but didn't get that kind of respect and that provides a big challenge to everyone else. i think the comparison with japan is accurate in certain ways. it's the rising powerta in east asia in the early 20th century, but they did that in a period when colonialism was the norm among the powerful countries that wanted the colonial possessions and therefore they took over korea, taiwan, other parts of china and i don't think that the chinese are like that.

the main issue is taiwan because they all agreed and we agree taiwan is part of china and they would like to reincorporate that island and isl think that is gog to be the biggest vote of contention if they try to do that by force in the future, but i don't think that they are on a roll to take over other parts of the world. if they want influence, they want respect, but they don't want necessarily an empire of the sort that japan tried to create in the 1930s. >> next call comes from cornelius in alexandria louisiana. good to hear from you. go ahead and make your question or comment. >> okay, first happy and blessed fourth of july weekend everybody out there. as he and offer you ought to look up abraham bolden he has a book called the echo.

he was the first african-american secret service agent for president kennedy. he tried to prevent the kennedy assassination. he got his pardon last year from biden. >> is that a new book? >> i will be honest with you, i don't know. >> i appreciate the recommendation. go ahead. >> mr. francis, i was a military police officer and i trained to fight against the russians. the communist chinese have this built into wrote initiative where they are going around buying up everything, buying up all the farmland in the military bases and small town america is trying to fight against them. they have a secret base down in cuba just like the cuban missile crisis. you said you were conservative. you left the conservative party.

my question for you, president trump tried to prevent. there is evidence that he tried to get 20,000 troops there before nancy pelosi and mitch mcconnell sergeant of arms ordered and at the democrats have come out and said that the fbi knew about january 6 coming and d did nothing. he was behind all this stuff, not presidentpr trump, and -- >> we've got a lot here, let's see what he wants to respond to. it tells you much more accurately what happened on that

day and i wouldn't trust his word on any of it. in terms of china, the belt and wrote initiative is driven by a lot of different motives. one, you've got this chinese construction company they don't have a lot of business in china. they want to make profits and so they've been told to go abroad. they do want to expand their influence. i think that the use of this initiative it does exist. there are certain facilities they are trying to create, but the fundamental thing is more political where they just want to cultivate goodwill in the developing world and it's not working for them very well. a lot of the problems, a lot of the projects have developed real problems. they are not making money and

the art testing a lot of countries. pakistan, sri lanka, argentina, montenegro into a huge debt crisis so in a way they are behaving like american creditors or european creditors 30, 40 years ago and generating the opposite of goodwill, generating a lot of resentment on the part ofen countries that cannot repay these chinese debts so i would say that is the big problem that the chinese have created through this initiative. >> the origins of political order came out in 2011. it's the first of a two-part volume. you dedicated to samuel huntington, who is he? >> samuel huntington was one of the great political scientists. if there are many fields within political science where he made

a very big mark, but his first book i think in many ways was most important cold political order, changing societies published initially in 1968 so up until that point there had been a broad consensus among social scientists and modernization theory that basically said all good things would go together that you get economic growth and the spread of individual freedom, rule of law, more democracy and all these things would be supportive. huntington was the first major voice to cast out on that in response to the military takeovers that were going on throughout latin america, africa and other parts of the world. and he said basically all good things do not go to gathered. and if you have socioeconomic modernization, you are going to

raise people's expectations and if you don't have a political system that can satisfy those, you're going to get instability, violence and social breakdown. i think that he was right about that. he basically understood the importance ofood the state. with efforts to update his thesis and say yes actually order is a precondition for all the other good things that the society can engage in and you have to worry about where that order is coming from and that is as i said a lesson that many americans failed to absorb, so for instance in the iraq invasion we assume you can get rid of the state and disband the

army and all of its security forces and somehow spontaneously still have order and that is one of the biggest mistakes ever made by an american policymaker because that is what then led to the chaos, the militia, the kind of civil conflict that it descended into the years after. so i think huntington wouldn't have been surprised by the results. i think that he would have said if you don't start with a state, you're not going to have democracy or rule of law because you need a state to enforce the law and that's why i thought it was an extremely important and relevant book but it did need to be updated and that's why i wrote that the two-volume series. >> if people were to pick up the 1968 book for the end of history and last man from 1992 still relevant today?

