Rating: 
Summary: Francis Fukuyama Seems To Have One Hand Tied Behind His Back
Review: "The Great Disruption" asserts that profound changes of the last thirty years has brought about a cultural paradigm shift unlike any other previously recorded in human history. Francis Fukuyama delves into the awkward subject of moral values and their importance in underpinning a viable democratic social order. One is warned at an early age to think twice before discussing the innately divisive issues of religion and values. Fukuyama, however, is a social scientist, and has chosen to tackle this dilemma knowing he risks irritating everyone, and ultimately satisfying no one. Furthermore, Fukuyama enters this fray with one hand tied behind his back. His membership within a professional environment demanding empirical data to back up every single claim tends to encourage a mind-set where one may eventually fail see the forest because the trees get in the way. I adamantly contend, for instance, that the at least subconscious belief in the rewards and punishment of an after life is non negotiable in keeping people civilized. Values are essentially religious in nature. A dichotomy doesn't really exist when one profoundly researches the matter. Self described secularist human beings will always remain a statistical minority. Alas, how do I prove these assertions? I am immediately taken to task by Atheists arguing that I have little evidence to prove what is actually in their heart of hearts. Where does one go from here? The writings of Shakespeare, Mortimer Adler, or a G.K. Chesterton may be valued, but how does one devise empirical testing of their valuable insights? Existentialist concerns take a beating when procrustean logical positivist methods are solely employed to validate their legitimacy. This challenge essentially turned the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, into a confused and tragic figure. Fukuyama is surviving his ordeal in better fashion than Wittgenstein, but I sense the academic scholar still feels overwhelmed by the limits of his professional tools.Esperanto is the futile attempt at coldly and analytically inventing a world language. A mere handful of academics and other peculiar devotees keep this doomed hope alive. Meticulously planned utopian schemes conflict with an individual's required freedom to create new paradigms when the serendipitous urge strikes their soul. Religion, like language, is also a phenomenon relying heavily upon a pervasive irrationality and unplanned events to convert the hearts and minds of its loyal adherents. Unitarianism is the dubious relative of the Esperanto movement. This religious organization's total world membership might not fill a good size football field. Fukuyama may accept the pragmatic importance of religious belief, but does he share my uneasiness when attending a religious ceremony? The data overwhelmingly prove that the more conservative religious traditions are organizationally more vibrant and have much higher membership rolls than their Liberal latitudinarian opposites. Does this mean that most people desire authoritarian direction? Am I a hypocrite who argues that religion is great for everybody else but me? Should I join a religious organization merely to prove solidarity with my next door neighbors? Is the general welfare, the so called communitarian social capital, instead better served if I opt to intellectually improve myself by reading the Sunday morning edition of the New York Times? Also, am I permitted to make fun of well educated Yuppies who indulge in such peculiar practices as "feng shui?" Paraphrasing the previously mentioned G.K. Chesterton, are people who abandon mainstream religions more susceptible in falling for the more bizarre manifestations of religious practices? The "true believer" depicted by Eric Hoffer frighten us far more than the agnostic. A secular democracy prefers ambiguity to the alternative risk of seeking final answers to questions that have forever haunted the human condition. It may be paradoxically conceded that religious faith sustains the typical citizen's desire for meaning in a heartless and uncaring universe, but aren't we compelled to discourage them from taking it too seriously? Cutting slack whenever possible and placing minimal restrictions upon adult behavior seems to work best for our Twenty First century American democracy. "The Great Disruption" has few answers, but that is not the fault of the author. I think it was Michael Oakshott who said that polite and genuine conversation is our best hope. Francis Fukuyama is to be wholeheartedly credited for assisting us to ask the right questions. That is why this book deserves five stars.
Rating: 
Summary: Crossroad of Oriental and Protestant Views
Review: Although the title looks controversial, one comes to understand easily toward the end that the author continuously looks at the good sides of hierarchy and social order. I thought that trait extremely oriental and similar to some Japanese sociologists. For him creating social orders is one of the most valuable endowments human beings are born with. His discription and enourmous data of the present state of "the Great Disruption" is breathtaking and insightful. The only point which disappointed me was that, although he stresses the change of women's attitudes towards job, family, kids, etc. as the major shifting force which dismantled the community, he does not link the human impulse to go back to social order with the women's increasing role in society. He merely talks about how men and women should adjust to the post-nuclear family style, and I was lost how he evaluates women's role in society.
