Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity

Product Description

In his bestselling
The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War would also mean the beginning of a struggle for position in the rapidly emerging order of 21st-century capitalism. In
Trust, a penetrating assessment of the emerging global economic order “after History,” he explains the social principles of economic life and tells us what we need to know to win the coming struggle for world dominance.
Challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right, Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the underlying principles that foster social and economic prosperity. Insisting that we cannot divorce economic life from cultural life, he contends that in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy.
A brilliant study of the interconnectedness of economic life with cultural life,
Trust is also an essential antidote to the increasing drift of American culture into extreme forms of individualism, which, if unchecked, will have dire consequences for the nation’s economic health.

From Publishers Weekly

Fukuyama argues that a nation’s economic strength is tied to its social unity, and that America is in danger of losing both.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Robert Kaplan
Los Angeles Times Book Review A work of interdisciplinary synthesis that shows a superior mind in action.

Amitai Etzioni
Washington Post Book World The ultimate book for those who seek to understand economics but realize that they are nestled in societies and cultures. A whole new way of doing economics.

Johanna Neuman
USA Today The book, like its title, is an investment worth making.

About the Author

Francis Fukuyama, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, lives in McLean, Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

On the Human Situation at the End of History

As we approach the twenty-first century, a remarkable convergence of political and economic institutions has taken place around the world. Earlier in this century, deep ideological cleavages divided the world’s societies. Monarchy, fascism, liberal democracy, and communism were bitter competitors for political supremacy, while different countries chose the divergent economic paths of protectionism, corporatism, the free market, and socialist centralized planning. Today virtually all advanced countries have adopted, or are trying to adopt, liberal democratic political institutions, and a great number have simultaneously moved in the direction of market-oriented economies and integration into the global capitalist division of labor.

As I have argued elsewhere, this movement constitutes an “end of history,” in the Marxist-Hegelian sense of History as a broad evolution of human societies advancing toward a final goal. As modern technology unfolds, it shapes national economies in a coherent fashion, interlocking them in a vast global economy The increasing complexity and information intensity of modern life at the same time renders centralized economic planning extremely difficult. The enormous prosperity created by technology-driven capitalism, in turn, serves as an incubator for a liberal regime of universal and equal rights, in which the struggle for recognition of human dignity culminates. While many countries have had trouble creating the institutions of democracy and free markets, and others, especially in parts of the former communist world, have slid backward into fascism or anarchy, the world’s advanced countries have no alternative model of political and economic organization other than democratic capitalism to which they can aspire.

This convergence of institutions around the model of democratic capitalism, however, has not mean