>> i think they are still relevant. huntington on the first page of the book said the soviet union, which was still a growing concern that the timee he wrote it is a state and will always be there and that proved to be wrong so he got a number of things wrong. i wrote the end of history at a time, well actually i wrote it before the fall of the berlin wall but we were certainly in the midst of something that huntington himself labeled the third wave of democratizationhi that began in 1970 and continued alll the way up until the first decade of the 21st century where the democracies expanded. that is in the period that we are living in. there's been a lotat of democrac regress, so that was not a pattern that continued more than

a generation. so those aspects were not right. >> go ahead and finish. i apologize. >> so, there is one aspect, however, of what i wrote back in 1992 that continued to be a theme up until the recent books especially my identity books and that concerned the importance of recognition and dignity in human affairs. in the end of history i talked about the fact that there's a part of the human psychology were what plato would have calledca the human soul. you have a rational part, a desiring part, but there's this thing that is translated often times as spiritedness or anger

and that's the part of the psychology that demands recognition. we are not satisfied just with peace and security in having a lot of food on the table. we also want other human beings to respect us and if we don't get that respect, we get very angry. and all the way back in 1992, i said that this is one of the weaknesses of democracy that people are not simply a satisfid by peace and prosperity. but they also want is respect and recognition and that led to the last part of the book that is about the last man who comes from the philosopher that said at the end of history when you get to the modern liberal state, people are not going to be satisfied because their lives are going to be flat. there's nothing to aspire to and people want that recognition of being greater than or seeking

and if they can't aspire to that, then they will aspire to injustice because that is a critical part of human psychology. and in many respects, i think that is what we are witnessing right now is that people are not content living in the richest and most stable secure societies in human history. they also want other things, they want justice, recognition just as important members of society. i think that's been driving a lot of the instability and populism that we've experienced. >> dayton ohio, go ahead with your question or comment. >> it is aen great honor to be talking with you guys. thank you very much. a public middle school teacher i teach literacy and reading in a group in ohio and i am a centerleft person. i think there's great purpose in

education. they decry the industrialization and things like that. my point is there's a lot of countries that have lifted people out of poverty. but if we look back at this era and think that a lot of people were helped as well, there's also a lot of people migrating from the developing countries to developed countries. one of the last activities i did is we watched and read about people literally walking through from one continent to get to this continent for a better life

and so i tried to be optimistic and to say if you get your education this is still a great country to grow up in, so my thoughts i would love to have your thoughts on globalization and -- >> thank you very much. >> first of all, let me say i have great respect for you as a middle school teacher because you are doing god's work and if you're transmitting some of that optimism that is also very important. one of the biggest defenses of the general and history thesis despite the setbacks and problems we have in american democracy is that if you ask where do people from the corrupt dysfunctional societies when they read those places where do they w want to go, do they wanto go to china, russia, iran? know they want to come to the united states, canada or europe.

that indicates that despite the problems there's still a lot of opportunity, freedom and the chance for a more prosperous life that exists in the united states. the point about globalization is absolutely right. if you look at the world as a whole between let's say the early 70s and financial crisis global output increased fourfold, all the goods and services produced by everyone in the world quadrupled in that period and china by it self managed to lift several hundred million of its citizens but that's been going on in many other developing countries in india and sub-saharan africa and so forth. if you look at the world as a whole, yes, globalization was actually a good thing.

the problem it wasn't necessarily a good thing for every person in every country and whatou happened in a lot of the rich countries is a lot of the jobs got outsourced to parts of the world where people could do the equivalent work that were payingiv a lot less money and tt i think set up the kind of inequality that has driven a lot of populism in the rich world and the thing is so it's true if taken as a whole they did a lot better but it's not a political entity. are divided into these nationstates and the effect of this was not necessarily a good one because it did create any qualities of many countries, so i think that's really one of the other consequences. >> i want to go back to origins of political order from the

