Is a pessimist simply a well-informed optimist?
Francis Fukuyama, author of the famous 1989 essay, “The End of History,” offers his thoughts about the importance of optimism and how so far the 21st century has not offered it [above].
In November, China’s President Xi Jinping met Fukuyama [a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy], whose claim to fame is a thesis that would seem to run against everything Mr Xi wants to protect: that the march to liberal democracy is unstoppable , The Economist noted.
Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, the companion volume to the author’s The Origins of Political Order, delves into the role of political institutions in societies across the globe, The New York Times adds. Fukuyama’s sweeping analysis considers how and why institutions develop and how to foster political accountability in liberal democracies.
