Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of talking politics. Today's the last episode in this series of history of ideas. It's about Francis Fukuyama and the end of history.

Did liberal democracy really end up on top in the battle of modern politics?

Or are there better ideas still to come? Talking Politics, History of Ideas, is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of

Books, Europe's leading literary magazine.

After each episode, continue your exploration of the history of ideas in their unrivaled

archive of essays and reviews, films and podcasts, and find out more about how a subscription to the

L.R.B. can be an indispensable home learning and student resource by heading over to their

website L.r.

me forward slash ideas.

That's L.r.

dot me forward slash ideas.

In this series of talks I have sometimes mentioned that the writers I've been discussing have a kind of catchphrase and often actually

it's four words long. So Hobbs' catchphrase is nasty, brutish and short. Constant, not so famous, rich men hire stewards. Tockville, tyranny of the

majority, Marx and Engels, workers of the world, okay it's five words, workers of the world unite,

Arend, the banality of evil.

I imagine that Hannah Arend got sick of being reminded of that phrase everywhere

she went. But there's only one author, the one I'm going to be talking about today, who kind of became

a catchphrase. His catchphrase has for 30 years been the

thing that he's known for. Many people, it's the only thing they know about him.

Francis Fukiyama in 1989 said that we had reached the end of history.

And those four words have dogged him ever since. In some ways he's been

running away from them he's written lots of other books he's come up with lots of

...