JENNIFER SZALAI2026年9月2日Francis Fukuyama has published a shelf of books about politics and political theory, including lofty treatises on liberalism and a sober two-volume study tracing the development of the modern state. Yet it sometimes seems he will be forever dogged by four little words.弗朗西斯·福山出版过大量政治及政治理论著作，其中包括关于自由主义的精深论著，以及一部严肃审慎的两卷本研究，追溯现代国家的发展历程。然而，他有时看起来似乎永远摆脱不了那寥寥五个字的纠缠。“Every week on Instagram or social media, I’ll post something and somebody will say, ‘Oh, well, I thought history ended,’” he said one recent afternoon in his Palo Alto home. What this “somebody” was referring to, of course, was “the end of history” — the four-word title and animating idea of Fukuyama’s cover essay for the summer 1989 issue of The National Interest. In the waning days of the Cold War, with the Soviet empire in retreat and American consumerism ascendant, Fukuyama anticipated “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” History was ending with “the triumph of the West.”最近一个下午，他在帕洛阿尔托的家中说：“每周我在Instagram或其他社交媒体上发点什么，总有人会说，‘哦，我还以为历史已经终结了呢。’”这些人所指的，自然是“历史的终结”——福山为1989年夏的一期《国家利益》杂志撰写封面文章时所用的标题，也是该文的核心理念。在冷战行将结束的日子里，苏联帝国节节败退，美国消费主义方兴未艾，福山预见到“经济和政治自由主义将取得全然的胜利”。历史正以“西方的胜利”走向终结。The article became a sensation, catapulting Fukuyama, then a policy wonk at the State Department, into a career as a scholar and public intellectual. He expanded the piece into his first book, “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), and had the good luck — as well as misfortune — to come out of the gate with a work of earnest political theory that was also a runaway best seller.这篇文章一炮而红，把当时还是个国务院政策官僚的福山推上了学者和公共知识分子的道路。他将文章扩展成自己的第一本书《历史的终结及最后之人》（1992年），并且既幸运又不幸地，一出手就写出了一部既是严肃政治理论又是超级畅销书的著作。As a phrase, “the end of history” sounded both highly potent and highly problematic, and Fukuyama was endlessly pilloried for it. People would gleefully point out that historical events kept happening. But he wasn’t talking about history; he was talking about History, in a grander, more conceptual sense. (The troublesome phrase wasn’t even his: He had borrowed it from Alexandre Kojève, the renowned Russian-French interpreter of Hegel.) Liberal democracy was an end point, Fukuyama argued, because as an ideal it could not fundamentally be improved upon: “All of the really big questions had been settled.”“历史的终结”听起来极具冲击力，同时又问题重重，福山因此遭受了无休止的嘲讽。人们会幸灾乐祸地指出，历史事件分明还在不断发生。但他说的并非一般意义上的历史，而是更宏大、更具概念性的“历史”。（这个惹麻烦的短语甚至不是他原创的：他借自亚历山大·科耶夫，一个俄裔法国人，著名的黑格尔阐释者。）福山认为，自由民主是一个终点，因为作为一种理想，它已无法从根本上加以改进：“所有真正重大的问题都已解决。”福山1989年发表在《国家利益》杂志上的文章《历史的终结？》成就了他的事业，但也从此让他饱受争议。 Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesIt was an undeniably optimistic thesis, an emblem (as well as a punchline) for the post-Cold War era. But Fukuyama’s book also contained a dark antithesis. “The end of history” was haunted by the possibility that the spread of liberal democracy would give rise to “the last man” — Nietzsche’s term for a complacent, decadent figure who forgoes risk and ambition in favor of comfort and safety. In the last five chapters of his book, which hardly anyone seemed to read or remember, Fukuyama predicted that boredom and restlessness could fuel a rage against the establishment machine.这无疑是一个乐观的命题，既是后冷战时代的标志，也成了一个笑柄。但福山的书中也包含一个黑暗的反题。“历史的终结”始终笼罩在一种可能性之下：自由民主的传播可能催生“最后之人”——尼采以此指代一种自满、堕落的人物，他们为求舒适与安全而放弃风险和抱负。在该书最后五章中，福山预言，无聊与躁动可能助长对建制机器的愤怒，然而这几章似乎没几个人读过或记得。More than three decades later, restlessness and rage are everywhere, and Fukuyama, at 73, is still trying to make himself understood. On Sept. 8, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish “In the Realm of the Last Man,” a memoir. As the title suggests, Fukuyama is doubling down, pushing back against what he derides as “these stupid, superficial interpretations of the end of history” that caricatured him as a naïve Pollyanna. He sees the current plight of liberal democracy not as a rebuke to his earlier work but as a vindication. The “last men” of our age grew so restive that they fell for populist demagogues who convinced them everything was rotten — “an outcome,” he says, “that was perfectly predictable more than 30 years ago.”三十多年后的今天，躁动与愤怒无处不在，73岁的福山仍在努力让人们理解他的本意。9月8日，法勒-斯特劳斯-吉鲁出版社将出版他的回忆录《最后之人的王国》。正如书名所示，福山在加倍强调自己的观点，回击他所讥讽的“那些对历史终结愚蠢而肤浅的解读”，这些解读将他丑化为天真的乐天派。他认为，当前自由民主的困境并非对他早期著作的否定，反而是一种印证。我们这个时代的“最后之人”变得如此焦躁不安，以至于轻信了民粹主义煽动者，后者让他们相信一切已经烂透——“这一结果，”他说，“早在30多年前就完全可以预见到。”But the memoir shows him changing his mind, too. Even though he disdains the “many casual critics” of his first book who didn’t bother to read past the first half of his title, Fukuyama also confessed that he never expected the realm of the last man to look quite like this.但这部回忆录也展示了他思想的转变。尽管他鄙视那些“随意批评”他的第一本书的人——这些人连标题都懒得读到后半部分，福山也坦言，他从未想到“最后之人”的世界会呈现如今这般景象。The closing pages of that first book included a passing reference to Donald Trump, then a New York City real estate mogul. Trump, he wrote, was among those whose ambitions could be satisfied in a liberal democracy, with its market economy.在《历史的终结及最后之人》最后几页，福山曾顺带提及唐纳德·特朗普，当时特朗普还是一个纽约房地产大亨。他写道，特朗普属于这样一类人：在自由民主及其市场经济中，他们的野心可以得到满足。“Instead of wanting to be tyrants, they can just become really rich,” Fukuyama recalled of his thinking at the time. “Little did I know that just getting rich wouldn’t be enough for him.”“他们不必渴望成为暴君，只需变得非常富有即可，”福山回忆起自己当时的想法。“我万万没想到，仅仅致富对他来说远远不够。”Fathers and sons父与子On a sunny morning in May, I met Fukuyama on the immaculately manicured campus of Stanford University, where he is currently a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. In person, he speaks quietly and projects a serene unflappability, though his intellectual and political journey has been remarkably circuitous.5月一个阳光明媚的早晨，我在斯坦福大学整洁优美的校园里见到了福山。他目前担任弗里曼·斯波格利国际问题研究所高级研究员。他本人说话轻声细语，透着一股平静沉稳，但他走过的思想与政治之途却相当曲折。Fukuyama’s father was born in Los Angeles to Japanese immigrants; his mother was from Japan. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, his father’s family was sent to internment camps — a fate his father managed to escape by getting a scholarship to a liberal arts college in Nebraska.福山的父亲出生于洛杉矶一个日本移民家庭，母亲来自日本。珍珠港事件后，父亲一家被关进拘留营——父亲因获得内布拉斯加州一所文理学院的奖学金，才得以逃脱这一命运。His grandfather lost his hardware store in Little Tokyo. “Got his citizenship, finally, in the early ’60s,” Fukuyama said. “The first thing he does, he votes for Barry Goldwater,” the archconservative presidential candidate. Fukuyama’s father, by contrast, was a “die-hard liberal.” A sociologist and a Congregational minister, he was active in the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War.他的祖父失去了在“小东京”的五金店。“他最终在60年代初获得公民身份，”福山说，“他做的第一件事就是投票给极端保守的总统候选人巴里·戈德华特。”相比之下，福山的父亲则是一个“铁杆自由派”。他身为社会学家和公理会牧师，积极参与民权运动，并反对越南战争。