2011. i wrote myself a question in my notes and i don't know if this is even legit or not, but i asked myself the question after reading the book. has the u.s. ever not been dysfunctional? >> i think the degree of polarization and misfiring of institutions is greater than other periods of history but polarization has been around for a long time. 1861 it led to the civil war. 600,000 americans being killed as a result of that conflict and so that's a pretty high degree of dysfunction. and there's even other periods. a lot of the late 19th century was polarized up until the 96 election and we've had the deepest stain on our national

political development has always been the issue of race. that was the original sin in the united states. it took the civil war to get to formal equality with the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments but then it took another century for the promise of those amendments to actually be realized in terms of the voting rights and citizenship and greater equality for the law but i think as everybody understands the social equality and economic equality, we are still not there. that's the problem the united states has faced. on the other hand, could you actually use those democratic institutions to keep the peace to get to policies that would progressively make things better, i think the system has been functioning it's just taking a long time to let's say get to the civil rights era but

it eventually happens, so i do think that the other question you have too ask yourself is is the united states functionalar compared to other societies and it remains the case that as an economic growth engine, the u.s. has been unparalleled. i think a lot of people have been predicting the american decline relative to other powers inan the world and just even afr covid all the countries coming out of covid the united states looks pretty good despite the elevated rate of inflation, where extremely low rates of unemployment continue to be innovative and if you look at the whole ai revolution, it's not happening nearly as fast in china that sounds subject to a lot of more severe problems and lower growth rate but also compared to europe and japan, so

i do think that there's something functional going on in the united states that continues to be an progressive and he begin of attraction for a lot of people that are not fortunate to live in this country. >> so the arc of history over the 250 years are a net positive? >> that was the original phrase. this was the thing i find frustrating about the discussions of the way that we teach our history because it does seem to me that you can keep two ideas in your head at the same time. the first idea there was this original sin of slavery and then segregation, jim crow, institutionalized racism and the effects of that to the present day is a fact of history.

but it's also the case that there has been progress over those centuries into the situation isn't the same as it was in 1619 or whatever earlier date but there has been progress and realizing the promise and the declaration of independence that all men are created equal and a lot of people have been excluded at the time if those words that is my understanding of american history that we have a basic problem and a.m. and during one, but our liberal institutions have been able to deal with them not as fast as we would like or hope, but compared to other societies that have been through the revolution to get to a place that is not as

good i am not sure that it's something that is uniquely terrible. >> david, tulsa, good afternoon to you. >> thank you for the program. it's the best television on program. the definition of critical race theory and the role that it's playing in politics today. >> i guess there is a version of critical race theory established by people like derek bell and a school that extended to the critical theory to the racial issues ways was a characteristic of the united a states and i thk

elevated its importance andva durability. that interpretation of american history is what i said minus the progress. it argues that it's been more apparent and real damn the fundamental reality is a continuation of systemic racism that is baked into all of our institutions and the like. and if that is what defines critical race theory then i just think that is wrong. you need a more balanced understanding that it gets both of the racism and the possibility of progress in the past and for the future. the problem in the united states is a lot of republicans have latched onto the most extreme

assertions andnd said that thiss characteristic of the way that everybody on the left thinksf about that particular issue and i think they've exaggerated the importance to the point even books talking about rosa parks and the civil rights struggle are not acceptable. you absolutely have to teach youngbo people about the terribe things that happen in our racial history in the united states. the point where that becomeses problematic is where you say nothing can be done about it because it is such an ingrained feature in our system that has denied the possibility both in the past and t the future.

but unfortunately, that view where you try to strike a balance is not a suitable to the kind of polarized politics that we have today, and i think that is a really terrible thing because you should be able to criticize that history but also l believe that there's certain advantages to our system. >> the next call is from lucerne valley, california. this is john. hi, john. >> hi there. this is for doctor fukuyama. you spoke previously about organized religion and virtues such as dignity, fidelity and temperance with any civil context. i've been working to ground these types of moral virtues

with any more basic extinguishable behavioral foundation. i just wanted to ask have you workeded on any scientific types of behavioral psychological census -- >> thank you, john. of the ten that i've published is one that i put out in i think 88 or 89 called the great disruption and i took on this argument that religion is necessary for moral order and explains the rise of all sorts of dysfunction, crime, family

breakdown and the like. my basic argument is close to what you might be suggesting. human beings are intrinsically social creatures and religion is one method thatgi is used for certain moral codes and standards but if you don't need religion to do that because of human instinct for conformity to rules is so strong that and you don't need formal religion to do that. if you want to the empirical demonstration of that, europeans are much less religious then when you ask them to go to church do you believe in god they say no, but the crime rates and family breakdown rates and all these things are lower than in the united states, so even when in the united states, if

you want to look at the highest rate of social dysfunction, they actually occur in the bible belt in places where overt religiosity is the strongest and so i think thatst there are one more example to prove this is east asia. east asia doesn't have organized religion. they've got various forms of shaman is on and so forth, but you simply don't have the kinds of religious view with a certain set of moral views. but they are relatively functionalai or extremely functional very well ordered society. so, i, would say that i believe there are things in human naturm that promote social order among them is religion, but it's not.

