Building Things

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN In 1989, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama - then an early-career academic who had cut his teeth conducting research for Ronald Reagan during his years as California governor - delivered a conference paper that would go on to become one of the most celebrated -and controversial - works of political theory of our time: The End of History. By 2009, he had broken with his neoconservative mentors, from Allan Bloom to Paul Wolfowitz, after recanting his support for the 'disastrous' invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the laissez-faire economics that produced the financial crash of 2008. But why did he change his mind? In this powerful political memoir, encompassing his father's involvement in the civil rights movement and his own work on CIA contracts in the 1980s, Fukuyama analyses his life alongside the seismic political shifts of the last thirty years - from Bush to Obama to Trump, from the War on Terror to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Profound and provocative, this is an intimate portrait of one of the twenty-first century's most important thinkers, an urgent study of contemporary politics - and a treatise on how the West can claw democracy back from the brink.

Francis Fukuyama is the internationally-bestselling author of 11 books, including his globally renowned Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute, and the Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He lives in California.