Fukuyama, an only child, was born in Chicago and raised in New York City. He studied classics at Cornell and lived at Telluride House — an insular, student-governed residence that was then heavily influenced by the conservative political theorist and classicist Allan Bloom. Bloom, in turn, had been a student of the German American philosopher Leo Strauss. “There was a fraternity next door,” recalled Ruth Epstein, a friend of Fukuyama’s from Telluride House. “They had keg parties. We had faculty receptions with sherry.” For an intellectually curious kid like Fukuyama, the atmosphere was thrilling.福山是家中独子，生于芝加哥，在纽约市长大。他在康奈尔大学修读古典学，住在“特柳赖德之家”——一处相对封闭、由学生自主管理的宿舍，当时深受保守派政治理论家、古典学者艾伦·布卢姆的影响。布卢姆是德裔美国哲学家列奥·施特劳斯的学生。“隔壁就有一个兄弟会，”福山在“特柳赖德之家”的朋友露丝·爱泼斯坦回忆道，“他们开啤酒桶派对，我们则有供应雪利酒的教工招待会。”对于福山这样求知欲旺盛的年轻人来说，这种氛围令他兴奋不已。It was also where he fell in with a “Straussian crowd” and became politically conservative, attracted to philosophical ideas about absolute truth and human nature. The development rankled his father, who insisted that his son had been “brainwashed.” Fukuyama resented this accusation. Even now, his father’s suggestion that he was the unwitting victim of a sinister influence campaign still pains him: “He never gave me credit for being able to think for myself.”正是在那里，他加入了一个“施特劳斯学派圈子”，并在政治上转向保守，被关于绝对真理与人性的哲学理念所吸引。这种转变令他的父亲大为恼火，坚称儿子被“洗脑”了。福山对这一指责深感不满。父亲称他是某场邪恶影响运动的天真受害者，这至今仍让他感到痛苦：“他从不相信我有独立思考的能力。”福山说：“我曾是新保守主义小圈子的一员。”后来，他因伊拉克战争和2008年金融危机与新保守主义彻底决裂。 Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesFukuyama would end up having a number of conversion experiences. He briefly flirted with French post-structuralism, moving to Paris for six months, where he took a seminar with Roland Barthes. Realizing that he no longer wanted to pursue “nihilistic projects built on assertions of the impossibility of reasoned discourse,” Fukuyama abandoned a graduate program in comparative literature at Yale to study international relations at Harvard. There he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East.福山后来经历了一系列思想转变。他曾短暂接触法国后结构主义，搬到巴黎住了六个月，期间参加了罗兰·巴特的研讨班。当他意识到自己不再想追求“在断言理性话语之不可能后建起的虚无主义计划”时，福山放弃了耶鲁大学比较文学的研究生项目，转往哈佛大学攻读国际关系，并在那里完成了关于苏联中东外交政策的博士论文。“I thought of myself as not just a conservative, but I was part of this neoconservative cabal,” he told me. All of that changed in the first decade of the 2000s. First, he broke with the neocons over the U.S. invasion of Iraq; then, in 2008, Wall Street recklessness brought the financial system to the brink. Fukuyama started to revise his priors. “This belief in the use of military hard power in order to promote democracy led to the Iraq War, and the financial crisis was a result of this conservative belief in free markets and the self-regulating ability of markets to maintain stable economic growth,” he said. “Both of those turned out to be total bullshit.” Liberal democracy couldn’t be sustained through extreme deregulation, or imposed at gunpoint.“我曾认为自己不仅是保守派，还是新保守主义小圈子的一员，”他告诉我。但这一切在21世纪前十年发生了改变。首先，他因美国入侵伊拉克与新保守派决裂；随后在2008年，华尔街的鲁莽行为将金融体系推向崩溃边缘。福山开始修正自己原有的信念。“相信动用军事硬实力来推广民主，导致了伊拉克战争；金融危机则是保守派相信自由市场、相信市场能够自我调节以维持稳定经济增长的结果，”他说，“这两者最终都被证明是一派胡言。”自由民主无法依靠极端放松监管来维系，也不能靠枪口强加于人。