>> we have about 45 minutes left from stamford 202 is the area code. 748-8200 in the central and eastern time zone if you want to make a comment, 8021 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones and we also have a text number (202)748-8903 for text messages only. please include your city and first name if you would. this is a text from greg. the british empire are likely likely hadthe most experience cg states where a modern state to didn't exist. what's your assessment of that history, goodod and bad? >> well, i think that it was a good legacy where the british actually succeeded in creating a state and the primary example of that would be india. india had a state before it was

conquered by britain or the subcontinent, but the british really created a some modernrn institutions that survived to this day so the administrative service was originally the british indian civil service, the army came out of the army that was created by the british, so that was a case where having ruled india for a couple hundred years actually had the time and energy to create a state institutions, but unfortunately in many other places, they didn't leave behind anything particularly remarkable. nigeria was a british colony that's never had anything comparable a to the state institutions that india did, and one of the dysfunction of contemporary nigeria is that it has an extremely weak government that really can't enforce rules

and provide basic order. there's many other cases of that. in some instances the british participated in a kind of divided and rule strategy and they d knew they couldn't creata centralized order and in order to protect the position they basically tried to play one ethnic group off of another and of that led to a different set of dysfunctions, ones the country received independence. kenya is an example of that where in a certain sense, the major groups that compete for power were in a certain sense promoted by britain as a means of a kind of divided rule strategy and that's s been one f the big defects of the kenyan politics, this competition between five or six major ethnic groups for political power so i would say the british legacy has

beenri very mixed, and i think it's important when colonial powers create a state state institutions, but britain's record on that is not great. >> another text message from ernest in hopewell junction, new york. is it time to modernize the constitution and how would we do this? >> well, yes, i think that basically, there are many features of the constitution that really do need modification. probably the one t that's out there most prominently is the electoral college which means a very small minority of american voters are actually determined who gets to be elected and there's other aspects of the constitution that really over represent smaller states. that was done deliberately by the founding fathers that wanted to get to the assent of the

smaller states to the constitutional order inn the first place and therefore gave them in effect a kind of veto power over things that would diminish that, but it's led to the fact that california with 40 million people gets to senators and wyoming with less than a million people gets to senators and it leads to a big distortion in the fair representation of the voters and so i would think that one of the things you want to do is modify that system so that it's more democratic and distributed power to people in proportion to the members in the population. the prospect for doing that right now is almost zero because among other things, the founding fathers made it extremely difficult to modify the constitution. big majorities not just in congress, but in each of the

states or among the states to bring about an amendment and that's one of the reasons why there've been so few amendments particularly in this polarized period the prospect that you get enough consensus on a modification that you can actually get the super majorities i think is vanishingly small. so i would say that there are other institutional practices that we have that are not rooted in the constitution that we could actually implement much more easily. for example, changing our electoral system from a win or take all plurality system to something like the rankin choice voting would make for example third-party bids much more feasible than they are under the currentea system and that's something that is under the control of individual states and municipalities and it doesn't have a constitutionall basis si wouldni think that things that n be changed rather than pie in

the sky changes are really what we ought to be focusing on right now. >> michael>> in broward county, florida. please go ahead with your question or comment for doctor francis fukuyama. >> caller: it's wonderful to hear you speak because you are one of the last true optimists i believe. you talk about there being a natural evolution into a liberal democracy, which i would add i olhave two quick questions here. might that liberal democracy be of liberal logic democracy i think a lot of libertarian populism is based on the fact that they see the lack of the need for government when we can communicate because hierarchy is about communication. without that maybe we can just haveve a law of efficiency but e problem is that are we going to come into that through

destroying government, centralized government in which case we would have chaos and i don't see that coming or a strong centralized government that will develop as you say the evolve intot will the literal software programs that will drive that logical future democracy and i want to add that this will blow your mind if you look at all of the billboards and the movies and the dramas and plays, there isn't a single one that is 100% fully optimistic and positive about the future. and that is where culture meets biology because that is an internal projection of what's going on inside our heads and the outside world of culture, culture is literally biology. >> we are going to leave it there and get a response from our guest. >> if you want in optimistic movie you can watch mary poppins, but watching that over and over is going to get pretty

boring and i thinknk that's why every movie involves some drama or conflict. i think being a liberal, classic liberal as i consider myself does not is not the same as being a libertarian. some libertarians basically think the government is bad and they are going to try to minimize the role of government in every aspect of life and i think that is a big mistake and it gets back to the point i made earlier which is that you cannot have a modern society if you don't have a modern state that is able to enforce the rules and is able to deliver services that people want to protect the community and so forth and this especially at the scale of a country that is nearing 350 million people, you know, you can't do that without, that isn't going to come about

spontaneously. you're not going to get people to simply band together on a horizontal basis to protectct their communities or if they do, what you're going to have is a descent into militias and warlord and that will be less good than having a monopoly forced by a legitimate democratically elected government, so i think that, you know, every society has got to be some mixture of centralized hierarchy plus bottom-up spontaneous cooperation. and if you have too much of the former you have a dictatorship and if m you have too much of te latter, you get into this situation so you've got to join the two. i think modern technology particularly the internet has raised the possibilityty of that grassroots cooperation a great deal and for all of the complaining about social media

in the internet, it is still the case that social media provides opportunities for grassroots organizations and mobilization that simply didn't exist before, and that's the reason countries like china and russia want to squash the ability of people to communicate with one another on this horizontal basis so that's something that actually technology is providing for us. but it can't just be that. you do have to have a more hierarchical systemu to imposea certain set of rules and defining what them extent of those are is kind of the big question in all of politics. >> the most recent book came out last year, liberalism and its discontent. next call is patched in keyport, new jersey. thanks for holding. you're on the air. >> thank you. i'm really concerned about globalism, not too much of the globalization of industry, but

the need for liberal, educational government, industrial elites think they can tell everyone how to live. an organization wants control over u.s. policies. with plagues and whatnot and the government goes away from the people. thee government works best on a local level as more and more comes out of washington and then out of volvos, the world economic forum. can american freedom derive globalism? >> i think that you are vastly exaggerating the power of what you call globalist institutions. the world health organization is just an advisory body. they put out concurrences about what the current state of the scientific evidence of something like pandemics. they have no power to enforcede that and i don't think it's

right that they aspire to that. no country a is delegated responsibility for its health policies to the who. it's simply an advisory body and of those are still done at the national level. i think overall if you look at the basically all of the existing international institutions, you know, they art like that, the countries have simply not been willing to give up significant degrees of sovereignty to international bodies in ways that give those bodies authority, certainly not any of the un organizations. now, one part of the world in which this has happened is europe. the european union and economic policy does delegate some substantial authority to european institutions. they did that voluntarily. they think they are better off as a result of that. it has created a bit of a backlash doing things people

don't like or understand and fundamentally they are kind of happyy with that. but we don't live in europe and who isn't going to do anything other than issue toothless degrees about what it thinks are good public health policies. .. new right, decay is not the same thing as civilizational decline. it does not have to be either terminal or irreversible. decay has to do specifically with institutional rigidity and capture of the state by elites.

that is the line i wanted to ask you about. capture of the state by elite. quickset is the respect of which i kind of agree with the former caller not on a global level but in terms off american politics. because we have interpreted our constitution and away the does not allow the state to regulate campaign finance and money and politics which other democracies do. it is basically a free-for-all rich corporations and rich individuals can simply buy political support to protect themselves. one example is the carried interest provision that allows hedge funds and other financial institutions to get taxed at a much lower level than individuals would be taxed at. the only way you can explain that is there capture of certain

members of congress through their lobbying and so forth. it ends up in that kind of situation. i think it has gone to really extraordinary levels. it is not a complete control by oligarchs otherwise you could not explain either bernie sanders or donald trump themselves what they did as well. that was not actually the choice of the majority of corporate america let's say. but it does mean we do have excessive eliteha control of thr mechanism of american democracy. i think you could vastly reduce that control if you actually had serious campaign-finance legislation. but again, given our polarization that is something we are not able to get too. other democracies do this quite effectively. think we could in theory do it

as well. do what david, florida good afternoon to you. >> good afternoon. as always thank you for c-span. professor, good to speak to you again as i did in 2016 on this very program. my observation is you talked about healthcare being one of the functions of the state. yet every time the state has tried to expand its role in healthcare it seems that the people revolt against it. in 1965 we passed a medicare paid in 1966 the republicans made big gains in the house. and in 1968 richard nixon was elected president in 2009 with obamacare or the affordable care act as you call it was pastor.

and in 2010 the republicans made big gains. >> what is your point david? >> the point is may be that people do not want all this big government grab of our systems. particularly healthcare. >> thank you sir, we got it. >> well, so every other richard democracy in the world has had a government mandated sometimes government run healthcare system provides a minimal amount of healthcare to its citizens. there is a good economic logic for doing that. if you do not have to worry about losing your health insurance you do not have to then worry about moving to a better job with a different company, moving to a different state and so forth. which is what we have got with the patchwork of state led plants some of which are more

generous than others and so on and so forth. there is a good economic logic between havingg this. what i would say is yes you are right. there's a lot of american resistance to this. this is one of i think the unfortunate manifestations of american exceptionalism. american exceptionalism can be interpreted as exceptionally good but also exceptionally bad or dysfunctional. i think this is one of the cases where there's a deep political culture of distrust of the state that i think americans carry two pathological extremes. and in cases where there is a really good function for the government to provide a certain service, we resisted when don't think all government is bad this is manifested in conservative

labeling of obamacare daca has socialized medicine. if we adopt this we are going to have socialism in the unitedd states. at that t is the case than the united states is the only rich democracy it's not socialist because every other one in japan, korea, germany, switzerland, norway, italy, every one of these countries has a universal health system mandated by the government. i think this is a function of a modern governments and it is kind of ait peculiarity of this american antistate -ism. that conflict to reject it. stay what are you still make classroom and if so what is your take on the evolution of students over the last 30 years? i'm still in the classroom.

i'm not looking forward to the applications and personal essays that i have to go through every spring as we admit students to our program. that will be written by chatgpt. most of the essays i had to read as written by computer. literally going to be written by a computer. not quite sure how to deal with that. i teach in a very diverse and international program. i run a program in international policy. forty or 50% of our students come from other countries. it is a little hard to characterize them as a whole. i do think there has probably been something of an increase in a certain kind of intolerance

and a certainen entitlement. i would say my students are less subject to this and other parts of the university. that has been a change for the worse. on the other hand they have become incredibly well-prepared. our higher education institution we do a great job of teaching people due to basic and information. there are areas where they could do t better. they basically given up on teachingit civics and a basic knowledge of how their own political system works. that is something we need to remedy. as a whole i like my students. stewart donald, you are on with francis.

>> good afternoon. what a privilege to get a chance to ask you a question professor. my question is based on my rereading of postmodernism by hicks. he doesn't excellent job of debriefing the intellectual history of marxist and anti- or i should say anti- enlightenment thought. my question to you is if you could do free verse on this as to what extent do you see posts in modern experiment with the united states. thank you for taking my call. >> i am glad you posed that question. chapter six of my last book of liberalism is all about that particular issue.

i think at the core of a lot of postmodernistes critiques as a critique of human cognition. the liberal enlightenment began with this belief there is an external objective world and that we human beings can understand and manipulate that world there something we call it modern natural science and the scientific method. that has come under attack by postmodernist. i think the attack begins on the left. i know a lot about this because i spent a couple of years of my life -- i went to paris and i studied and i met an undergraduate. i know a lot of the french postmodernist thinkers. then it migrated to the unitedun states took hold and a lot of the american universities. one of the central critiques was

a critique of modern science and in a series of the books he basically said that in the old days at a ruler did not like one of his subjects he would have killed. but today we cannot do this. we have to use a gentler techniques. what we do is we manipulate what we think the truth is. and in the case of incarceration and homosexuality and a number of other areas he argued quite persuasively that appears to be a scientific consensus represents the hidden interest of an elite is trying to buy compliance and loyalty among their subjects. he then generalize that to say basically the whole of science is not about any search for objective truth. it certainly about power. the power want to use this

technique as a ways of enhancing their power. and i think this is true in many respects. we have the period of american history scientific racism a lot of supposedly scientific observers talked about racial hierarchies and this is all rooted in biology. there is no question there haveo been examples of this. but then to broaden thehe critie and say everything is subjective. everything just represents the power of elites that are manipulating things behind the scenes is really to undermine to make things possible. what happened during the covid epidemicne is this idea that had taken root in postmodernist circles on the left and informed a lot of progressive thought. then migrated over to the right

