Francis Fukuyama admits that he was wrong. He was wrong about Donald Trump. To his credit, the world’s most famous political scientist saw Trump coming long before anyone else.

An episode of The Simpsons famously foresaw a Trump presidency as early as 2000, 16 years before he was elected. But Fukuyama was eight years ahead of The Simpsons in nominating Trump as the sort of character who could pose a potential danger to the democratic order.

Illustration by Simon Letch

In his most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992, Fukuyama wrote that “a developer like Donald Trump” was the sort of person who could not be satisfied by the customary offerings of a democracy.

It was normal that each of us seek the kind of recognition that the ancient Greeks thought necessary to satisfy the part of the soul they called thymos, the part craving fulfilment through recognition by our fellow humans. This explains, in part, the appeal of democracy; it recognises all adult citizens as equally entitled to political recognition. But some of us demand more than recognition by our peers. Some demand to be acknowledged as superior, to dominate. Fukuyama dubbed this “megalothymia”.

“This desire to be recognised as superior would normally be a big problem in a democracy where everybody was supposed to be equal,” Fukuyama tells me, “and that you needed outlets, therefore, for this energy.”

The good news was that democracy, when paired with a free-market capitalist economy, would offer the necessary outlet: “The good thing about having a capitalist economy is that instead of being a dictator, you could be a billionaire, and I gave Trump as an example.” The compulsion for superior status could be channelled harmlessly into the pursuit of ever-greater piles of money.

It was a winning combination. Democracy granted political equality. Capitalism allowed a safety-valve economic inequality. Fukuyama posited that it was so good, this liberal democratic capitalism, that it would prove to be the ultimate evolution of human governance – “the end of history”. His conclusion galvanised an intense debate that has raged for decades. The book was “rarely read but often........

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