The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama – review
Human beings have always organised themselves in tight-knit groups – there never was a Rousseauian paradise of free-spirited individuals roaming contentedly through the primordial forests.
The trouble was that the first human societies were too tight-knit. These were essentially kinship groups and generated what Fukuyama calls "the tyranny of cousins".
People would do almost anything for their relatives, and almost anything to the people who weren't (rape, pillage, murder). This was a recipe for constant, low-level conflict, interspersed with periodic bouts of serious blood-letting.
The way out of the kinship trap was the creation of states (by which Fukuyama means centralised political authorities), which were needed to break the hold of families.
States are one of ( the three pillars ) Fukuyama identifies as providing the basis for political order. The reason that powerful states aren't enough on their own is that political power doesn't necessarily solve the problem of kinship. Instead, it can simply relocate it up the chain, so that all you get are strong rulers who use their power to favour their relatives, a phenomenon that is all too easy to identify, from the ancient world to contemporary Libya. So the rule of states needs to be supplemented by the rule of law, which imposes limits on political power and corruption. However, the rule of law itself can destabilise political order by undermining the ability of states to take decisive action when it is needed, and giving non-state organisations too much of a free hand. Hence the need for the third pillar: accountable government (or what we might now call democracy). This retains a strong state but allows people to change their rulers when they start behaving badly.
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama – review
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/12/origins-political-order-francis-fukuyama-review
The book begins with the evolution of human nature, briefly covers social evolution from foraging to agriculture to the earliest states, and then compares political evolution, its parallels and divergences, in India, Islam, and particularly China and the West up to the eve of modernity.
A key theme of Origins is that a modern political order is not a unitary package: it consists of a bundle of three separate institutions with distinct histories.
- One is a modern state, with competent and honest officials, not prone to nepotism, corruption, and clientelism.
- Second is the rule of law, or binding constraints upon the rulers as well as the ruled.
- Third is accountability, usually via elections but also via a sense of responsibility towards the people, a sense of ruling for the common good.
- We evolved to be nepotistic, most inclined to cooperate with kin.
- We evolved to be religious;
- we evolved to be norm-followers; and
- we evolved to seek status or recognition.
A particularly illuminating element of the book is how these evolved dispositions have continued to be influential. Nepotism, or kin selection, as expressed in strong tribal or clan lineages, is a continuing theme in the book as the nemesis of the modern state. If tribalism is strong, as today in Afghanistan or the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, modern states cannot flourish. The importance of religion as an influence on political development is another theme throughout. It was from religion, Fukuyama argues, that the rule of law arose. The key role of norms and institutions provides the subject-matter of the book: political institutions. Fukuyama regards the desire for status or recognition as the main source of change in history, and he engages in a running dispute through the book with rationalist or rational-choice explanations.
Though Fukuyama uses a bio-historical and bio-political approach, he is by no means a ‘biological determinist’. Biology he treats as probability not determination.
After briefly describing the transition from foraging to agriculture and then the development from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states, Fukuyama turns to his main concerns:
- the origins of the modern state – in ancient China;
- the origins of the rule of law in the realms of powerful religions: India, Islam, and Christendom, but not China; and
- the origins of accountability in the assemblies of medieval Europe, especially the English parliament.
Considering the origins of the modern state, Fukuyama’s key contention is that this did not arise only in 19th–century Europe but earlier, in China, in the 3rd century BC. For Fukuyama, the Chinese bureaucracy was rational and Weberian and hence ‘modern.’ If he is correct, we have to conclude that there were two different roads to political modernization: one in China, the other in the West. In other words, this was a case of parallel evolution.
Fukuyama makes the useful point that { state-building requires overcoming the strong bonds of kin }
States were recurrently prone to being colonized by
- their officials’ nepotism (favouring their relations),
- dynasticism (seeking to have their offspring inherit their office),
- tribalism, and clannishness.
According to Fukuyama, China’s pioneering ‘modern’ rational bureaucracy arose due to a combination of the necessities of war and the megalomaniac ambition of Qin Shi Huangdi (259–210 BC), the First Emperor, who is the most vivid and memorable character in Origins. Still, it might be objected that this explanation is incomplete because warfare and megalomania have been much more common across history than rationalized bureaucracies. A crucial precondition is missing: a rational bureaucracy is only likely to arise and endure in a population that was pre-adapted for rationalism, for cognitive ability, and for holding education and examinations in high status.
How ‘modern’ was China’s bureaucracy? One objection to Fukuyama’s modernity-of-mandarins thesis is that though Chinese officials were recruited on educational merit, the content of their education was highly traditionalistic. Civil service examinations were exhaustive and gruelling tests of candidates’ ability to memorize prodigious quantities of classical texts. Competence was not measured in mastery of practical, scientific, or technical knowledge. The latter kind of competence is closer to what a ‘modern’ bureaucrat is supposed to master. If so, this calls into question Fukuyama’s point that there were two different roads to political modernity: the Chinese and the Western. It implies that China’s bureaucracy was less than fully modern. Fukuyama’s Sinocentric account of the modern state is interesting but not entirely convincing.