is a critique of science and scientists the public health authorities in retrospect made a lot of mistakes. that's the weight science science works you don't with the cause of covid is, how it is transmitted. the protection against it. all lot of the times they got wrong were fed into the general narrative masking and all of these other measures public health authorities are recommending. a gigantic conspiracy on the part of hidden elites to basically manipulate people and render themselves more powerful. it is transmuted they are issues

that people on the right care about. the whole modern world is made possible by the possibility of science and or apprehension we never get completely right but we use experimental techniques to get closer and closer to that truth. if we did not have that we would not have much of an modern economic world. we went to mike in detroit please go ahead if your question or comment. >> when it comes to critical race theory and some of these other strategies of the democratic party this is all about divide and conquer. but obama was talking about how house would fundamentally change the nation. he was looking around going into what? goodhearted welcoming people.

it's overwhelming evidence and you are talking about political corruption, personal corruption please do not mutilate ourco children. submission, intrusion and incompetence to the identity politics. this is existenial threat within our country. forget about state isn't. globalism and socialism has a lot to do with the ideology these people in the democratic party. we went to mike i think we've got the point. let's get a response for. >> but. disagree.etely a lot of the identity politics that i myself object to is believed by a certain very progressive wing of the democratic party. that party rejected the most left-leaning candidate in 2020,

bernie sanders. picked a candidate. believing that no particular group ought to be held up above any other particular group. the objective of something like civil rights movement ought to be integration into an american mainstream. it was not this mad identity. he wanted to divide the country. it's just our politics had shifted. a lot of people take kind of crazy statements made by individual professors or by one extreme wing of the democratic party say all democrats believe that is just nonsense. there is much more diversity of opinion within that party that i

think you are giving them credit for. cox what do you look at the personal essay from students who are applying to be in your class? what appeals to you? hugsec it is interesting. the part that tends to get written by the computer at age 15 and i permit learned mathematics when a 17 and i did this, taking all the boxes. that they think admissions committees are looking at. the more useful kinds of things are the descriptions of their personal struggles. another problem i think is going to be chat dpt is going to be perfectly able to come up with a narrative in the future.

you can actually verify things people said. they have really had to struggle with really bad family conditions. personal experiences that were traumatic or whatnot. we get through all of that is something i take seriously. once you identify what the reader of the application is looking for he get the computer to deliver up that same thing whether it's true or not. that is what i focus on. we went let's go to the other side of the coin which is perhaps if you have a bias or two. mike from detroit you completely disagree with what he had to say it you were in his class with wt

affect his grade? >> oh no. as a professor you cannot let these kinds of partisan disagreements affect the weightu evaluate a student. first of all in my teaching political institutions and in a way that does have implications for your partisan choices. who were never going to grade anyone onbo that partisan. they're going to grade people on the basis of did they use evidence? did they make coherent arguments? did they cite credible sources as logical consistency? those are the things you look for. whether that benefits one partisan side or the other, is

not what you make judgments based off of. sue and elizabeth, oklahoma city think of holding. gogo ahead. >> professor, a great honor to hear you and speak with you. my concern is i guess historical ignorance of so much of the americannc population and the growing lack of interest in history among college students has declined in the number of students now studying it. i use it as an example if you would of a dangerous precedent. for example time traveler's guide to english history, restoration for example gives away the english treated their servants then of course the english moved to america and carried the same traits with them. that lack of inability, the lack of ability to understand the

evolution of practices is worrisome. and it. wondered if you could comment, thank you. >> guest: i am worried about that as well. i think learning history as part of the task in civics education. if you do not understand where you're institutions came from historically you are not going to understand how they operate in the present. i'm afraid a lot of schools and in particular a lot of elite schools likela stanford have got rid of the basic education and let's say american institutions. there used to be a required culture course that was required of all stanford students into the late 1980s basically start to the hebrew bible go to the great western thinkers is a

western culture course culminating in t federalist paps and american constitution going on to marx and lloyd and other speakers the university got rid of that in the 1980s as a result of pressure from critics on the left that said why the emphasis on western institutions? we should be sitting china, india, the muslim world you do need this basic understanding of other civilizations. but it should not come at the expense of understanding thoseg western institutions that are the basis for our common held beliefs in our own american democracy. that simply not taught in many schools today. i think thathe is one of theu reasons you can get away with making so many bad ahistorical

