The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Marshall Matters with me, Winston Marshall, for The Spectator.

Today I'm in Oslo and I have the privilege of being joined

by political scientist, senior fellow at Stanford University, and author of, amongst other books,

the books identity, liberalism and its discontents, the origins of political order, and the famous

1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. As I said today, we're in Oslo at the Freedom Forum, where Francis Fukyama, my guest, has been speaking about liberal democracy and its rise and fall, which I hope to get into in this conversation.

But first of all, Francis, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with you.

Well, thanks for having me.

Forgive me if this is

potentially tedious questions, I imagine you might be asked this a lot, but just for

listeners and viewers who might need refreshing on your work, I wondered if we could, if I could take

you back 31 years to your, 34 years, I'm sorry, to your essay, the end of history,

which, in which you argued, what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War,

or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such.

That is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western

liberal democracy as the final

form of human government. But as I said, in your speech yesterday, you were examining the fall of

democracy and the failure of liberalism. So I wondered, how has your thinking changed over the last

34 years? Well, you know, what your thinking changed over the last 34 years?

Well, you know, what we've had in the last 17 years or so is not the fall of democracy,

but we've had setbacks.

You know, the process of the development of democratic institutions is never a linear process.

...