Every now and then, a serious scholar wins the lottery. An academic journal publishes their research and the article crosses over into the mainstream, making them rich and famous. Fortune has smiled like this on many academics, but none so lucratively as Francis Fukuyama in 1989.

That summer, the National Interest featured Fukuyama’s article ‘The End of History?’, in which the author recognised both that the Cold War was ending and that he wasn’t sure what was coming next – hence the question mark in his title. Fukuyama drew on the Russian-French philosopher Alexander Kojève’s interpretations of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, and added his own analysis of Plato – not the usual recipe for a publishing sensation – to argue that the end of the Cold War did not mean just the end of an era, but ‘the end of History as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.

When the Berlin Wall came down later that year, Fukuyama seemed like the prophet of his age, a seer who could explain why the West had won and what the new world would look like. The march of globalisation through the decade that followed cemented Fukuyama’s stature. In 1992, he