And his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, is a remarkably fair-minded-one might say liberal-minded-exposition of liberalism’s current predicament. Fukuyama, now at Stanford University, is a strong thinker. The slip-up is a little embarrassing, but it doesn’t really damage the book’s argument. Even with this book, the pattern of neglect-by-vague-praise continues: None of its many reviewers, for all their pretense at comprehension, noticed that his drive-by definition of “deontology” (“not linked to any ontology or substantive theory of human nature”) is totally wrong: Deontology comes from deon, a Greek word here meaning something like “duty” and refers to the study of ethics. His subsequent work has received respectful public attention, but little scholarly engagement he is treated more as a symptom than an intellect. His notoriety for the “End of History” thesis is based on a misreading of that phrase, not a real reading of his 1989 National Interest article “The End of History?” or his less sanguine 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Francis Fukuyama’s work is generally treated much the way pigeons treat statues: as something on which to deposit badly digested ideas, which are then left for others to clean up.
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