SOURCE: “Bigger Than the Family, Smaller Than the State,” in New York Times Book Review, August 13, 1995, pp. 1, 25.

In the following review, Zakaria offers tempered assessment of Trust, which he describes as “a fascinating and frustrating book.”

In 1989, as Communism teetered on the brink, Francis Fukuyama wrote a now-legendary essay extravagantly titled “The End of History?” In it, he argued that the global movement toward democracy and capitalism had brought to a final conclusion the centuries-old ideological debate over the ideal form of government. Now Mr. Fukuyama has shifted his attention from the state to society; the result is a fascinating and frustrating book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. We have settled on the structure of the state, he writes, but “liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality.”

In the world of ideas, civil society is...