75 Quotes by Francis Fukuyama

The only part of the world where tribalism was fully superseded by more voluntary and individualistic forms of social relationship was Europe, where Christianity played a decisive role in undermining kinship as a basis for social cohesion.

Most human beings, in other words, would rather fight than starve.19.

The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible.

When liberal democracies work well, state, law, and accountability all reinforce one another.

As a result of their own experience in a country with historical social mobility, American policy makers are often blind to deeply embedded social stratifications that characterize other societies. The only successful political revolution in the western hemisphere that also resulted in a social revolution was that of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1959, a revolution that the United States spent the next fifty-plus years trying to contain or reverse.

The politics of recognition and dignity had reached a fork by the early nineteenth century. One fork led to the universal recognition of individual rights, and thence to liberal societies that sought to provide citizens with an ever-expanding scope of individual autonomy. The other fork led to assertions of collective identity, of which the two major manifestations were nationalism and politicized religion.

According to the historian John LeDonne, “The existence of a national network of families and client systems made a mockery of the rigid hierarchy established by legislative texts in a constant search for administrative order and ‘regularity.’ It explained why the Russian government, more than any other, was a government of men and not of laws.”28.

The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups.

It is interesting to speculate whether commercial capitalism was thereby smothered in its crib in Egypt, just at a moment when it was beginning to take off in other places such as Italy, the Netherlands, and England.24 On.