The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

This book was written at the end of the Cold War, with the essential thesis that now, after the failure of communism, we could finally say that capitalist democracies were the very best form of government.

Fukuyama used a concept that was proposed by Marx, that eventually mankind would settle on an ideal form of government--he thought it would be communism, but he was wrong about that.  He failed to take into account what Plato first identified--that each and every man needs to feel important.  Freud called it ego and Plato called it thymos, but what it really amounts to is that we all want to be on top of a heap and to be noticed.  Fukuyama asserts that while it is impossible for each and every person to be a celebrity, that at least a democracy allows you to have a voice in the process of government, so it is the form of governance that comes the closest to satisfying the need for recognition as well as the need for stability.  The book expands on an essay of an almost identical title that is a little more succinct in reaching it's conclusion, but this is a nice summary of the thoughts of liberal thinkers since the Age of Enlightenment.  The arguments in favor of democracy in general and capitalist democracy in particular have some flaws in them, many of which Fukuyama himself points out, but on balance, I think his argument holds water--to this point in history--what the future holds, we have no clue.  Remember, there was a time when an essentially leader-less form of goverment had many constituents, despite the fact that even socialism had been shown to be unworkable up to the point where Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto.