Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition by Francis Fukuyama

Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition a Book by Francis Fukuyama

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment marks Francis Fukuyama’s own concurrence with this complex of opinion: “Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited,” he writes, the Left “has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways.” In his view, the abdication of class politics has stranded the Left in a parlous condition. Without the votes of white workers, there can be no stable path to electoral victory; moreover, the “political correctness” mandated by left “identity politics” occasions a corresponding backlash: “The right has adopted the language and framing of identity from the left In his diagnosis of an excess of political particularism and its prescription of reintegrated national identity as the cure, Fukuyama joins with the other congregants of backlash theory. Only the care and scope he displays in holding to its central tenets is unique. Fukuyama never emulates the sensibility of grievance he purports to critique. His sentences strive to be as tolerant and impartial as the ideal democratic state they advocate. “Identity politics,” for Fukuyama, is not just a scapegoat. Its conception spans centuries and continents, and he traces its history before he wades into the wetlands of contemporary polemic ”

About Author

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, and Mosbacher DIrector of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Dr. Fukuyama has writtenon questions concerning governance, democratization, and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. His book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment will be published in Septmer 2018. Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, and was a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.