Trusting economics? A review of Francis Fukuyama's Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

Theology Today, Jul 1996 by Stackhouse, Max L

Francis Fukuyama, a noted Rand Corporation scholar, created quite a stir several years ago when he published The End of History and the Last Man. The title, of course, referred not only to the collapse of the Soviet Union following on the heels, half a century earlier, of the defeat of the Nazi Reich but also to the intellectual collapse of the Hegelian and, subsequently, the Marxist and historicist interpretations of political economics and of the Nietzschian and, subsequently, the Heideggerian and deconstructionist interpretations of culture. All of these strands of "historical-critical" understanding have, he argued, been exhausted, although for many, postmodern residues of Cartesian doubt remain the root of their hermeneutics of suspicion.

Fukuyama's view received a great deal of comment and criticism. Historians said that what he calls historicism is not what they do. Social theorists said that he prematurely wrote off radical ways of thinking by assuming that the dialectics of history are concluded and that liberal democracy is spreading everywhere. This criticism was often accompanied by the presumption that if one did not embrace the critic's view of things, one must be either a reactionary trying to impose premodern modes of thought on contemporary conditions or an advocate of bourgeois, Western, imperialist capitalism.

In Fukuyama's new work, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free, 1995. 447 pp. $25.00), we find a suggestive companion to the earlier volume, and it turns out that his critics are partly right but mostly wrong. He does see deep connections between premodern patterns of life and what is presently the case. Not everything has been changed by modernity, and the fruits of modernity are substantially adopted into patterns of life that existed long before modernity. Indeed, "modernization" itself may well be the consequence of deeply rooted beliefs and practices that modernity can neither explain nor sustain alone.

Further, he does think that certain kinds of corporate-capitalist economics, although not the possessive individualism loved by some theorists, are more likely to bring prosperity and to relieve people of their poverty and dependency than is Hegelian-Marxist statism or Nietzschian-Foucaultian nihilism. In the long run, no one who wants to survive, to help a people flourish, to build a viable society, or to live well will choose them.

But his argument is deeper and broader than his critics anticipated. Since both the historicist and nihilist perspectives are based on forms of critical thought that breed distrust, they fail to see what generates the social capital that is the basis for peaceful politics and productive economies. And even if economic theories of "rational choice" can account for a substantial percentage of people's economic behavior, they miss the critically important influences that are culturally framed. What enables human societies to flourish is not suspicion, deconstruction, and self-interest, but just the opposite: It is trust, a social virtue, formed in certain kinds of relationships. The immediate question, therefore, is this: In what and in whom do people trust, and what difference does it make if they build networks of trust one way rather than another?

To answer this question, Fukuyama turns to the comparative study of "civil society," that network of "intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities and churches," that builds on "the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations." He argues that a "thriving civil society depends on a people's habits, customs and ethics" and, mediated by the family, is inevitably also shaped by religious traditions. In other words, he seeks to study the ways in which trust, and thus civil society, and thus peoples over time, flourish, as evidenced in the kind and quality of their material development.

Fukuyama argues that we are facing, around the world, both a convergence of common structures-patterns of constitutional democracy, technological and communication interchange, and corporations as primary actors in economic life-and a greater awareness of cultural differences. The Italians, the Japanese, and the Americans, for example, simply do not conduct their politics, their media, or their management in the same way, and much is misunderstood if cultural differences are not recognized. Yet, cultures are not totally self-enclosed, and conflict between them is not inevitable. Cultures can grow or develop latent possibilities within themselves, and they can borrow or resist elements from other cultures. Still more, we can learn much from how distinct cultures support or inhibit the trust that allows them to interact with each other. The capacity to learn from and to compare cultures is itself revealing, for it reflects both a deep common humanity behind the very serious differences and certain common structures present in every society that allow us to recognize similarities beyond the differences.