 The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconsitution of Social Order
New York, NY: Free Press, 1999; Touchstone, 2000 (paperback)
Non-US Editions of The Great Disruption Link to data tables Publisher's Blurb: THE GREAT DISRUPTION: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order Over the past fifty years, the United States and other developed countries have made the shift from industrial to information societies; knowledge and networks have replaced brute strength and mass production as the basis of wealth, power, and social interaction. And yet at the same time, Western societies have endured increasing levels of crime, massive changes in fertility and family structure, decreasing levels of trust, and the triumph of individualism over community. Just as the nineteenth-century transition from agriculture to industrialism brought about momentous changes in moral values, the changes of the past fifty years constitute a Great Disruption, one that has occurred in virtually all post-industrial societies. But even as the once stable order of the industrial age has broken apart, all is not lost. In a masterful intellectual synthesis, Francis Fukuyama brings together sociology, economic theory, and evolutionary biology to explore the central question: Where does social order come from and can it be restored once lost? What he finds is that human beings are biologically driven to establish moral values and that these values evolve from the ground up rather than being imposed by government or organized religion. Social order thus ebbs and flows in long cycles as societies adjust to a constantly changing technological and economic environment. And indeed, he shows that the Great Disruption of the 1960s and 1970s is giving way at the turn of the century to a Great Reconstruction, as Western society weaves a new fabric of social and moral values appropriate to the changed realities of the post-industrial world. The Great Disruption mounts a powerful challenge to our old assumptions about society and culture, and, like Fukuyama's previous books, it promises to be the intellectual sensation of 1999.
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