Woodworking with Francis Fukuyama

By Brent Crane

Francis Fukuyama has a crack in his credenza. He has just noticed it running like a vein through the top of the sideboard, which takes pride of place in his rather bijou dining room. He is perturbed by this unexpected blight on what appears to be an otherwise flawless work that took him two years to complete. The bulky, reddish-brown piece is made of Monterey Cypress – the same, Seussian species that I can see from the kitchen window standing beyond the finely manicured back yard on the Monterey Peninsula in California. “I’ve got to do something about that,” he murmurs, rubbing his hand along the unseemly fissure; his distracted tone suggests that his mind is already busy on a solution. “I could put a butterfly mortise in there or something to hold it together,” he says. “But it’s actually not going to affect things.”

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama – Frank to his friends – became famous for his sensational debut, “The End of History and the Last Man”. In the book he argued that, with the end of the cold war, the world had witnessed “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism”. Whereas Karl Marx envisioned history as heading inexorably towards communism, Fukuyama reckoned that its rational endpoint lay in liberal democracy. But like a crack running through an otherwise pristine piece of furniture, events since then have seemed to undermine his grand postulation.