Building Things

'One of the West's most interesting public intellectuals' THE TIMES 'None is more eminent or experienced than Francis Fukuyama' FINANCIAL TIMES 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.