Twenty years after proclaiming the end of history, Francis Fukuyama has returned to his favourite subject. His new book, The Origins of Political Order, is a fascinating, sweeping chronicle of man's political development - and the re-engagement seems to have had a sobering effect.
The Stanford Professor made his name with the famous 1989 essay, The End of History, but he was not, as is often claimed, announcing that human affairs would cease or war end. 'There were a lot of stupid misunderstandings,' he says in a mesmerising, viscous monotone.
A modern interpreter of 18th century German philosopher Georg Hegel, Fukuyama believes history was propelled by a clash of ideas and internal contradictions. With the end of the cold war, Fukuyama believed there was no longer any question about how to organise human affairs: 'All of the really big questions had been settled.' History, he said, was a force motoring towards a final destination of liberal democracy and capitalism. He quoted Hegel approvingly: '[History is] nothing other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.'
More often quoted - and pilloried - than read, Fukuyama's essay and subsequent 1992 book captured and stoked the triumphalism that followed the end of the cold war. Incomes rose. Technology progressed. Mikhail Gorbachev did a Pizza Hut commercial. Rhetoric about the inevitability of freedom only seemed to intensify after attacks on Western supremacy in the 21st century.
In many ways, it all suggested he was right. The blandness of today's academic and political debate proves Fukuyama's contention that it no longer seems possible to think of theoretical alternatives to market capitalism. It's easy to make fun of Fukuyama, Slavoj Zizek wrote, but most of us are now Fukuyamaists.
But is Fukuyama? A mood remindful of the happy 1990s has been observable recently. Uprisings in the Arab world and, less recently, Iran have produced a similar sense of inevitability and optimism. Fukuyama has not been taken in: 'I think people are going to be disappointed,' he says. 'I don't think it's going to lead to a stable democracy from any short-term perspective. Institutions don't come about overnight. They have to be built over time; this is something that people in the Arab world are going to experience. In some of the states that have less sense of nation, you could get sectarian war'.