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In Trust, a sweeping assessment of the emerging global economic order "after History," Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the hidden principles that make a good and prosperous society, and his findings strongly challenge the orthodoxies of both left and right.
In fact, economic life is pervaded by culture and depends, Fukuyama maintains, on moral bonds of social trust. This is the unspoken, unwritten bond between fellow citizens that facilitates transactions, empowers individual creativity, and justifies collective action. In the global struggle for economic predominance that is now upon us - a struggle in which cultural differences will become the chief determinant of national success - the social capital represented by trust will be as important as physical capital.
But trust varies greatly from one society to another, and a map of how social capital is distributed around the world yields many surprises.
The greatness of this country, he maintains, was built not on its imagined ethos of individualism but on the cohesiveness of its civil associations and the strength of its communities. But Fukuyama warns that our drift into a more and more extreme rights-centered individualism - a radical departure from our past communitarian tradition - holds more peril for the future of America than any competition from abroad.
