2D
European countries, and which we therefore can’t take for granted. So, as you see, the normative concern is separate from the empirical question of whether democracy is inevitable.
SHAFFER: Origins incorporates economics, anthropology, philosophy, and social psychology, for lessons about political order. Is that kind of study too rare today?
FUKUYAMA: This ts partly the fault of the structure of academia. There’s such a premium placed on specialization and narrowness that it’s very hard to think more broadly and to cross disciplinary boundaries. I work at Stanford in an interdisciplinary institute, and I’ve been associated with these kinds of outfits for most of my years. And those are where the most interesting research gets done.
SHAFFER: What field outside of political science has the most important insights for understanding political order?
FUKUYAMA: That’s hard to say. I don’t know if there is one. Part of the problem is economics — it’s a very important discipline, but in a way it’s colonized the rest of the social sciences. A lot of political analysis in academia is driven by this model of everybody being a rational decision maker driven by more or less material interests. There’s obviously something to that, but it’s a very limited way of looking about politics, which is about dignity and values and ideas that can’t be explained in material terms. Other disciplines — sociology and anthropology — have gotten at those things better than economics has.
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