So, hello everyone and welcome to this e-site online conversation.

My name is Fredik Erickson and I'm very pleased to welcome today, Matilde Fasting,

a colleague in the world of think tanks,

who has recently published a fascinating book on Francis Fukuyama and what comes after the end

of history. This is also our subject for today's conversation. Matilda is an economist,

an economic historian, and she is a fellow at the Norwegian

think tank Civita. She has a PhD in the economic history of ideas and has

previously published several books in that field and she joins me now from Oslo.

Hello Matilda I'm very glad to have you with me today.

Hello, can you hear you? We can hear you fine, absolutely. So first of all,

congratulations to a new book. I find it's fascinating because it's a deep dive into the thinking

of what is a remarkable person who has managed to set the tone for so much of Western

thinking about politics, ideas and the world since the late 1980s. His first

major track was The End of History and the Last Man. And I think this is the book that he's also

going to be most remembered for. At the same time, it's also a book that has prompted a pretty

robust disagreement among scholars and readers about what he actually said

in that book, for instance. Did he really say that the struggle between ideas and societies

would end? Even now, people debate this. After the West left Afghanistan a few weeks ago

with a tail between its legs, I read comments suggesting that Fukuyama had

gone it all wrong and that his liberal triumphalism after the collapse of communism was extraordinarily naive.

And then again, there were others suggesting that, no, Fukuyama actually got it right. This is the type of

conflict and the type of problems that will arise in Fukuyama's

...