the holistic destruction of nature and the biosphere. The second is the end of the Homo sapiens species,
through modern science and genetic engineering, as thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari predict. Rather than a
definitive end, modernity has revealed itself to be a continuous debate, between optimists, pessimists,
civilisationists, historicists and relativists.
One question remains. What led Fukuyama to the ultimate search for the end? Fukuyama was born in 1952
to a middle-class academic family and grew up on New York’s Lower East Side. His father was a
congregational minister and professor of religion, giving Fukuyama an early experience of both academia
and teleological, eschatological theories of history. The shadow of Strauss hung over Fukuyama’s
undergraduate education; he majored in classics (Latin, Greek and the culture of both civilisations) at the
University of Cornell. His housemaster was Bloom, with whom Fukuyama recounted many late nights
discussing philosophy and “Great Books” and “Great Ideas” – a genre for which Bloom was passionate.
After his undergraduate degree, Fukuyama studied comparative literature at Yale and the University of
Paris. Comparative literature in the 1970s was to be a critical poststructural environment, where students
were encouraged to question and criticise key texts in western literature and culture. At Yale, Fukuyama
studied with deconstructionist Paul de Man. In Paris, he studied under Roland Barthes and Derrida, who sat
in on Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930s, and who went on to become seminal scholars in the French
poststructuralist school. This school of thought, epitomised by Derrida, questions the origin, presentation
and possibility objective facts (known as “structures”).
Yet Fukuyama’s self-described “intellectual side journey” came to an end after six months in Paris after he
grew disillusioned with the negativistic and abstract nature of poststructuralism. He told The New York
Times’s James Atlas: “I was turned off by their nihilistic idea of what literature was all about, it had nothing
to do with the world. I developed such an aversion to that whole over-intellectual approach that I turned to
nuclear weapons instead.” Similar to Kojève’s insistence that philosophy has no value if not applied to its
own time, Fukuyama’s academic career led him to pursue more practical subjects.
At Harvard, he pursued a PhD in Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East in the context of the Cold War. In
1981, he left the neoconservative Rand Corporation, a public policy thinktank, to work for Paul Wolfowitz,
director of policy planning in the Reagan administration and another former student of Bloom. Fukuyama
spent the rest of the 1980s working between public policy, foreign policy and the Bush administration. He
always kept one foot in policy and one in academia, even during the heavy years where Fukuyama was
involved in the secretary of state’s negotiations over Palestinian autonomy and later German reunification.
As such, in 1989 the John M Olin Centre for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the
University of Chicago presented a lecture series on the Cold War and the wider state of global order titled
“The Decline of the West?” In a quirk of history, and a testament to the value of networking, the John Olin
Centre was headed by none other than Bloom. They invited a public policy researcher, whom Bloom’s co-
host Nathan Tarcov described as having an “interesting and unusual intellectual trajectory ... interested and
knowledgeable about literary and aesthetic matters”. The functionary accepted, and his lecture title
opposed the wider defeatist tone of the conference. It posed a simple question with a Great Idea: “Are We
Approaching The End of History?”