Many writers of social criticism announce their message at the start. Obvious examples are Will Hutton's The State We Are In or Francis Fukuyama's own The End of History. His new volume, The Great Disruption is not really in this category at all; and the message does not become clear until the end of the book.

The author starts off by comparing the development in the last decade towards democratic market economies bringing with them increasing prosperity, with evidence of moral decline. I am allergic to those who bemoan the decay of their own times compared with some past golden age. But he does present some hard evidence.

In countries ranging from the US and Sweden to the UK there has been a rapid rise both in theft and in more violent crime since the 1950s. Divorce rates increased and the number of births to single mothers has soared. At the same time questionnaire studies show a decline in the extent to which individuals are prepared to trust each other.

So far one might be reading a slightly more sophisticated than usual moan about the decadence of modern times. But as one proceeds one realises that the author is more discriminating. For instance he does not accept that a religious revival is necessary to restore morality. Nor does he believe that modern capitalism is an immoral force. While it encourages the gain motive, it also develops habits of loyalty, co-operation and honesty without which modern business cannot succeed and without which countries like Russia will never become successful capitalist economies.

He links his argument to the debatable concept of "social capital". This seems to include shared values, voluntary associations and friendships, together with trust itself. Recent academic investigations, however, show that, in Britain at least, indices of these different aspects of social capital have not moved in the same direction. The trend has been for people to belong to more voluntary associations and engage in more informal personal contacts, despite the rise of television. The main exception is that membership of associations has declined among the old working classes and people under 30. There has been a decline in membership of political parties such as parties and trade unions balanced by increased interest in environmental groups and associations like the National Trust and British Heritage. On the other hand there has been a moderate decline in the extent to which people are prepared to trust one another personally.

Despite Fukuyama's attempts at objectivity, he ignores a great many signs of improvement compared with the more authoritarian 1950s. To take two examples almost at random: there are too many tales of how in the bad old days policemen felt unable to intervene to prevent really brutal domestic violence, citing the excuse "an Englishman's home is his castle". Moreover many parents report the efforts that school children today make to help handicapped fellow pupils compared with the bullying and victimisation they remember from their own schooldays. Doubtless there is a minority of budding lager louts and football hooligans to which these remarks do not apply. But surely we are occasionally allowed to think of the rest of the population as well.

In Part Two Fukuyama takes a different direction. He provides a useful survey of the biological and economic forces which make cooperation as well as competition a rational strategy ; and he explains in some details why, "me, me, me" is not a sensible approach even for the most egotistical. I am not sure how much of this will be new to those who have read Matt Ridley's The Origins of Co-operation or the books by Robert Axelrod or Robert Frank. But he does add a new dimension by analysing in some detail the way in which modern business requires the development of "networks" of people who co-operate without either hierarchical discipline or immediate market incentives.

In the third part, he moves in yet another direction. He shows that individual moral behaviour has fluctuated historically and that the more anti-social movements of the past two decades could well have been a temporary dip in a series of long cycles. For instance homicide rates in the 13th century were three times greater than in the 17th; and Victorian morality was a swing away from the more uninhibited behaviour of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

It would have been much more straightforward if this had come at the beginning of the book even at the cost of losing those readers who like to bemoan their own times.

At the end Fukuyama is rightly agnostic. Looked at under a microscope, the incidence of crime and single parentage in the US show us some levelling out or improvement in he 1990s. The hopes, but is far from sure that innate tendencies towards responsible behaviour will reassert themselves.

The book has two main faults. The author falls for the common fallacy of identifying "individualism" with the law of the jungle. Abstract words like individualism can mean whatever we want them to mean. But those who write as the author does are in grave danger of throwing away the liberation of the human spirit which was the great achievement of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and insinuating that virtue consists in the subordinating one's own personality and interests to those of the group - the fallacy of Third Way rhetoric.

This links with a sin of omission. The greatest danger to our civilisation is not selfishness or self-interest. It is the combination of intense loyalty and selfless behaviour towards one's own group with the utmost neglect and cruelty to those outside. Fukuyama is aware of this -- he refers to the Balkan model as the wrong sort of in-group social trust. He is in good company in not knowing how to tackle or live with, the dichotomy. But he does not realise how much this contrast undermines the whole communitarian project to which so many of his remarks seem to point.