Rating:
Summary: Are we naturally social people?
Review: As a third world citizen this book impressed me with one of its main idea that says that no matter the storms of selfishness and individualism, sooner or later, we will come back to be social and reliable to each other again. That trend to be social to other people would be, under Fukuyama's point of view, based on physiological features of our human constitution. The references Mr. Fukuyama cites, for instance, to relate the human brain's functioning and language to our "natural" trend to be social should be reviewed by the readers interested in deeper understanding. Mr. Fukuyama would not be the first scholar who believes that is human culture what makes more intensive our "hidden" trends to be social (or, the reverse, what makes us violent to each other and intolerant). Reading "Trust", another book of him, oneself realizes how important is the society's culture towards the role of family and work and school to build up social capital. The very essential difference between one society and the rest, in the race for competitiveness, under the ideas from "Trust" would be human created: culture, related to social capital and his formation. But now, in "The Great Disruption" appears our physiology as an important source of explanations of our collective and cultural creations (like language, attitudes towards work,and our social capital too). What i can comment from my knowledge of peruvian history is that the social capital is a cultural product, made by people in history, with all our rational and non-rational choices, made individually and colectively. Being together in the same territory, under the same national state, and tolerate each other group, even though among different groups of peruvians we don't trust, could be explained by some physiologicals fundamentals. But this is not the same of building up social capital.Our biology,probably, makes harder having some behaviors along the time, but nothing else. So, was our human physiology an important explanation of what made less harder troublesome times in peruvian history, making us at least "just a little" tolerant to each other groupe, despite of all our differences?. May be. But the solutions of our pending challenge, of building up more social capital, will come from choices, determined by culture and social motives, not from physiology. A very interesting book, against all their debatable ideas.
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing new here
Review: Fukiyama's End of History was a bit overwritten, but it contained some original and provocative ideas which he convincingly defended. The book caught my attention to the degree that I've bought Fukiyama's subsequent books: Trust, and now The Great Disruption. Trust, Fukiyama's middle book, explored some of the links between what he calls "spontaneous sociability", circles of trust, and productivity. Not exactly the sweeping scope of End of History, but he did promote some new ideas. The Great Disruption, in many ways, reads like "Trust Lite". This time around Fukiyama focuses on the relationships between rules, social order, and economic growth. He offers some empirical data (and nifty line charts) on statistics like crime, out of wedlock births, poverty, etc. There is some good information here, but I reached the end of the book without having acquired any new ideas or concepts. The book's conclusion is strange. First, he puts in a plug for his End of History theme: that liberal democracy is the only viable alternative for the advancement of society. He then goes on to contradict his Hegelian theory of historical directionality by concluding that history in the "social and moral sphere" is not in fact directional in nature, but is cyclical. Finally, he concludes that the future of mankind depends on the "upward direction of the arrow of History", contradicting his previous point and again promoting his idea of the "directionality". Huh?? In the end, Fukiyama runs us around in circles (280 pages worth) without reaching any real conclusions at all. There wasn't really enough material here for a book, and as I read Disruption I felt that I was just getting bits and pieces that he'd forgotten to include in his previous two releases. This is recycled material. Not recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Fukuyama is an intellectual giant of our time, yet readable and to the point. I recommend anyone to start off with his "End of History" before graduating to "Trust" and specially "Great Disruption". Could he yet better himself?
