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You're listening to the partially examined life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 209 is something like what primarily motivates political action or maybe why are political problems so intractable.

And we're talking to Dr. Francis Fukuyama about his 2018 book Identity, The Demand for Dignity in the Politics of Resentment.

For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com.

This is Mark Plinson-Mire, whose inner self is entirely non-social in origin in medicine Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin, isothamatically living in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes Owen, feeling very somatic in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is Dylan Casey in Medicine, Wisconsin.

This is Francis Fukuyama. I'm in Palo Alto, California, looking forward to our conversation.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. This is a great treat for us.

So you've got a whole view of human nature here and how we should understand that to best understand what's going on politically.

This is of course a later elaboration of your 1992 book, The End of History and The Last Man.

That really went into quite a bit of philosophical depth.

In fact, most of us looked at part three of that book about this concept of thumus that we'll be talking about that comes all the way back to Plato,

spirit-edness, something that is supposed to be missing in contemporary economic analyses.

And so that's the thing that you kind of added to the National lexicon.

And now with this book, we're adding specifically the notion of identity and identity politics and how to understand what's going on right now based on this concept that you set up in the earlier book.

I think that in order to understand the concept of identity, you really do need to go back to the basis that it rests on in human nature.

So in Plato's Republic, Socrates in talking about what a just city would be says that there are three parts of the soul, or he asks whether there aren't three parts of the soul.

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