Fukuyama Quotes

#1. Interest groups exercise influence way out of proportion to their place in society, distort both taxes and spending, and raise overall deficit levels through their ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They also undermine the quality of public administration as a result of the multiple and often contradictory mandates they induce Congress to support. All of this has led to a crisis of representation, in which ordinary people feel their supposedly democratic government no longer truly reflects their interests but is under the control of a variety of shadowy elites. What is ironic and peculiar is that this crisis in representativeness has occurred in part because of reforms designed to make the system more democratic. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#2. men had been everywhere and had seen everything, life's greatest experience had ended with most of life still to be lived, to find common purpose in the quiet days of peace would be hard #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#3. But we forget that government was also created to act and make decisions. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#4. The degree to which people in developed countries take political institutions for granted was very much evident in the way that the United States planned, or failed to plan, for the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#5. We are taking the time to consider the Hungarian case for a simple reason: to show that constitutional limits on a central government's power do not by themselves necessarily produce political accountability. The "freedom" sought by the Hungarian noble class was the freedom to exploit their own peasants more thoroughly, and the absence of a strong central state allowed them to do just that. Everyone understands the Chinese form of tyranny, one perpetrated by a centralized dictatorship. But tyranny can result from decentralized oligarchic domination as well. True freedom tends to emerge in the interstices of a balance of power among a society's elite actors, something that Hungary never succeeded in achieving. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#6. When a rural Greek is hospitalized, relatives are in constant attendance to keep a check on the doctor and the treatment he prescribes. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#7. Interstate wars in Latin America have been so infrequent and politically unimportant that many major surveys of Latin American history barely cover them. Compared to Europe and ancient China, or indeed North America, war had a marginal effect on state building. Charles Tilly's aphorism "war made the state, and the state made war" remains true, but begs the question of why wars are more prevalent in some regions than in others. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#8. In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmatic agenda. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#9. The effect of education on political attitudes is complicated,
for democratic society. The self-professed aim of modern education
is to "liberate" people from prejudices and traditional forms
of authority. Educated people are said not to obey authority
blindly, but rather learn to think for themselves. Even if this
doesn't happen on a mass basis, people can be taught to see their
own self-interest more clearly, and over a longer time horizon.
Education also makes people demand more of themselves and for
themselves; in other words, they acquire a certain sense of dignity
which they want to have respected by their fellow citizens and by
the state. In a traditional peasant society, it is possible for a local
landlord (or, for that matter, a communist commissar) to recruit
peasants to kill other peasants and dispossess them of their land.
They do so not because it is in their interest, but because they are
used to obeying authority. Urban professionals in developed countries, on the other hand, can be recruited to a lot of nutty
causes like liquid diets and marathon running, but they tend not
to volunteer for private armies or death squads simply because
someone in a uniform tells them to do so #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#10. But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between socalled "interest groups" that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#11. A high degree of autonomy is what permits innovation, experimentation and risk taking in a bureaucracy. If the slightest mistake can end a career, then no one will ever take risks. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#12. Perhaps when you're young you think that something must be profound just because it is difficult and you don't have the self-confidence to say 'this is just nonsense #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#13. recent events compel us to raise anew. From the beginning, the
most serious and systematic attempts to write Universal Histories saw the central issue in history as the development of Freedom. History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out. And if we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that History itself might be at an end. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#14. Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#15. If networks are to be more efficient ... this will come about only on the basis of a high level of trust and the existence of shared norms of ethical behavior between network members #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#16. The explosion of opportunities for litigation gave access and therefore power to many formerly excluded groups, beginning with African Americans. For this reason, litigation and the right to sue has been jealously guarded by many on the progressive left. But it also entailed large costs in terms of the quality of public policy. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#17. From the earlier discussion of Europe in the nineteenth century, however, it should be clear that the middle classes are not inevitably supporters of democracy. This tends to be particularly true when the middle classes still constitute a minority of the population. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#18. However, neither rule of law nor political accountability exists in contemporary China any more than they did in dynastic China. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#19. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who has overseen the massive World Values Survey that seeks to measure value change around the world, has argued that economic modernization and middle-class status produce what he calls "post-material" values in which democracy, equality, and identity issues become much more prominent than older issues of economic distribution. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#20. 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 #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#21. Economists agree that all taxes potentially detract from the ability of markets to allocate resources efficiently, and the least inefficient types of taxation are those that are simple, uniform, and predictable, which allow businesses to plan and invest around them. The U.S. tax code is exactly the opposite. While nominal corporate tax rates in the United States are much higher than in other developed countries, very few American corporations actually pay taxes at that rate, because they have negotiated special exemptions and benefits for themselves. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#22. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, that spectrum appears to be giving way in many regions to one defined by identity. The left has focused less on broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized - blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees, and the like. The right, meanwhile, is redefining itself as patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#23. Regarding social order, Francis Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century. #Quote by Douglass North