Rating:
Summary: contradictions
Review: I started out really liking this book and if it had continued in the vein it began, I probably would have given it four or five stars. The author's definition of social capital is key to the book's good and bad points: "Social Capital can be defined as a set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permits cooperation among them." He proceeds from there to analyze various factors in the world that add to or detract from social capital and correlate these to historical changes in culture, economy, crime, etc. Things that help social capital include trust, community, marriage, education; things that hurt it include crime, greed, individualism, single parent families, etc. After all his outstanding analysis, I could only imagine the chapter on capitalism would have to point how the greed and individualism it inspires is a problem. But no! Instead he seems to stop and redefine what social capital is, just so he can say that capitalism is a good thing: "The view that social capital is a public good is wrong." "...rather a private good that is pervaded by externalities." So this rationalizing basically gets to a point where he is suggesting that greed and individualism now do work for the common good and therefore add to social capital. It was enough to make me want to throw the book out the window! Luckily, the window I was next to didn't open! In the end his conclusions were very anti-climactic. There have been many of these "disruptions" in the past and this current one is just another like the ones before (not so "Great" after all?) and it is currently on the decline, taking care of itself, so apparently all you and I need to do is sit back in our LazyBoys and have another beer! NOT a feel-good book, they say? I think it IS. I would recommend it only for the first half of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Fukuyama Disproves Himself -- Ideology trumps facts
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fukuyama Disproves Himself -- Ideology trumps facts
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fukuyama's paean to corporate culture
Review: If by Great Disruption Fukuyama refers to the increase in crime, drugs, illegitimacy, divorce, he is talking about what is largely an underclass problem that has nothing to do with changes in corporate structure and perhaps only a little more to do with the move to a service economy. Fukuyama takes issue with the Contradictions of Capitalism conservatives who argue that capitalism that generates its own counterculture like modernism, or those like Charles Murray, who blame welfare for generating "bureaugamy" and destroying the family. Fukuyama instead takes the standard Straussian line, familiar from Allan Bloom (his teacher), that it is all the fault of Nietzsche and German sociology, and that "hang loose" is a thougtless Americanization of "Gelassenheit." Please. But there is hope, and here sociobiology comes to the rescue. Human beings by nature generate order, and the trust and responsibility necessary for conducting business "spiritualize" capitalism and generate an order that more than simply a draw on our dwindling Victorian reserves. The destruction of authority is not a problem if the Great Disruption is miraculously homeopathic and generates a new anti-hierarchal, "network" structure that bears more resemblance to an organizational flow chart than the kind of irrational bonds that are needed to keep a family together or prevent people cutting in line at the 7/11. As far as social theory goes, Fukuyama is a lite weight.
Rating:
Summary: It's Hard to Know What to Think!
Review: It is quite difficult to me to feel anything but a benign "that's interesting" type of indifference to this book. On some things, Fukuyama does rather well. On others, I could not resist the urge to rhetorically ask myself: "Did he really get this published?"
First, the good stuff. As others have noted, Fukuyama provides decent factual documentation and analysis to support part 1 of his argument - that the social bonds common to the days of yore have dissipated through time (aside from a few contradictions that I'll get to later). He also provides a quite lively, if a tad oversimplified and/or overeager, section on the life sciences' recent findings that we are social creatures after all.
So that accounts for the two extant stars. What accounts for the three I decided to withhold? First, and most devestatingly, Fukuyama never makes it clear how this dissipation of 'social capital' can be attributed to the 'information revolution' - the transition from an industrial-based to information-based economy or culture. It seems his only strategy is to rule out, curtly and unconvincingly, other variables only to tell us: "Well it couldn't be those, and since the timing is right, so it must be the information revolution." I don't buy it (yet), and don't see how Fukuyama expects me to.
Second, there are an embarassing number of out-and-out contradictions in this book. First, there is the biggie: Fukuyama spends a lot of time telling us that via human nature, the rebuilding of social bonds is endemic and inevitable to humankind. Then, in the next section, he tells us that we must work dilligently to bring about what he just told us was endemic and inevitable. (This is reminiscent of Marx telling us that the revolution was inevitable and that therefore, the workers must be dillegent in ensuring that it comes about).
There are other contradictions: Fukuyama tells us in the book that crime is and has been on the rise for some time. A bit later, though, he tells us that the vast majority of American neighborhoods are safe and that it is only people's perception of rising crime via the media tht seems to be the problem. He also tells us that marriages dissolving in their first few years is a new frightening trend, while later in the book teling us that it is "not uncommon" for marriages to dissipate only after the kids are raised. I just don't understand!
Anyhow, I could go on, but I'd rather get to my main point: although this book may have a few eye opening moments (generally those moments where Fukuyama is reinforcing things we already know), all in all, it is not worth your time. If you want to explore the weakening of the 'social fabric' try Etzionni's "The Spirit of Community" or Callahan's "The Cheating Culture." If you are interested in the life sciences' research on the sociality of humans, try Ridley's "The Origin of Virtue," or Axelrod's 'Evolution of Cooperation.' Both do a better job than this book.
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