End Of History Essay

Fukuyama takes up this subject in The Great Disruption, in which he trains his focus on the deterioration of morality and civic values in America and other developed countries between the 1960s and 1990s.

Fukuyama takes up this subject in The Great Disruption, in which he trains his focus on the deterioration of morality and civic values in America and other developed countries between the 1960s and 1990s.

Fukuyama also asserts that increasing mistrust breeds corresponding increases in crime, litigation, and corruption.

In the United States, Fukuyama observes, declining rates of participation in voluntary associations indicate a weakening of social commitment in general, and thus an erosion of valuable social capital that is difficult to replenish and without which society suffers detrimental effects.

Such rampant amorality, Fukuyama notes, is historically cyclical and typical of periods of great economic change—in the present case, the move from a post-industrial to an information society.

Fukuyama suggests that the women's liberation movement, though ultimately a positive force of social transformation, was also a major source of the “disruption.” Drawing upon research in anthropology, evolutionary biology, game theory, psychology, and moral philosophy, Fukuyama contends that humans by nature tend to self-organize and self-regulate in beneficial ways, leading to his optimistic conclusion that a new era of spontaneous, popular reform is on the horizon, a period during which people will likely demand higher standards of morality and responsibility among themselves, others, and institutions.

The following entry presents an overview of Fukuyama's career through 1999.

Social scientist Francis Fukuyama touched off a maelstrom of controversy with his provocative essay, “The End of History?

According to Fukuyama, high levels of social trust permit the organization of large, multilevel corporations and economies of scale, as evident in prosperous countries such as the United States, Germany, and Japan.

However, in nations such as China, Italy, and France, where trust is either insular, provincial, or weakly linked to the state, the ability to expand beyond small, family-owned businesses into the global marketplace is hampered.

Biographical Information Fukuyama was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in New York City by his Japanese parents.

His father, Yoshio, was a Congregationalist minister and professor of religion. from Cornell in 1974, Fukuyama began graduate work in comparative literature under Paul de Man at Yale University, then spent six months in Paris where he visited the classrooms of preeminent literary theorists Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.