Our Posthuman Future
Encyclopedia
Francis Fukuyama
Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of...
. In it, he discusses the potential threat to liberal democracy
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...
that use of new and emerging biotechnologies for transhumanist ends poses.
From the back cover of the paperback edition:
A decade after his now-famous pronouncement of "the end of historyEnd of historyEnd of history may refer to:* The advent of a particular political and economic system as a signal of the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government, as posited by Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Francis Fukuyama*The...
", Francis Fukuyama argues that as a result of biomedical advances, we are facing the possibility of a future in which our humanity itself will be altered beyond recognition. Fukuyama sketches a brief history of man's changing understanding of human nature: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that humans had "natural ends" to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama argues that the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendants will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken with the best of intentions.
Publication history
- Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002, hardcover (ISBN 0-374-23643-7)
- Picador USA, 2003, paperback (ISBN 0-312-42171-0).
See also
- The End of History and the Last ManThe End of History and the Last ManThe End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his 1989 essay "The End of History?", published in the international affairs journal The National Interest...
- Brave New World argument
- The Abolition of ManThe Abolition of ManThe Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," and uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of...