Identity: The demand for dignity and policies of dissatisfaction, by: Francis Fukuyama

Global politics today no longer focus on the traditional conflict between the left and the right. From the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and environmental parties, to European nationalist movements against immigration, refugees, minorities, and multiculturalism, to white supremacist Trumpism, to dignity revolutions and the Arab Spring, global politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century revolve around identity politics and the demand for recognition of the dignity of groups feeling resentment due to marginalization, erasure, or threats to their existence. Fukuyama attempts to understand the emerging identity conflict mainly between liberalism and populism (which he defines doctrinally and problematically as “democracy without liberalism”), by examining the two types of identity produced by economic and social-individual modernity, through Luther, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, which theoretically ended with the adoption of the Bill of Human Rights; and the collective, through Herder and Lagrange, which led aggressive nationalism to its fascist and Nazi end—detailing the history of equal recognition of dignity and humanity, and concluding that populist discourse is impossible by reducing identity to racial, ethnic, or religious sectarianism. The book argues that modern societies are inherently pluralistic, and that the only possible community identity today is “covenantal identity” based on democratic principles and liberal openness, within local cultural containers fundamentally shaped by language. The book thus raises urgent questions that all cultures—including Arab and Islamic culture—must reconsider, provide modern answers to, and reflect on their dimensions and implications. Along the way, the book thoroughly discusses the crisis of the global liberal system that originally allowed populism to emerge, offering (as in Fukuyama’s last two books: The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay) important modifications to the core thesis of the end of history. – Translator: “Read this book to know what’s happening… and don’t ever say later that no one warned you…” Observer magazine. Number of pages: 224