text: I was intrigued by his "The End of History." I thought his  "Trust" was a brilliant book and used it extensively in my  masters thesis and doctoral dissertation. I only hope this latest book is a  disruption in an ongoing chain of good books. In the end, "The Great  Disruption" is a down right silly book. It has a lot of usefull data  but Fukuyama's humanistic ideology clouds it all. All his empirical data  and any real understanding of history undermine his polly-anna conclusion:  that things just have to get better because people are ultimately good.  Fukuyama proves that the moral consensus -- the social capital -- of the  earlier era has been wiped away. That crime has sky-rocketed and that the  apparent drops in recent crime rates are only the result of high  incarceration rates and lower percentages of younger men. Then he turns  around and wants us to believe that disfunctional behaviour has dropped  because people are naturally gregarious and have a natural inclination to  rebuild social capital. He doesn't bother to deal with societies -- like  Ethiopia -- that have never been able to build up enough social capital. He  doesn't really look any further back in history past about 1950. His  generalizations about the 19th century merely show how little he has taken  into account the big picture of history. He thinks (based on his ideology  of human goodness) that things just have to get better. If he had studied  Pitirim Sorokin for a really big picture of history, he would know better.  People can come to a similar optimistic conclusion as does Fukuyama but  they will need to be much better grounded in history if they are going to  make generalizations about long-term historical cycles. For that, I would  recommend Robert W. Fogel's "The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future  of Egalitarianism." Fogel, a Nobel prize winner, has all the optimism  of Fukuyama but with the history to back it up
  