#24. Marx's original definition of "bourgeoisie" referred to ownership of the means of production. One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of property has become vastly democratized through stock ownership and pension plans. Even if one does not possess large amounts of capital, working in a managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#25. What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that
capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially
available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the
Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth
process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers
capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided
that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#26. The rule of law is critical for economic development; without clear property rights and contract enforcement, it is difficult for businesses to break out of small circles of trust. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#27. Where trust is prevalent, he explained, groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. "By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means," wrote Fukuyama. It #Quote by Thomas L. Friedman

#28. Most people living in rich, stable developed countries have no idea how Denmark itself got to be Denmark - something that is true for many Danes as well. The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#29. Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance.5 In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#30. Unfortunately, the trading of political influence for money has come back in a big way in American politics, this time in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized bribery is narrowly defined in American law as a transaction in which a politician and a private party explicitly agree upon a specific quid pro quo exchange. What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what an anthropologist might label a gift exchange. In a relationship of reciprocal altruism, one person confers a benefit on another with no explicit expectation that it will immediately buy a return favor, unlike an impersonal market transaction. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#31. Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a 'terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness. #Quote by Mark Fisher

#32. On the other hand, there are a number of cases where economic growth did not produce better governance, but where, to the contrary, it was good governance that was responsible for growth. Consider South Korea and Nigeria. In 1954, following the Korean War, South Korea's per capita GDP was lower than that of Nigeria, which was to win its independence from Britain in 1960. Over the following fifty years, Nigeria took in more than $300 billion in oil revenues, and yet its per capita income declined in the years between 1975 and 1995. In contrast, South Korea grew at rates ranging from 7 to 9 percent per year over this same period, to the point that it became the world's twelfth-largest economy by the time of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The reason for this difference in performance is almost entirely attributable to the far superior government that presided over South Korea compared to Nigeria. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#33. If people who have to work together in an enterprise trust one another it is because they are all operating to a common set of ethical norms ... such a society will be better able to innovate ... since the high degree of trust will permit a wide variety of social relationships to emerge ... #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#34. I'm a tenured professor. But I'd get rid of tenure. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#35. An industrial policy worked in Taiwan only because the state was able to shield its planning technocrats from political pressures so that they could reinforce the market and make decisions according to criteria of efficiency - in other words, worked because Taiwan was not governed democratically. An American industrial policy is much less likely to improve its economic competitiveness, precisely because America is more democratic than Taiwan or the Asian NIEs. The planning process would quickly fall prey to pressures from Congress either to protect inefficient industries or to promote ones
favored by special interests. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#36. The rule of law constitutes a basic protection of individuals against tyrannical government. But in the second half of the twentieth century, law lost its focus as a constraint on government and became instead an instrument for widening the scope of government. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#37. The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology ... For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, MA ... #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#38. A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous "wisdom of crowds" are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that "institutions matter": poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions. We need therefore to better understand where those institutions come from. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#39. Modern political systems are labeled liberal democracies because they unite two disparate principles. Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property, which is critical for economic growth and prosperity. The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole. Over the past few years, we've witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#40. Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#41. Putting one's parents out to pasture in a nursing home has very deep historical roots in Western Europe. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#42. Most human beings, in other words, would rather fight than starve.19 #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#43. The rationale for tenure is still valid. But the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#44. A society built entirely out of rational individuals who come together on the basis of a social contract for the sake of the satisfaction of their wants cannot form a society that would be viable over any length of time. - FRANCIS FUKUYAMA #Quote by Cesar Hidalgo

