Quotes from Francis Fukuyama

The young Hegel witnessed Napoleon riding through his university town after the Battle of Jena in 1806 and saw in that act the incipient universalization of recognition in the form of the principles of the French Revolution. This is the sense in which Hegel believed that history had come to an end: it culminated in the idea of universal recognition;

Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the by-product of legislators or public officials who feel more obligated to family, tribe, region, or ethnic group than to the national community and therefore divert money in that direction.

To deceive the state, strangers, or even associates is accepted, and often applauded as evidence of cleverness.

If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, ... then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom; for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.

Germany, in other words, developed both a strong state and rule of law early on, well before it developed accountable government.

The implication is that any successful order needs to suppress the power of kinship through some mechanism that makes the guardians value their ties to the state over their love for their families.

The philosopher Charles Taylor, following Hegel, points out that struggles over identity are inherently political because they involve demands for recognition.

Whether he was conscious of it or not, Deng was restoring much of the institutional legacy of traditional Chinese government. Only this time, it was the Communist Party that played the role of the emperor with his eunuch cadres supervising a vast bureaucracy.

Unrepresentative interest groups are not simply creatures of corporate America and the Right. Some of the most powerful organizations in democratic countries have been trade unions, followed by environmental groups, women's organizations, advocates of gay rights, the aged, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and virtually every other sector of society.

Human beings cooperate in order to compete, and compete to cooperate.

Democracy in the developed world became secure and stable as industrialization produced middle-class societies, that is, societies in which a significant majority of the population thought of themselves as middle class.

Human beings do not enter into society and political life as a result of conscious, rational decision. Communal organization comes to them naturally, though the specific ways they cooperate are shaped by environment, ideas, and culture. Indeed

Contemporary identity politics is driven by the quest for equal recognition by groups that have been marginalized by their societies. But that desire for equal recognition can easily slide over into a demand for recognition of the group's superiority.

Religion and politics must therefore be seen as drivers of behavior and change in their own right, not as by-products of grand economic forces. THE

La conexión entre ingreso y dignidad también sugiere por qué algo parecido a una renta universal garantizada, como solución a la pérdida de empleos por culpa de la automatización, no conseguirá la paz social ni hacer felices a quienes la reciban.

A political system that is all checks and balances is potentially no more successful than one with no checks, because governments periodically need strong and decisive action.

an idea that became foundational in modern thought, that we have deeply hidden inner natures that are smothered by the layers of social rules imposed on us by the society surrounding us. Autonomy for him meant recovery of that authentic inner self, and escape from the social rules that imprisoned it.

Kant picked up on Rousseau's idea of perfectibility, and turned it into the core of his moral philosophy. At the beginning of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says that the only thing that is unconditionally good is a good will, and that the capacity to make moral choices is what makes us distinctively human. Human beings are ends in themselves and should never be treated as a means to other ends.

It is only with the development of political institutions like the modern state that humans begin to organize themselves and learn to cooperate in a manner that transcends friends and family. When such institutions break down, we revert to patronage and nepotism as a default form of sociability.

When China decollectivized under Deng Xiaoping's household responsibility reforms in 1978, the peasant family sprang back to life and became one of the chief engines of the economic miracle that subsequently unfolded in the People's Republic.25

The most modern contemporary bureaucracies were those established by authoritarian states in their pursuit of national security.

On the other hand, countries that democratized early, before they established modern administrations, found themselves developing clientelistic public sectors.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012).

War, as we saw in Volume 1, creates incentives for efficient, meritocratic government that ordinary economic activity does not and therefore is one important path to state modernity.