Francis Fukuyama, American political scientist, economist, and author

Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and international relations scholar, best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992). In this work he argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle and become the final form of human government, an assessment meeting with numerous and substantial criticisms. In his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity (1995), he modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.