SOURCE: “The End of Amorality,” in Washington Post Book World, June 13, 1999, pp. 1, 3.

In the following review, Kazin credits Fukuyama as a “subtle, learned thinker,” though finds shortcomings and contradictions in The Great Disruption.

Are you worried about the rise of violent crime, the illegitimacy, the child abuse, and the pervasive cynicism that seem to have dominated public life over the past three decades? Then Francis Fukuyama has good news for you: We are, he maintains, on the verge of a new era in which ordinary people will strive to live morally and insist that their institutions and leaders do the same. An ethic of collective responsibility will gradually replace that of rampant individualism.

Armed with so bald a thesis, Fukuyama might sound like a right-wing polemicist straining to be a prophet. But the author who burst into prominence in the early 1990s with a remarkable argument about “the...