Francis Fukuyama (1952-) is known for his work on political philosophy and international relations. One of his most famous ideas is the concept of “the end of history,” which he presented in his book “The End of History and the Last Man.” In this work, Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War marked the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and the triumph of liberal democracy as the final form of government. He also explored themes related to modernity, democracy, and the challenges facing liberal democracies in the contemporary world.
Today, however, we share the philosophy of Fukuyama from his much more focused work ‘Trust: The Social Virtues And The Creation Of Prosperity’, which was originally published in 1995 and was intended as a follow-up to his “Last Man” concept. The book examines both the challenges of building and maintaining trust within a society and the benefits that trust can bring in terms of social cohesion, economic development, and overall prosperity.
A Top Level Review Of ‘Trust’
Key points from Fukuyama’s ‘Trust’ include:
Trust as Social Virtue & Economic Impact – Fukuyama emphasizes trust as a crucial social virtue that underpins successful economic and social interactions within a society, and highlights how high levels of trust can lead to increased economic prosperity by reducing transaction costs, fostering cooperation, and enabling efficient functioning of institutions.
Trust & Organization – Fukuyama discusses how cultural norms, historical experiences, and institutional structures influence the level of trust within a society. The importance of trust in institutions, such as government, businesses, and social organizations, is explored as a key factor in societal well-being and economic growth.
Quotes are excerpted from Free Press paperback edition of ‘Trust’, published by Simon & Schuster in 1996, and organized into topics.
Groups
“… durable social institutions cannot be legislated into existence…” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“A high-trust society can organize its workplace on a more flexible and group-oriented basis, with more responsibility delegated to lower levels of the organization.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 3 – Scale and Trust
“… to create a variety of new, voluntary social groups that [are] not based on kinship… [requires] a high degree of trust between individuals… and hence a solid basis for social capital.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 6 – The Art Of Association Around the World
“… lack of trust outside the family makes it hard for unrelated people to form groups or organizations, including economic enterprises.” – Part 2 – Low-Trust Societies And The Paradox Of Family Values – Chapter 8 – A Loose Tray of Sand
“There is… no single bridge to sociability beyond the family that spans all cultures exhibiting a high degree of trust and spontaneous sociability.” – Part 5 – Enriching Trust – Chapter 28 – Return to Scale
Liberty
“The enormous prosperity created by technology-driven capitalism serves as an incubator for a liberal regime of universal and equal rights, in which the struggle for recognition of human dignity culminates.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
Social Capital
“A thriving civil society depends on a people’s habits, customs, and ethics – attributes that can be shaped only indirectly through conscious political action and must otherwise be nourished through an increased awareness and respect for culture.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“… the economy constitutes one of the most fundamental and dynamic arenas of human sociability. There is scarcely any form of economic activity, from running a dry-cleaning business to fabricating large-scale integrated circuits, that does not require the social collaboration of human beings. And while people work in organizations to satisfy their individual needs, the workplace also draws people out of their private lives and connects them to a wider social world. That connectedness is not just a means to the end of earning a paycheck but an important end of human life itself.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“… economic activity represents a crucial part of social life and is knit together by a wide variety of norms, rules, moral obligations, and other habits that together shape the society.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“… ‘social capital’ [is] the ability of people to work together for common purposes in groups and organizations… a distinct portion of human capital has to do with people’s ability to associate with each other, that is critical not only to economic life but to virtually every other aspect of social existence as well. The ability to associate depends, in turn, on the degree to which communities share norms and values and are able to subordinate individual interests to those of larger groups.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it… Social capital differs from other forms of human capital insofar as it is usually created and transmitted through cultural mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 3 – Scale and Trust
“Acquisition of social capital… requires habituation to the moral norms of a community and, in its context, the acquisition of virtues like loyalty, honesty, and dependability. The group, moreover, has to adopt common norms as a whole before trust can become generalized among its members. The proclivity for sociability is much harder to acquire than other forms of human capital, but because it is based on ethical habit, it is also harder to modify or destroy.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 3 – Scale and Trust
“Social capital is not distributed uniformly among societies.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 3 – Scale and Trust
“Social capital and the proclivity for spontaneous sociability have important economic consequences… there is a relationship between high-trust societies with plentiful social capital… Societies well supplied with social capital will be able to adopt new organizational forms more readily than those with less, as technology and markets change.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 3 – Scale and Trust
