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.