In a twist, he now finds himself more politically aligned with his father, who died shortly after “The End of History and the Last Man” was published. Still, Fukuyama is dismissive of what he calls the left’s “social justice agenda,” and likens the pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses to “struggle for the sake of struggle.” He retains a Straussian emphasis on human nature, speaking like a traditional conservative on innate differences between men and women.颇具戏剧性的是，如今他发现自己与父亲的政治立场更加一致。父亲在《历史的终结及最后之人》出版后不久便去世了。尽管如此，福山对他所称的左翼“社会正义议程”不以为然，并将大学校园里的亲巴勒斯坦营地比作“为斗争而斗争”。他仍保留施特劳斯学派对人性的强调，像传统保守派一样谈论男女之间的先天差异。Asked how he would identify his politics today, he chuckled. “Well, it’s complicated.”被问及如今如何界定自己的政治立场时，他轻声笑了笑：“嗯，这很复杂。”Stuck in the dialectic困于辩证法Despite experiencing firsthand the downsides of intellectual celebrity — the glib critiques, the warped interpretations — Fukuyama has always wanted a broader audience beyond his fellow academics. He has two small offices on Stanford’s campus: one dominated by a big Ukrainian flag on the wall and the other by studio lights and camera equipment, which he uses to film content for his YouTube channel, “Frankly Fukuyama.” (It’s an endearingly corny double entendre — his friends call him Frank.)尽管亲身体验过知识界名人身份带来的种种弊端——轻率的批评、扭曲的解读，福山始终希望拥有学术界以外更广泛的读者群体。他在斯坦福校园里有两间小办公室：一间墙上挂着一面巨大的乌克兰国旗，另一间则摆满了演播室灯光和摄像设备，用来为他的YouTube频道“福山直言”(Frankly Fukuyama)拍摄内容。（这个名称是个可爱又老套的双关语——朋友们都叫他弗兰克。）“About a year ago I acquired a Gen Z social media manager,” he said, describing his efforts to reach a generation of young people who don’t read newspapers or watch TV. In the time of the last man, attention becomes the coin of the realm: “The moment you say something really edgy, you can see your numbers go up.”“大约一年前，我雇了一位Z世代的社交媒体运营，”他说，借此描述自己如何努力触达那些不看报纸也不看电视的年轻一代。在“最后之人”的时代，注意力成了硬通货：“只要你说了什么特别尖锐的话，马上就能看到数据往上涨。”“我想我们可能注定要陷入这样一种周期性的循环中——我们先是在成功的自由民主制度下经历一段和平与繁荣，”福山说道。“我们厌倦了它，然后试图摧毁它。”Inside the classroom, his approach is decidedly different. He’s the director of the master’s program in public policy and teaches a class on “problem-solving in the real world.” The day I was there, I watched him teach a case study on the failed effort in the last decade to create a smart city in Toronto.而在课堂上，他的方式完全不同。他是公共政策硕士项目的主任，教授一门名为“现实世界中的问题解决”课程。到访那天，我旁听了他讲授的一个案例，内容是关于过去十年间多伦多创建智慧城市的失败尝试。Fukuyama, standing at the front of a room encircled with white boards, skillfully guided two dozen students through the small-bore, technocratic details of this Canadian initiative in urban planning. The point of the class was to examine issues at a granular level, he told me: “We’re probably not going to do a case on how Israel should deal with Hamas.”福山站在一间四壁布满白板的教室前方，熟练地引导二十多名学生分析这项加拿大城市规划倡议中那些琐碎的技术细节。他告诉我，这门课的目的是从微观层面审视问题：“我们大概不会用以色列该如何对付哈马斯来做案例。”There’s something curious about seeing Fukuyama — one of the few American political theorists with public name recognition — instruct students in the finer points of municipal projects instead of enchanting them with big ideas. But the absence of philosophy flows directly from his philosophy. After all, if you believe that history has ended and “the really big questions” have been settled, you might well decide that the remaining questions are principally ones of policy and implementation.看到福山——少数几位拥有公众知名度的美国政治理论家之一——向学生讲解市政项目的细枝末节，而非用宏大理念吸引他们，这多少有些令人诧异。但哲学的缺席恰恰源自他的哲学。毕竟，如果你相信历史已经终结，“真正的大问题”已经解决，你很可能就会认定，剩下的问题主要就是政策和执行层面的了。