In his new autobiography, Francis Fukuyama boasts that for decades “students in introductory classes in international relations all over the world were required to read [Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations] alongside The End of History.” The flex is warranted; during my undergrad we were assigned both essays in one of my classes on international law. Many intellectuals dream about reaching this level of notoriety. But for Fukuyama, fame came at a heavy price. Namely, he became the kind of thinker whose ideas everyone has an opinion on even while they resolutely avoid reading him (see 99 percent of recent conservative commentary on Karl Marx and Marxism for an example).

For years, Fukuyama’s problematic but provocative thesis about reaching the “end of history” was subjected to a lot of superficial criticism from the Left and the Right. A standard move by critical intellectuals was to hold Fukuyama up as the poster boy for smug triumphalist neoliberalism, resting thoughtlessly on its post–Cold War laurels. This was true even if, as Slavoj Žižek often points out, in practice most leftist intellectuals and parties seem to have accepted the inevitability of capitalist realism. On the other side of the fence, right-wing critics like Huntington chastised Fukuyama with a kind of squishy liberal optimism, hypothesizing that humanity wasn’t quite done clashing with itself yet.