Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History?" is often misread as triumphalist. In his book "The End of History and the Last Man," he argued liberal democracy might win but atop a cramped vision of the human soul, lacking room for recognition, greatness, and daring. Such a system, he thought, would not be stable for long.

Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford University, has written many books since, including a two-volume series on political orders and a defense of liberalism. His new book is a memoir: "In the Realm of the Last Man."

In this conversation, Ezra Klein and Fukuyama revisit the ideas of the end of history and the last man. Fukuyama explains that "the end of history" was not his phrase but Hegel's, referring to History with a capital H—a directional, progressive process. The question was not the end of events but the objective toward which history leads. Marxists believed the end was a Communist utopia. Fukuyama observed in the late 1980s that we would stop at liberal democracy and capitalism, the practical end of history.