I recently read Liberalism and Its Discontents on a balcony in Shanghai, looking out at a city that has achieved remarkable prosperity without liberal democracy. It felt like the right place to read Fukuyama. Here was a man famous for declaring the end of history, now admitting that the system he championed was in trouble. The irony wasn't lost on me, and I suspect it wasn't lost on him either.
Fukuyama defends liberalism against attacks from both the nationalist right and the progressive left. He acknowledges the real failures — atomisation, inequality, the sense that meritocracy has become a justification for inherited advantage. But he argues that the alternatives are worse. The book is less a celebration than a repair manual. Fukuyama wants to fix liberalism, not abandon it.
The standout for me was his careful distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. The latter — the ideology of deregulation, privatisation, and market worship — isn't the same as the former, which is fundamentally about limiting state power to protect individual dignity. In my local government days, I saw how neoliberal policy often transferred power from elected bodies to unelected markets, without actually improving outcomes. Confusing the two has done enormous damage to liberalism's reputation.
As a Buddhist, I'm sympathetic to critiques of pure individualism. The self isn't as solid as liberalism assumes. We're constituted by our relationships, our communities, our obligations. A political philosophy that ignores this is incomplete. But as someone who grew up in Britain and values freedom of speech, due process, and the peaceful transfer of power, I'm also wary of the alternatives. The Chinese model delivers stability and growth, but it doesn't deliver the freedom to dissent.
Some people say that liberalism has already failed and that we should move on to something new — whether that's nationalist conservatism, socialist planning, or some form of post-liberal communitarianism. These critiques aren't without merit. Liberalism's great strength — its neutrality, its refusal to impose a single conception of the good life — has also become its weakness. When a society has nothing binding it together beyond individual choice, you get fragmentation. You get the loneliness that leads people to seek meaning in politics, or conspiracy, or radical identity. But Fukuyama's response isn't to reject liberalism. It's to strengthen it. He argues that liberalism needs to recover a sense of national identity and shared purpose. Not the aggressive nationalism of the far right, but something more modest: a sense that we're in this together, that citizenship means something. Teaching in an international school in Shanghai, I see how hard this is to build. My students come from a dozen countries. Their shared identity is thin. But it isn't impossible.
I'd recommend this book because it's written by a man who has changed his mind before and is humble enough to do it again. That humility is rare, and it's exactly what liberalism needs if it's going to survive. Fukuyama isn't claiming liberalism is perfect. He's claiming it's repairable.
If you care about the future of liberal democracy, read this book as a defence, not a celebration. Separate liberalism from capitalism. Markets are tools. Liberalism is a set of principles about freedom and dignity. Don't let the failures of one discredit the other. And build institutions, not just arguments. Fukuyama is right that ideas matter, but they matter through institutions. Join something. A school board, a local charity, a reading group. The abstract defence of liberalism means nothing if the practice of it disappears.