[In the following review, Green offers an unfavorable evaluation of Trust.]

How is it that some people become famous while others do not? Of course, it smacks of sour grapes for one of the latter to ask this about one of the former, but Francis Fukuyama's career begs for the question. How exactly do you get ahead by boldly making one of the worst predictions in the history of social science? In case anyone has forgotten, six years ago he wrote that, with the fall of Communism, we've reached an “end of history,” marked by a “worldwide convergence in basic institutions around liberal democracy and market economics,” in which “the broad process of human historical evolution culminates not, as in the Marxist version, in socialism but rather in the Hegelian vision of a bourgeois liberal democratic society.” This is also a world in which “modern technology … shapes national economies in a coherent fashion,” so that “the world's advanced countries have no alternative model of political and economic organization other than democratic capitalism to which they can aspire.”

He's got to be kidding. The American economy (or the South Korean or Italian or Chinese or British economy) is “coherent”? The aspirants to “democratic capitalism” (Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, Patrick Buchanan, Charles Pasqua, Silvio Berlusconi) are trying to adopt liberal democratic political institutions? “Human societies … around the world” are restricted to a handful of nation-states, mostly in Western Europe and North America? How much effort does it take to notice that elites in one after the other of the “advanced countries” have sought to shed liberal institutions as fast as they can, in order to crush rebellions bound to arise as “the global capitalist division of labor” integrates all of us into a two-class world of unrelenting rigidity?

And what of Hegel, to whom Fukuyama explicitly compares himself? Yes, Hegel thought that a world of independent nation-states might reach the “end of history,” but only by manifesting the triumph of reason in their institutions. It doesn't take more than a cursory reading of The Philosophy of Right to discover that he didn't have in mind anything remotely like governments in thrall to organizations of multi-armed paranoiacs or neofascist thugs or (especially!) religious sectarians; or governments that deny a general duty to maintain the welfare of the poorest-off. Hegel notoriously toadied to the Prussian regime, but his euphemistic account still makes it sound a lot better than the Tory regime of 1995, or what we can expect for the United States by 1997. Bourgeois liberalism? If only. Any socialist nowadays would gladly settle for that. How about John Stuart Mill for President? Jefferson? Kant? Adam Smith? Lincoln? One is reminded of Gandhi's famous response on being asked what he thought of Western civilization, that “it would be a good thing.”

How to demonstrate this alleged convergence, as opposed to simply asserting it? The trick is methodological, assiduously perfected by Fukuyama in the more than 400 pages of Trust, almost all of which he borrows from other people's sociology or economics—Alice Amsden on South Korea, Ronald Dore on Japan, Michel Crozier on France, Charles Sabel and Michael Piore on the new regime of work, Alexis de Tocqueville on the United States and the ancien régime, Edward Banfield on Southern Italy, Max Weber on the Protestant Ethic and Confucianism, Mary Ann Glendon on rights, Samuel Huntington on the excesses of democracy … and on and on. Replace Marx's emphasis on historical materialism with Weber's on culture; “culturalism” then does the lion's share of the work. (“Cultural relativism,” the more familiar term, is an ethical stance; what I prefer to call “culturalism” is purely sociological.)

From a culturalist perspective, there are no inherent contradictions in capitalism that cry out for resolution; instead, there are many capitalisms, each based on a national culture, and each successful or not depending on how congruent the culture is with a lifeworld of market exchange—the best lifeworld available. Progressive economic life is based on a culture of generalized “trust,” or what Fukuyama calls “spontaneous sociability.” The best index of such sociability turns out to be widespread corporate conglomerations, monopolies, cartels, the zaibatsu, all of which indicate that their host-societies (Japan, Germany and the United States) have cultural understandings that generate trust in non-kin, most importantly, in professional corporate managers and engineers. Conversely, Confucian familism in China and Korea limits the spread of the impersonal corporate form, obliging the relatively inefficient state to take over the role of general entrepreneurship, while British class contempt dictates a destructive split between financial and industrial capital, and “amoral familism” in Southern Italy makes progressive economic development there all but impossible.

We are told that this spontaneous sociability is rooted in precapitalist political decentralization and in concomitant institutions of an elaborated civil society, such as the well-known web of reciprocal obligations in Japan that led to the post-World War II trust-based exchange of lifetime employment (nenko) for labor peace; or, in Germany, feudal guilds and the universal work ethic they fostered, which ultimately made possible an immensely elaborated welfare state; or, in the United States, Protestant sectarianism and its correlative, communal activism, which until recently balanced out a hypertrophied individualism.

It's helpful to compare this basically static account of capitalist development with such neo-Marxist versions of the same phenomenon as those of Rodney Hilton, Barrington Moore, Perry Anderson and Robert Brenner. Brenner's analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England, France and Poland describes social actors (lords and peasants, landowners and agricultural laborers), significant events (peasant rebellions in times of economic crisis) and transformative outcomes—different political settlements of these class struggles, resulting in different patterns of land tenure with consequently different implications for later economic activity. In Moore's account (from which Brenner took off), top-down transformations resulted in fascism (e.g., in Japan and Germany). Overall, these “historical materialist” approaches to change emphasize the role of struggles for power among social classes, rather than socially neutral abstractions such as “decentralization” or “communitarianism.”

Fukuyama's culturalist explanations, in contrast, are devoid of historical struggle, and tend to vanish into dust at the first sight of it. For example, the web of obligation in Japan, based on a cultural proclivity for “spontaneous sociability,” does almost the whole work of the Japanese “miracle”—until, that is, “the bursting of the bubble economy of the late 1980s.” Now, it appears, economic recession has put “tremendous pressures on the lifetime employment system,” so that “some large corporations have in fact resorted to layoffs.” And in Germany that same recession “created high and seemingly intractable levels of unemployment, and in the view of many observers it was precisely the communitarian aspects of the German postwar Sozialmarktwirtschaft that was to blame.” Just as in Japan, “the general intensification of global competition … will continue to put a great deal of pressure on German communitarian economic institutions,” and the welfare state may have to be downsized considerably. The Old Mole under Highgate Cemetery is surely saying at this point: Well, that's what I told you, isn't it? Cutthroat competition, a falling rate of profit, the need to maintain surplus value through a sloughing off of labor and a lowering of the average wage—what did you expect? The chapters on Japan and Germany, in fact, both end on an almost elegiac note: Hey guys, this communitarian stuff was nice while it lasted, but now let's get with global capitalism.

What is the point of these cross-cultural comparisons that come to nothing, especially since, as Fukuyama assures us, cultural patterns are not exportable? On the face of it, they seem to have nothing to do with Fukuyama's legendary convergence. Actually, though, the culturalist analysis makes his point, which is that there are many roads to capitalism, and some of them are communal rather than (liberal) individualistic or state-oriented. And so, “a corollary to the convergence of institutions at the ‘end of history’ is the widespread acknowledgment that in post-industrial societies, further improvements cannot be achieved through ambitious social engineering.” Put simply, the United States could stand some communitarianism of the old style (German, Japanese or American Puritan); what it doesn't need are strong public institutions.

The target of these 457 pages of other people's sociology is educated, prosperous and powerful American elites, who receive a simple and helpful message: Nothing painful or costly has to be done, because nothing can be done. Install Japanese production techniques (“lean manufacturing”) in your workplaces to produce company loyalty in the place of job-productive trade unionism, provide in-house flexible training, and that's about it. Your taxes needn't go up, and the state won't bother you because the state can't accomplish anything worthwhile. We philosophize; you are philosophized. Your history has ended, buddy; mine has just begun. Back to Chiapas with you. Or to inner-city ghettos, whose inhabitants, per Fukuyama (out of Thomas Sowell) are “deracinated,” without entrepreneurial spirit or institutions of communal self-help; and thus beyond other people's help.

