In the wake of the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama provocatively announced the end of history in his debut writing with the same title, which implied the convergence of the eventual forms of political and economic institutions. But Fukuyama argued that the end of History, a single, directional, and coherent process of developments of human societies, does not mean an end to society’s challenges for improvement, given the limitations of social change by government efforts. Fukuyama detected the critical delay in moral and social development, which should go ‘hand-in-glove’ with the progressive tendency of liberal political and economic institutions. Indeed, so vulnerable is the transparent framework of laws and institutions, which was built for political order, in place of moral consensus, drawing on law-abiding and rational yet individualistic behavior in pursuit of self-interest. Fukuyama maintained that the problem with most modern liberal democracies is that they cannot take their cultural preconditions for granted. Fukuyama also noted that liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality. Fukuyama asserted that an abundant stock of social capital is presumably what produces a dense civil society, which in turn has been almost universally seen as a necessary condition for modern liberal democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America best elucidated the political function of social capital in a modern democracy. Fukuyama argued that Tocqueville would agree with the proposition that without social capital, there could be no civil society, and that without civil society, there could be no successful democracy. Keywords: State (Institutions), Civil Society, Social Capital, Political Development, Political Decay
