Francis Fukuyama is an eminent, and controversial, political scientist. (Most people who are worth anything, I’ve found, are controversial, to some degree.) He is my latest guest on Q&A: here. We talk about a wide variety of subjects — political, philosophical, and personal. You can learn a great deal from this man.
He teaches at Stanford and is a co-founder of American Purpose, which describes itself as “a magazine, media project, and intellectual community.” The purpose of American Purpose, so to speak, is to defend classical liberalism against its illiberal foes, from whatever quarter. To many young people, Fukuyama tells me, the liberal order, or ordered liberty, seems obsolete. Spent. He and his allies aim to challenge this attitude.
By “liberalism,” says Fukuyama, he does not mean the San Francisco school board. He means “the idea that really gets its start in the second half of the 17th century and argues that human beings have inherent individual rights that need to be protected by a rule of law, by a constitutional structure that limits the power of government and recognizes the agency of individuals.”
Fukuyama was born in Chicago and grew up in New York. Also in State College, Pa. His father was a Protestant minister and a professor of religious studies. His grandfather — his father’s father — came to America from Japan in 1905. His father (the religious-studies professor) was born in Los Angeles and attended the L.A. public schools. After Pearl Harbor, the family was interned, in Colorado.
But Fukuyama’s father, and his father’s younger sister, had a ticket out. A college in Crete, Neb. — Doane — gave them scholarships, so they would not have to spend the war in a camp. This was an example of American better angels.
Francis Fukuyama went to Cornell, Yale, and Harvard. He studied with some very well-known professors: Allan Bloom, Paul Deman, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Samuel Huntington, Harvey Mansfield, et al. In our Q&A, we discuss some of these teachers, in some detail.
We also discuss the question of American identity and American purpose (to use those words again). What is an American? Is America an idea? Partially an idea? A creedal nation? Partially so? These are combustible questions.
For Fukuyama, they have a personal element. When he was growing up in New York, he did not know a single other Japanese American. He endured taunts from schoolmates, who called him a “Chinaman” and so on. They demanded to know what he “was.”
His father said, “Tell them you’re an American.”
Says Fukuyama to me, “If America doesn’t have a creedal identity, then I’m not an American, and I believe I am an American — so I have a big personal stake in this.”
At the end of our conversation, I ask him about people — authors, thinkers — who have meant a lot to him. He can start as anciently as he wishes. He names Plato — because he studied the Republic under Bloom, his freshman year, and “the Republic was foundational in structuring the way I think about politics.”
But he reserves his biggest valentine for Alexis de Tocqueville. “He kind of invented modern sociology or anthropology, because his big contribution was not just the observations he made about the American art of association or American democracy, it was really the fact that he understood that, beneath the visible institutions, like constitutions and laws, you have habits, you have mores — what we call ‘norms’ today.” And “his approach is one that I’ve tried to emulate in my own thinking and writing about political systems.”
Fukuyama, like Mansfield and others, has made me think I need to know Tocqueville better than I do. (Been a while.) And if you’d like to know Fukuyama, a little — again, our Q&A is here.