SOURCE: “Big Picture,” in Commentary, Vol. 108, No. 1, July-August, 1999, pp. 80-3.

In the following review, Murray offers a positive evaluation of The Great Disruption.

Francis Fukuyama likes to paint on a big canvas. He came to international attention in 1989 with an article in the National Interest, “The End of History?,” controversially proposing that liberal democracy might constitute the end point of our political evolution. This was followed by two books, The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and Trust (1995), in each of which, calling upon all the social and behavioral sciences, he grappled with the meaning of life in a world grown (hypothetically) rich and peaceful.

He has not scaled back. In his new book, The Great Disruption, Fukuyama takes it upon himself to explain the sudden downward slide on a wide variety of social indicators that began in the mid-1960s and in some ways is still...