---
title: In  Conversation With Francis Fukuyama on the Last Man He Once Declared Triumphant
description:  In 1989, a young political scientist announced that history itself had reached its destination. On 2 September, at the London School of Economics, Francis F...
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-08-07T17:46:51.269Z
updated: 2026-08-07T17:48:12.421Z
canonical: https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/in-conversation-with-francis-fukuyama-on-the-last-man-he-once-declared-triumphant
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/81V+L5ug-BL._SL1500_.jpg
categories: Author Journeys
content_type: News
region: London
publication: The Quantum of Light
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

In 1989, a year before the Berlin Wall came down, a little-known State Department policy planner delivered a conference paper arguing that liberal democracy was not simply winning the Cold War but had reached the end point of humanity's ideological evolution altogether. The paper was called The End of History?. Its author, Francis Fukuyama, was in his mid-thirties. Thirty-seven years, a public break with the neoconservative movement and a shelf of subsequent books later, he is publishing the memoir that finally explains how he got there, and what he now makes of an argument that has spent three decades being tested by exactly the events it claimed had run their course.

On 2 September, the London School of Economics hosts Fukuyama for a conversation built around that memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, chaired by LSE President and Vice Chancellor Larry Kramer. Tickets go live at midday on 19 August, and on past form for a Fukuyama appearance in London, they will not stay available for long.

## The last man, revisited

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