In these mountains of analysis local insights might prove to be more significant or persuasive

In these mountains of analysis, local insights might prove to be more significant or persuasive than the general argument.So, for example, one of the most important aspects of Trust is the way it detonates the myth that the Asian economic boom is based upon a mass of culturally homogenous nations. In fact, he shows that Asian states vary as much or more than Western. This new argument means that Fukuyama cannot simply be dismissed as a hard conservative triumphalist or as a crude deterministic propagandist for liberal democracy. He sees that, even if the broad systemic arguments are over, there are still huge variations and tensions to be understood.But the peculiarity of Fukuyama as a thinker is that precise agreement or disagreement with his argument is not really the point.

The remaining 20 per cent is cultural, and trust lies at the centre of this cultural requirement. The free market, he accepts, is essential but only accounts for about 80 per cent of the story. An ability to extend trust throughout a society is essential for the building of the large corporate units of modern capitalism. America, Japan and Germany have high levels of trust; France, Italy and China low levels.The importance of this argument is that it distances Fukuyama from straightforward free market conservatives. Success in the operation of capitalism could best be achieved by nations with high cultural assets, the most important of which was trust. And the social costs of that wealth also seemed to vary enormously - from peaceful, low-crime Japan to violent, high-crime America.In Trust, Fukuyama addressed these cultural variations. But there seemed to be huge local variations in what precisely the ideal meant and how effective it was in application It made nations richer, but it made some richer than others.

And certainly one could hope that the pattern of the last 200 years would continue - no two liberal democracies have ever gone to war. Certainly one could say that this ideal had triumphed in the sense that it was globally perceived as the only possible form of political legitimacy. The simple spectacle of the liberal democracies standing triumphantly at the end of history had conflicted with the West's own view of itself. Uncertain and riven with internal conflicts, the victorious nations did not, in 1989, necessarily feel victorious. To point out that the end of history might well be marked by a spiritual vacuum made human sense; it seemed to be observably true.But the problem with the argument was that it tended to present the world as being relentlessy smoothed out into one featureless liberal democratic plain. But in his book-length version of the argument, it became clear that his message was not crudely optimistic.

He believed there were significant human problems with the ending of history. Once the long struggle for recognition had ended, or, at least, been defused, what was there left to do? Would the Last Man be little more than a passive consumer, devoid of spiritual depth? Would he, as Nietzsche put it, be a "man with no chest"?These doubts made the whole argument more convincing. Once communism had fallen, there was no competing source of legitimacy left in the world. Clearly history would go on in that ancient struggles had to be played out - as in former Yugoslavia - but history, in the sense of a conflict between big ideas, was over.Fukuyama was attacked by many as being little more than a State Department propagandist, providing intellectual respectability for Republican and Tory triumphalism. This was in contrast to the pursuit of survival and economic self-interest that had dominated Western thought since Hobbes and Locke. The First Man - a mythical figure at the beginning of the historical process - was not primarily seeking wealth, he was seeking affirmation of his identity and worth. Whereas the economic First Man will always compromise in the name of survival, the Nietzschean First Man will press forward towards recognition, driving the Hegelian process.Liberal democracy encompasses this drive and provides the climax of the historical process.

But Fukuyama argued that scientific knowledge, because it could not be lost, only accumulated, had introduced a definite direction, a movement towards ever higher technological capability. This movement has led, he argues, inexorably towards capitalism and liberal democracy. It was, for example, American micro-electronics that threatened to render obsolete the entire Soviet arsenal and thereby accelerated the fall of communism.From Nietzsche came the idea of human aspiration as the pursuit of recognition. Communism had abused this idea by inventing a historical direction which, though Hegelian, was palpably not true. Hegel was said to be the forerunner of communism and Nietzsche of fascism.