In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir

From the celebrated author of the international bestseller The End of History and the Last Man and other books on the most important political questions of our time, comes a strikingly personal intellectual memoir.

Francis Fukuyama, a leading public intellectual, is well-known for his landmark, bestselling works of political philosophy and history. Here, for the first time, he charts his political and intellectual evolution across five transformative decades. We follow him from the circle of students around the conservative intellectual Allan Bloom at Cornell, into the halls of power in Washington and at the RAND Corporation, and into private conversations with world leaders from Muammar Qaddhafi to China's powerful elite. Fukuyama touches on his family's story, including his relatives' internment during World War II along with other Japanese Americans. And, in surprisingly personal terms, he reflects on the experiences that led him to reevaluate his own thinking, most notably his dramatic public break with the neoconservative movement over the invasion of Iraq.

More than a conventional memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man is personal history as political history--the story of a life that illuminates the troubled fate of democracy and liberalism over the last fifty years. Returning to and developing the concepts that have been central to his work--recognition, thymos, trust, identity, human nature, institutions, and the Last Man--Fukuyama brings the depth and richness of personal experience and pathbreaking scholarship to illuminate the crises of the twenty-first century.

Urgent, brilliant, and essential, Fukuyama's In the Realm of the Last Man reveals a major thinker grappling in real time with the convulsions of history, and looking ahead to our possible future.

Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 09/08/2026
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780374620431


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2026
Publishers Weekly 06/08/2026

About the Author
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has previously taught at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. Fukuyama was a researcher at the RAND Corporation and served as the deputy director for the State Department's policy planning staff. He is the author of Liberalism and Its Discontents, Identity, Political Order and Political Decay, The Origins of Political Order, The End of History and the Last Man, Trust, and America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. He lives with his wife in California.