“Francis Fukuyama” was once the punchline to a gibe that went: “Have you heard the latest political science joke?” The reference was to the 1992 book that made Fukuyama famous, The End of History and the Last Man, and what was assumed to be its thesis: with the defeat of communism, liberal (capitalist) democracy had been revealed as history’s ultimate destination.

Francis Wheen captured the general tone of derision when he called it “one of the worst predictions in social science”. Didn’t the rising smoke from the Twin Towers simply falsify it? Fukuyama’s critics on the Right, no admirers of liberalism, preferred the idea of a “clash of civilisations”. Those on the Left, dreaming of a future beyond capitalism, thought him a smug bourgeois shill.

The jokes came from people who hadn’t read very far past the first half of the book’s title. They didn’t attend to Fukuyama’s explicit acknowledgement that there were many places across the world where history resolutely continued. All he denied was the possibility of a serious, realistic and coherent world-historical alternative to liberalism (and Osama bin Laden hardly provided that).

Of his more recent writings, his two-volume work of historically informed political theory – The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014) – has been acknowledged as a serious contribution to the subject, its length and erudition revealing him as better than a hack who happened to catch the political wind of the early 1990s.

His latest book is rather shorter. What he calls “classical” or “humane” liberalism, he reminds us, “is under severe threat around the world today”. And here, he is referring to principles – “equal individual rights, law, and freedom” – that could in principle be shared by people who call themselves progressives or conservatives. But in the face of its unpopularity these days among the bien-pensant, “its virtues need to be clearly articulated and celebrated once again”.