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many of the objections have come from religious thinkers who appealed to God’s commands. Such arguments have limited appeal in the largely secular world of Western philosophy. Other defenses of objective truth in ethics made no appeal to re...

the view that moral judgments state objective truths has been out of fashion since the 1930’s

or that democracies will find a way to solve their problems. I think we’ve got a number of long-term problems in the United States that don’t seem to be getting addressed with the current political system.

are there any developments in bio-technologies in the past nine years that you find particularly disturbing?

and I think we’ll be disappointed in the short run. I don’t think the more pro-Western forces are the ones that will end up on top in the short-run. But we’ve got to start somewhere.

or the International Republican Institute

what can we do to promote democracy in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring”?

and the Bush administration hadn’t really thought through the implications of invading Iraq. I still think there are ways that the United States can help promote democracy

and our ability to construct democracies — to your “falling-out” with neoconservatism. Was that “falling out” just local to some of the failures and disappointments of the Bush years or was it a break with the intellectual project as a whol...

what I was saying is that there was a theory of history among progressive intellectuals for most of the 20th century. That theory of history was Marxism. And according to the Marxists

I won’t attempt one — but you’ve made oblique references to your own revisions and criticisms. How does the rise of China and the current Arab unrest

because without rule of law they can’t keep this up. In a way the challenge that contemporary China poses it that they are doing well

it wasn’t thinking about the effect on kinship. It was acting in a self-interested way

social order at one stage depended on extended kinship — people living in tribes where people traced ancestry to a common ancestor that may be three

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...

2011 -- It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call Francis Fukuyama one of the most important thinkers in America. He’s a rare triple threat in public-intellectual life — maintaining high appointments in academe

who got into such a sulk recently that he took 11 days off work

consumed by hypocrisy as it cheers on some brave Arabs (but not those in Syria) while brutalizing its own seekers of the freedom promised in 1979. Arabs aren’t buying Iranian hypocrisy. Only Iran’s command of Revolutionary Guard force and t...

long at the top of the Washington agenda

the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency