Today, as we look around the world, it sometimes seems to be spinning out of control. It feels like a time, to quote Yates, when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, when the best lack all conviction and the worst seem full of passionate intensity.

Does the fault lie in the vagaries of human nature, or in our leaders and institutions?  The answer is that both are intimately linked in ways that, when fully understood, explain the essence of how the world works.

This is the journey that Francis Fukuyama takes us on in his two volume masterwork on political order.  He has just published the second volume, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

My conversation with Francis Fukuyama: