Francis Fukuyama
Article
Francis Fukuyama is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between February 20, 2021 and August 05, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies””; “I would much prefer the world where Francis Fukuyama had been right”; “Whatever Francis Fukuyama meant by ‘the end of history’“. It most often appears alongside US, America, Twitter.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 7
- Issue count: 7
- First seen: February 20, 2021
- Last seen: August 05, 2025
Appears In
- Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
- The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
- Ukraine Thoughts And Links
- From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
- Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
- Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism
- Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?
Related Pages
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- US (4 shared issues)
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- America (3 shared issues)
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- Twitter (3 shared issues)
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- Achilles (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- CIA (2 shared issues)
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- Cuban Missile Crisis (2 shared issues)
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- Donald Trump (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- Ezra Klein (2 shared issues)
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- Google (2 shared issues)
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- Iraq War (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Here’s my answer: The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.
I’m not sure. Being part of history sucks, and I would much prefer the world where Francis Fukuyama had been right and liberalism had won so completely that freedom no longer needed any defending. But the good thing about history is that all of this has happened before, and in the past it’s always stopped happening, and for all you know maybe it will stop happening this time too.
Inline links: maybe it will stop happening this time too
Whatever Francis Fukuyama meant by “the end of history”, it probably wasn’t “nothing will ever happen”.
Francis Fukuyama was a political scientist who wrote a book saying nothing would ever happen.
I started feeling a deep kinship with Francis Fukuyama a few years ago.
It's a bit more complex than that. In particular, the end of intensive kinship directly helps economic growth because it clears the way for voluntary associations to thrive. But the psychology angle is what's really unique to WEIRD – in particular, Francis Fukuyama has previously argued that kin institutions might be a problem for higher-level cooperation.
Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be.
Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. As always, read the whole thing and don’t trust my summary, but the key point is:
Inline links: Liberalism Needs Community