Fukuyama e o nascimento da politica - City Journal

The Dawn of Politics
ADAM KIRSCH
City Journal, Spring 2011, vol. 21. n. 2

Francis Fukuyama goes back to the beginning.

It’s possible that Francis Fukuyama does not take unmixed pleasure in his fame as the author of The End of History and the Last Man. Ever since Fukuyama published that book in 1992—indeed, ever since he published the article on which it was based in The National Interest in 1989—he has been shadowed by the phrase “the end of history.” Since then, he has written five more books on big, complex subjects, ranging from the decline of trust in American society to the future of genetic engineering, and he has participated in countless policy debates. Yet on the cover of his new book, The Origins of Political Order, he once again is identified as “the author of The End of History and the Last Man.”

Will this book—a 500-page survey of the growth of states “from prehuman times to the French Revolution,” with a promised second volume taking the story up to the present—finally be the one to emancipate Fukuyama from the end of history? The question is justified not simply by the size, scope, and ambition of the project but, above all, by its emphasis on origins. If the end of the Cold War represented the end of history, Fukuyama’s new book starts over at the beginning, with the emergence of the first states out of kin-based tribes more than 4,000 years ago. In the introduction, Fukuyama explains that his purpose in The Origins of Political Order is to offer a new theory of political development, to supersede the one that his mentor Samuel Huntington advanced in his 1968 study Political Order in Changing Societies.

But it is hard to avoid thinking that Fukuyama is after even bigger game. After all, he emerged in his first book as a proud Hegelian—more, as a rehabilitator of Hegel, in an age that had lost patience with all grand theories of historical progress. “The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of us into deep historical pessimists,” Fukuyama wrote. But the events of 1989 made it possible once again to believe that history was marching in the direction of freedom, that liberal democracy would prove to be the solution of mankind’s long experiment in politics. This or that tyranny might win a temporary reprieve, but the ultimate judgment was sealed.
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