Francis Fukuyama - Bizalom

Francis Fukuyama stirred up a worldwide debate with his book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992: sociologists, journalists, and politicians have been trying to refute since then - sometimes with superficial arguments, sometimes with more serious analyzes - the basic premise that the historical development of humanity has come to an end , because there is no realistic alternative to liberal capitalism and cannot be in the future.

In his new study, Bizalom, published in 1995, the American social researcher analyzed the economic world order emerging "after history" and sought an answer to a question that was particularly important for the new democracies at the time (in fact, it has hardly lost its relevance to this day): what hidden mechanisms operate behind the statistical data, which are easily visible on the surface, and which influence and often fundamentally determine the success of a national economy. In other words: under the same political system, what makes one country able to produce an economic miracle, while the other staggers from crisis to crisis.

According to Fukuyama, economic life is inseparable from culture: from those "irrational" values ​​that are linked to morality, community spirit, family, and religion, and therefore neoliberal economics, which predominantly operates with interests and rational responses, only applies to them to a limited extent. Therefore, the main task of modern societies is to preserve or create a high level of social trust and social capital, because the lack of this hinders the development of the economy at least as much as the scarcity of physical capital.

This large-scale study by Fukuyama, which meticulously analyzes many successful and struggling national economies of the world, is a convincing attempt to synthesize liberal and conservative ideological systems.