“Social capital, the crucible of trust and critical to the health of an economy, rests on cultural roots.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 4 – Languages of Good and Evil
“Lack of spontaneous sociability becomes more pronounced the poorer one gets, as one would expect given the causal linkage between inability to cohere socially and poverty.” – Part 4 – American Society And The Crisis Of Trust – Chapter 25 – Blacks and Asians in America
“… communities of shared values, whose members are willing to subordinate their private interests for the sake of larger goals of the community as such, have become rarer. And it is these moral communities alone that can generate the kind of social trust that is critical to organizational efficiency.” – Part 4 – American Society And The Crisis Of Trust – Chapter 26 – The Vanishing Middle
“Unlike other types of economic pathology, the causal relationship between social capital and economic performance is indirect and attenuated.” – Part 4 – American Society And The Crisis Of Trust – Chapter 26 – The Vanishing Middle
“Social capital is critical to prosperity and to what has come to be called competitiveness, but its more important consequences may not be felt in the economy so much as in social and political life.”- Part 5 – Enriching Trust – Chapter 31 – The Spiritualization of Economic Life
“The ability to cooperate socially is dependent on prior habits, traditions, and norms, which themselves serve to structure the market… The concept of social capital makes clear why capitalism and democracy are so closely related. A healthy capitalist economy is one in which there will be sufficient social capital in the underlying society to permit businesses, corporations, networks, and the like to be self-organizing… That self-organizing proclivity is exactly what is necessary to make democratic political institutions work…” – Part 5 – Enriching Trust – Chapter 31 – The Spiritualization of Economic Life
“Social capital is like a ratchet that is more easily turned in one direction than another; it can be dissipated by the actions of governments much more readily than those governments can build it up again.” – Part 5 – Enriching Trust – Chapter 31 – The Spiritualization of Economic Life
Sovereignty
“… in postindustrial societies, further improvements cannot be achieved through ambitious social engineering. We no longer have realistic hopes that we can create a ‘great society’ through large government programs.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“A liberal state is ultimately a limited state, with government activity strictly bounded by a sphere of individual liberty. If such a society is not to become anarchic or otherwise ungovernable, then it must be capable of self-government at levels of social organization below the state.” – Part 5 – Enriching Trust – Chapter 31 – The Spiritualization of Economic Life
“… the reduction of trust in a society will require a more intrusive, rule-making government to regulate social relations.” – Part 5 – Enriching Trust – Chapter 31 – The Spiritualization of Economic Life
Trust
“… a nation’s well-being, as well as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“… rules or habits [give] members of the community grounds for trusting one another… communities are united by trust.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“Out of… shared values comes trust, and trust… has a large and measurable economic value.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“Communities depend on mutual trust and will not arise spontaneously without it.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 3 – Scale and Trust
“Trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behaviour, based on commonly shared norms [rather ‘moral values’ in Chapter 13], on the part of other members of that community.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 3 – Scale and Trust
“… people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which has to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means. This legal apparatus, serving as a substitute for trust, entails what economists call ‘transaction costs’. Widespread distrust in a society, in other words, imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 3 – Scale and Trust
“We often take a minimal level of trust and honesty for granted and forget that they pervade everyday economic life and are crucial to its smooth functioning.” – Part 3 – High-Trust Societies And The Challenges Of Sustaining Sociability – Chapter 13 – Friction-Free Economies
“From an economic standpoint, there are certain clear advantages to being able to operate in a relatively rule-free environment… There is usually an inverse relationship between rules and trust: the more people depend on rules to regulate their interactions, the less they trust each other and vice versa.” – Part 3 – High-Trust Societies And The Challenges Of Sustaining Sociability – Chapter 19 – Weber and Taylor
“… trust is not the consequence of rational calculation; it arises from sources like religion or ethical habit that have nothing to do with modernity.” – Part 5 – Enriching Trust – Chapter 30 – After the End of Social Engineering
Virtues
“…every human being seeks to have his or her dignity recognized.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“Law, contract, and economic rationality provide a necessary but not sufficient basis for both the stability and prosperity of post-industrial societies; they must as well be leavened with reciprocity, moral obligation, duty towards community, and trust, which are based in habit rather than rational calculation.” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 1 – On The Human Situation at the End Of History
“The social virtues, including honesty, reliability, cooperativeness, and a sense of duty to others, are critical for incubating the individual [virtues]…” – Part 1 – The Idea Of Trust – Chapter 5 – The Social Virtues
“Sociability is… a vital support for self-governing political institutions and is, in many respects, an end in itself.” – Part 5 – Enriching Trust – Chapter 27 – Late Developers
Thanks for reading!