markets and political debate because people simply don't understand their own history. >> host: you right in origins of political order i am paraphrasing you a little but i think i it is a lot of historicalut writing has been characterized od taa what does that mean? >> yes those letters stand for one dan thing after another. where a lot of history's recitation of this king came to power than he was deposed by that upstart and this happened and that happened. there is a war and so forth. you don't actually have an effort to draw a larger narrative. what common patterns do you see in history? what kinds of institutions developed over time? what was their impact that would actually be useful in thinking

about the present? the thing is you should you say we should study history but there is so much history you could spend four years studying the history of the republic in the sixth century and still not exhaust most of the literature. you have to beat much more focused of the kind of history. i actually think ap world history in ap american history classes continue to try to do that. they try to focus in on one of the certain basic number of facts that you really need to know to be conversant in those areas. a lot of universities have given up on that i find among my students it is quite remarkable. the ones that actually knowth facts about the way their own society developed they learn them in their high school ap history courses not anything they took in the university.

>> every guess that appears on in-depth we ask what are they reading? and what's some of their favorite books are the answers we got from francis fukuyama favorite books include terminal shock and snow crash the inheritors, michael lewis the fifth risk octavia beutler parable of the sower and professor fukuyama is currently reading tara isabel burton self-made. what is that book about? >> well comment tara burton is a very acute social observer. her book is about modern identity in modern times we have this idea we have a unique self insight each and everyone of us. and we need to cultivate that self. so she gives this history of

self identification. in the end it amounts ofto self-promotion per she goes all the back to the renaissance. she carries it up through the kardashians into the present. although she tends not to be terribly judgmental i think in therr end she thanks this is noa healthy trend that we should constantly be looking within ourselves for our bearings. because we are social creatures we need to connect to other human beings. and so sometimes the most important thing is not with the deepest very thing in our soul but the way we relate to other people. it's a very interesting book because it kind of reveals a common thread of self creation that extends many western history projects an e-mail after the segment and saying iran to

the books too quickly. we are going to show the favorites again. are there any on their you want to speak to? i really like stevenson i like science fiction in general. and i have always loved his books. they speak to the political issue so snow clash was written in the early 90s. it's about in america the federal government has been reduced like many libertarians everything else was controlled from one to the next. it was the libertarian world termination shock as his latest book is about global warming. it's about the fact a single

rich individual in texas is able to pump enough sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere that he can actually change the weather patterns of the indian monsoon and so forth. and how the world deals with climate change when that kind of technological possibility exists. so they are book ends to this long. between the '90s and the present were our concerns have shifted from disliking the state and wanting to live into a place like global warming. eight fairbanks inheritors is on france's trenches list the fifth risk at octavia beutler parable of the sower.. last call michigan please go ahead may have about two minutes. >> thank you for taking my call.

professor you mentioned you studied denmark, denmark's history. i'm going to suggest the dutch republic was founded in 1581. included seven independent providences it is part of their constitution. they are the first country that had religious freedom. this was a problem for the pilgrims after they left england dutch republic but discover their children will be exposed to other religions so he left for america. it went alright jan edwards are going to leave it there thank you veryso much. professor fukuyama? >> guest: i had a visiting professorship at a danish university so i felt i knew denmark better. i've been to the netherlands a lot getting to the netherlands but denmark it was.

i knew that country personally perks him to finish with this quote from your book identity the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment the global surge toward democracy that began in the 1970s. the third wave of democratization has gone into a globalsi recession. our present world is moving toward the dystopias of hyper centralization and endless mefragmentation. different parts of the world to sing the breakdown of institutions the failed states polarization and growing lack of consensus over common ends. socialit media and the internet have facilitated self-contained communities walled off not by physical barriers francis

fukuyama has been our guest for the past two hours. rewe appreciate you coming backn in-depth 17 years after your first appearance. thank you sir. >> the government for having me. >> he spent a bookshelf podcast makes it easy for you to listen to all of c pans nonfiction books in one place you can discover new authors and ideas. we tweak or make it convenient close to multiple episodes critically acclaimed authors govern history, biography, current events and culture from her signature program about books. after words book notes plus q&a pit listen to c-span's bookshelf podcast feed today. find all of our podcast on the free c-span now mobile video app. or where ever you get your podcast and on our website c-span.org/podcast.

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