It's impossible to tell if Fukuyama intends this book to be read as an essay in political negativity, but that's certainly how it will be read by those who matter. This is especially so since he peddles the usual line of American nostalgia (“The Way Things Never Were,” in Stephanie Koontz's wonderful title), according to which we were a trusting, communal bunch until—guess what?—yes, the 1960s. (The nostalgicists should all be forced to read an entertaining book on early twentieth-century labor struggles by Louis Adamic called, simply, Dynamite. Or any book on slavery or Reconstruction. Or … ) Then came the welfare explosion, the litigation explosion, the rights explosion and abortion, and so—here he appropriates the recent work of Robert Putnam—Americans stopped being communal, stopped joining voluntary organizations. And it's all our fault!

Well, if Putnam and Fukuyama insist on looking at bowling clubs and P.T.A.s, that's what they'll find. But have they heard of the N.R.A. and the Christian Coalition? It's not community that's lacking, but civility and a respect for equal justice. Putnam uses the decline of union membership as an index of failing communalism, but somehow he and Fukuyama have missed the development of corporate unionbusting as one of the major American growth sectors of the past two decades. Do workers distrust managers because of too much individualism? Actually, most of the participants in “the rights explosion” whom I know belong to many voluntary associations and are intensely communal, though it's true they don't go bowling much. Does standing in vigils count?

Fukuyama (like his source Mary Ann Glendon) does not consider the possibility that our unending racial and sexual confrontation is a cause as well as an outcome of communal breakdown. Nor does he notice the savage class warfare that capital (not labor) has been waging for two decades. Nor the way in which social decay in the face of global redistribution has produced the distorted sociability of superpatriotism (“We're Number One!”). Nor the enveloping culture of greed, hyped not by “inner-city African-Americans” or tort lawyers but by good old-fashioned economic elites and their pet Presidents. That is, he doesn't notice much because he keeps looking for “culture,” instead of looking for people who are doing things to other people.

In a throwaway that sums up his critique of liberal individualism, Fukuyama remarks that Asians—especially the familistic Chinese—have difficulty understanding American insistence on human rights because of the abstract universalistic principles on which such rights are based. I pondered this notion. What might it mean? The best I could come up with is that people with Confucian rather than Christian traditions think that it's perfectly O.K. to torture nonkin. Do they really? And let's see, was the embrace by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Commentary magazine of Argentine torturers due to some defect in Irish Catholic or Jewish culture? What culture trains all those Latin American torturer/murderers at Fort Benning? When the U.S. Air Force decided that the best way to prepare female pilots for rape was by raping them, whose cultural tradition was that? Men's?

The world over, a depressingly large number of people will torture and murder in the pursuit of power, or out of the desire to maintain it (“maintaining order” is what this is usually called), and if we are among those people it appears that our only internal constraint will be the urgency of our need. External constraints, on the other hand, are considerably more important. There's plenty of abuse of rights in the United States, but a lot less than in China, and the reason is not some kind of communitarianism but because we have created a variety of institutions to restrain such abuses, and China hasn't. On the other hand, we're not nearly so good as the Germans at creating institutions to prevent and alleviate economic despair. Of course, cultural patterns do count here, as this comparison suggests; a one-sided economic materialism (as Weber put it) cannot by itself explain the differences. But the overemphasis on culture is worse, because it justifies a cop-out on action, on taking as much responsibility as one can reasonably manage for the state of the world. That's why when I see the word “culture” these days, I reach for my eraser.

Actually, no one will really read Trust, except reviewers like me, because it's 200 pages too long and repeats every point many times. But everyone in a certain milieu will talk about it, because as a crash course in comparative political economy and sociology it enables them to think they know what they're talking about when they chit-chat about lifetime employment in Japan or the high cost of the German welfare state. And it fits perfectly with the dominant political consciousness of the day.