Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're talking

to Francis Fukuyama, still best known for coming up with the end of history, but now he's

trying to make sense of identity politics. Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership

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six months of the lrb for just one pound an issue. We recorded this conversation a couple

of days ago in London, part of our tour of small podcasting rooms. We did this one at the

New Statesman, we're very grateful for that. Francis Fukuyama's book is called Identity, Contemporary

Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition and he is taking on some of the really difficult

issues of today, but I started by trying to make the link back to the end of history and talking

to him about recognition. You've been writing about this theme for a long time, let's call it

recognition, the recognition of dignity as being a huge driver of how human beings behave

and it's there in the end of history in the last man. In that account it is one of the great

advantages of liberal democracy that it provides suitable channels for human beings desire

for recognition. In the last 25 years it clearly has continued to provide that, but that

relationship has become much more fraught. This book is partly about how fraught that relationship

is in various ways. Is it recognition that has changed and what we mean by recognition

or is it liberal democracy that's changed in that 25 year period? I think that in a way both

of those things have happened and it depends on what countries you're talking about. One of the

things that's happened in Eastern Europe for example where you've had the rise of populist parties

...