Fukuyama now seeks to set the record straight ... This fresh attempt to clarify his position is styled by Mr. Fukuyama as a memoir, but it is better seen as a series of meditations ... The book’s style is more professorial than memoirist.
Purely as a memoir, I should say, this one is disappointing. Fukuyama loses interest in telling his own life story around page 60. The fun and revealing anecdotes are front-loaded ... Fukuyama wants to be able to say I told you so. And on these grounds, his book does remind us that he did. But there is little comfort in this. What he has identified is a human problem: the blink of an eye that separates utopia from dystopia. We got what we always wanted, but it is not enough and never will be.
The most dramatic passages of his memoir describe Fukuyama’s break with his neoconservative milieu over the war in Iraq ... Less...a personal memoir than as an inner monologue of post-cold war liberalism ... The memoir is not the apologia of a prophet whose prophecy failed. It is the record of a moment when liberalism learnt to live in the present tense.
In a world of pretentious complexity, Fukuyama’s clarity of prose is itself a political statement ... But is there a way to reconcile these two opposing forces, the liberal egalitarianism of the End of History and the illiberal supremacism of the Last Man? For all his erudition, Fukuyama throws his hands up at this quandary.
Fukuyama’s new retrospective inadvertently reveals that it’s the liberal democratic model that seems unready for the next century. Able to see the flaws in his system but unwilling to countenance the type of politics that might transcend them, Fukuyama has produced a book emblematic of a 'centrism' still proudly fighting the last brushfires of the twentieth century long after the wildfires of the twenty-first have swept by them ... Announces not just the latest phase of Fukuyama’s career but the exhaustion of the ideas that career rested on ... On the whole, Fukuyama does not seem properly chastened by the events of the past two decades—mixing a strange complacency about the deeper problems confronting liberal democracy with attacks on straw-men versions of those who seek its reform.
