Wrong-Headed

Francis Fukuyama is famous for being wrong. Wrong about the end of history, wrong about Neoliberalism, and wrong, I am guessing here, to tell his wife that her butt did, in fact, look big in those jeans. Despite all this wrongness, he continues to prosper and now in what can only be seen as singular opportunity to be exceptionally wrong about nearly everything, he has released the first of two books in which he

mines the fields of anthropology, archaeology, biology, evolutionary psychology, economics, and, of course, political science and international relations to establish a framework for understanding the evolution of political institutions.

Ever eager to take humanity's ability to create its own history, he

posits a link between Darwinian natural selection and political evolution. Because human nature has universal, evolved characteristics, he writes, "human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures." Biology, he continues, "frames and limits the nature of institutions that are possible."

He want's to answer one

 fundamental question: Why do some states succeed while others collapse?

It's nice to see that his faith in fictive totalizing narratives wasn't diminished by the failure of Hegel's claim about the course and nature of history to bear anything like fruit. We can only wait in breathless anticipation for the inevitable moment when Fukuyama, once again, admits he was wrong.