Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a political theorist who held that economics were the driving force behind all human activity and interaction. Human nature, Marx argues, was to make the most use of the resources available. Marx called for a strong central communist state that held control of the means of production and distributed them and the proceeds from them equally to the members of the state. in Marx's view, religion was not an integral part of human motivation, but was, in Fukuyama's description, "a fairy-tale that was cooked up by elites to justify their domination of the rest of society." (p. 162)

Fukuyama disagrees with Marx on the matter of religion, providing evidence of the closely related development of religious ideas and secular concepts of the rule of law. He also rejects the type of approach taken by Marx and other theorists that seek to find a single human...