This attraction to the nuts and bolts of problem-solving has a corollary in his private life, too. Fukuyama is a lifelong tinkerer; he dedicates multiple chapters in his memoir to his multiple hobbies. He used to build drones and fly them on campus. At his home, where he lives with his wife and their dog (the couple’s three children are grown), he keeps racks of computer servers that he built to store music and movies. He showed me some gorgeous bow-back chairs and a handsome card table that he crafted by hand. He derives evident satisfaction from making stuff that works. His original title for the memoir was “Building Things.”这种对解决问题时具体操作细节的着迷，在他的私人生活中也有对应的体现。福山是个终身的“动手派”；他在回忆录中用多个章节讲述了自己的各种爱好。他曾经组装无人机，在校园里放飞。在他与妻子和爱犬同住的家中（三个子女均已长大成人），放着他自己组装的一排排电脑服务器，用来存储音乐和电影。他向我展示了几把漂亮的弓背椅和一张精致的牌桌，都是他自己制作的。制作出能正常使用的东西，显然给他带来了满足感。他回忆录原来的标题就叫《造物》(Building Things)。Yet I caught an occasional glimpse of someone who seemed a little wilder and less prudent. There was a motorcycle parked in his driveway. (It’s a Yamaha; he used to ride a Harley.) A longtime friend, Mark Cordover, told me that when the family was living in McLean, Va., a couple of decades ago, Fukuyama took up cross-country biking and immediately ventured onto one of Virginia’s most treacherous trails. Biking with him, Cordover was “scared out of my mind.”不过，我偶尔也能瞥见他性格中更狂野、不那么谨慎的一面。他的车道上停着一辆摩托车（是雅马哈，他以前骑哈雷）。他的老友马克·科多弗告诉我，大约20年前，他们一家住在弗吉尼亚州麦克莱恩时，福山迷上了越野骑行，而且一上来就挑战弗吉尼亚州最险峻的路线之一。和他一起骑行时，科多弗“吓得魂飞魄散”。Fukuyama also put a ramp in front of his home to try out bike jumping and proceeded to break his elbow. While we were walking together on Stanford’s sprawling campus, with cyclists zooming by in every direction, he would stride into intersections without so much as a pause. Inevitably, he’s been hit by speeding e-bikes a couple of times; one collision was bad enough that he had to be taken away in an ambulance.福山还曾在家门口搭起坡道，尝试骑行跳跃，结果摔断了手肘。我们一起走在斯坦福广阔的校园里时，单车从四面八方疾驰而过，他却常常大步跨入路口，连停都不停。他因此不可避免地几次被飞驰的电动自行车撞到；其中一次撞得相当严重，他不得不用救护车送走。It’s striking that the methodical builder of practical objects can also be a rash risk-taker who jeopardizes his physical safety with confounding regularity. “I get into a lot of accidents,” he sheepishly told me. But then it makes sense that the author of “The End of History and the Last Man” would embody his own dialectic.令人惊讶的是，这位做事有条不紊、擅长制作实用物件的人，同时也是一个鲁莽的冒险者，屡屡以令人费解的频率危及自身安全。“我经常出事故，”他有些难为情地告诉我。不过，作为《历史的终结及最后之人》的作者，他本人身上就充满了这种辩证的矛盾，倒也在情理之中。“I think that we may be fated to be in this kind of now cyclical system where we go through a period of peace and prosperity brought on by successful liberal democracy,” Fukuyama told me once we were safely seated in Stanford’s faculty club. “We get bored with it and then we try to destroy it. And we launch ourselves back into authoritarianism, conflict, war. And then we get tired of that, and we say, ‘Oh, maybe we should go back to liberal democracy again.’”“我想我们可能注定要陷入这样一种周期性的循环中——我们先是在成功的自由民主制度下经历一段和平与繁荣，”当我们终于安全地坐在斯坦福的教师俱乐部里时，福山对我说。“我们厌倦了它，然后试图摧毁它。我们把自己抛回威权主义、冲突和战争之中。然后我们又厌倦了那些，然后我们说，‘哦，也许我们该回到自由民主了。’”He seemed suspended in a place that might seem familiar to a lot of people these days, between hope and resignation: “I just don’t see that there are a whole lot of new ideas out there.”他似乎悬置于一种当今许多人都可能感到熟悉的状态中，介于希望与无奈之间：“我只是觉得，好像已经没有多少新想法了。”Jennifer Szalai是时报非虚构类书评人。翻译：经雷点击查看本文英文版。获取更多RSS：https://feedx.net https://feedx.site