#45. For capitalism flourishes best in a mobile and egalitarian society #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#46. 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 #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#47. Joseph Stalin was said to have contemptuously asked, "How many divisions has the pope? #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#48. I argued earlier that clientelism is an early form of democracy: in societies with masses of poor and poorly educated voters, the easiest form of electoral mobilization is often the provision of individual benefits such as public-sector jobs, handouts, or political favors. This suggests that clientelism will start to decline as voters become wealthier. Not only does it cost more for politicians to bribe them, but the voters see their interests tied up with broader public policies rather than individual benefits. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#49. I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#50. It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#51. Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#52. ACCOUNTABILITY TODAY As noted in the first chapter, the failure of democracy to consolidate itself in many parts of the world may be due less to the appeal of the idea itself than to the absence of those material and social conditions that make it possible for accountable government to emerge in the first place. That is, successful liberal democracy requires both a state that is strong, unified, and able to enforce laws on its own territory, and a society that is strong and cohesive and able to impose accountability on the state. It is the balance between a strong state and a strong society that makes democracy work, not just in seventeenth-century England but in contemporary developed democracies as well. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#53. while Koreans also are relatively group-oriented, they also have a strong individualistic streak like most Westerners. Koreans frequently joke that an individual Korean can beat an individual Japanese, but that a group of Koreans are certain to be beaten by a group of Japanese."36 The rate of employee turnover, raiding of other companies' skilled labor, and the like are all higher in Korea than in Japan.37 Anecdotally, there would seem to be a lower level of informal work-oriented socializing in Korea than in Japan, with employees heading home to their families at the end of the day rather than staying on to drink in the evenings with their workmates.38 #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#54. The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing to older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class as their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the "Wrong Address Theory": "Just as extreme Shi'ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#55. For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon,
but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense,
freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature o r according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#56. The desire for economic prosperity is itself not culturally determined but almost universally shared #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#57. The repeated demand for "justice," incorporated into the names of many Islamist parties, reflects not so much a demand for social equality as a demand for equal treatment under the law. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#58. Finally, state capacity is a function of resources. The best-trained and most enthusiastic officials will not remain committed if they are not paid adequately, or if they find themselves lacking the tools for doing their jobs. This is one of the reasons that poor countries have poorly functioning governments. Melissa Thomas notes that while a rich country like the United States spends approximately $17,000 per year per capita on government services of all sorts, the government of Afghanistan spends only $17 when foreign donor contributions are excluded. Much of the money it does collect is wasted through corruption and fraud. It is therefore not surprising that the central Afghan government is barely sovereign throughout much of its own territory.6 #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#59. Any economic network is largely dependent on trust if it is to function well. As economists put it, a high degree of trust lowers the costs of transactions and compensates for a lack of information. According to the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama, trust is a key prerequisite for prosperity. #Quote by Daniel Ammann

#60. I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#61. Europe's exhausted elites were ready to concede both liberal democracy and redistributive welfare states to ensure social peace. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#62. In general, Americans are not very good at nation-building and not very good colonialists. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#63. The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church's self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby reconvey her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself. A woman's right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church, since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows and spinsters. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#64. but on Hegel, his "idealist" predecessor who was the first philosopher to answer Kant's challenge of writing a Universal History. For Hegel's understanding of the Mechanism that underlies the historical process is incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist. For Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. Hegel's Universal History complements the Mechanism we have just outlined, but gives us a broader understanding of man - "man as man" - that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#65. In the future the optimal form of industrial organization will be neither small companies nor large ones but network structures that share the advantages of both. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#66. When used as an instrument of enforcement, the courts have morphed from constraints on government to mechanisms by which the scope of government has enormously expanded. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#67. For Hegel, by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#68. in cold countries they have very little sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they have more; in warm countries, their sensibility is exquisite. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama

#69. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a classic book in 1996 on why the most successful states and societies exhibit high levels of trust - Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity - noted that "social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. #Quote by Thomas L. Friedman

#70. Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions. #Quote by Francis Fukuyama