Turning to the origins of the rule of law, a second divergence comes into view. In China, no rule of law developed; but in the lands of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity it did. The reason is that where the authority of religious organizations was high, rulers were constrained to accept the rule of law. But in China, where a strong state had solidified early, and where the rulers took pains to prevent a challenge to their supremacy from organized religion, no rule of law developed. In Europe during the Middle Ages, the balance tilted furthest in favour of the Church and against the state. There, the rule of law was strongest.
One criticism of Fukuyama’s treatment of this issue is that he gives relatively little attention to the content of the ruling laws, as opposed to the presence or absence of legal constraints on rulers. In the West, law had two unusual features that had a great impact on political order. One was that the law recognized corporate entities, bodies independent of either rulers or kin groups. This was the legal basis for self-governing city corporations or universities. Another key feature of Western law from ancient Greece onwards was the prohibition on polygyny. This was unique to the West. All other major regions of the world allowed polygyny. This had one clear political effect: European rulers had no harems, unlike rulers elsewhere. As a result, there was a correlation between polygyny and despotism and between monogamy and greater political liberty. Since Fukuyama highlights the West’s divergence in kinship matters, it is odd that he does not mention its divergent marriage system.
The next great divergence concerns accountability: as Fukuyama recognizes, only in Europe, and in particular England, did institutions of political accountability develop. Across medieval Europe, a parliament, a cortes, or a sejm was to be found in most places. But the only one to survive and grow in power was the English parliament. The crucial juncture for modern accountability was the sequence of the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and the English colonists’ Declaration of Independence. Why was England unique? Fukuyama compares four paths taken by early modern European states. One was weak absolutism (France or Spain) involving the sale of offices. A second was strong absolutism (Russia). A third was failed oligarchy (Poland, Hungary). The fourth was accountable government (England, Scandinavia). Among the reasons he offers for the accountable path were the growth of literacy encouraged by Protestantism and the cohesion or solidarity of the English parliament. It is no wonder, then, that Fukuyama thinks the rise of accountability was highly contingent. It was a close-run thing.
Although Fukuyama begins the book by vowing to offer an alternative to an Anglocentric or Eurocentric history of political liberty, and offers instead a Sinocentric account of the modern state, in practice he recognizes that this part of the story is unintelligible without taking account of England’s and Europe’s uniqueness. The old contrast of Western liberty and Eastern despotism retains much of its truth. China may have been precociously modern in its bureaucracy, but that simply meant a more rational despotism. Fukuyama chooses not emphasize it, but his account of the history of political liberty is centred upon the West.
This makes Fukuyama’s exclusion of ancient Greece and Rome from any discussion illogical. Fukuyama’s defence of the exclusion is thus: ‘although Greece and Rome were extremely important as precursors of modern accountable government, China was more important in the development of the state’ (p. 21). This is a notably feeble reason, given that Fukuyama is aiming to explain both the origins of accountability and the modern state. More likely is that the temper of the multicultural times, plus a rising superpower in East Asia, leads him to pay much attention to China and none to the ancient West. The consequence of this decision, though, is to underplay the singular contribution of the West since antiquity to political liberty. We learn nothing in the book of Greek democracy or Roman republicanism.
If the bureaucratic state was a case of parallel evolution (arising independently at least twice in ancient China and modern Europe), if the rule of law was also a case of parallel evolution (arising in three areas), and if accountability was a case of divergent evolution (arising only in Europe), the next volume will have to tackle the issue of convergent evolution: whether or how far distinct societies may converge on a modern political order. The evidence of this volume points to many obstacles to general convergence. Fukuyama emphasizes very long term continuities. China, he argues, has had an efficient, centralized, but authoritarian polity with only a few interruptions since the 3rd century BC, and continues to display high-quality authoritarianism. In India, there is no historical precedent for strong government, due to the countervailing influence of religion. In the West, the rule of law and accountability are long established checks on the power of the state. Instead of parallels or convergences, there have been many long-lasting divergences. In short, Fukuyama’s new book suggests, implicitly but undeniably, that political divergence among different regions and civilizations is deeply rooted and long enduring. In such a situation, the idea of a general convergence, a universal rendezvous in a common regime, appears unlikely. The second part of the end-of-history thesis appears to be in trouble.
The classic history of political order is that there was early on a great divergence between Eastern despotism and Western liberty. Ancient Greeks such as Herodotus noticed it, as did numerous modern European political philosophers. Today, however, this contrast is regarded as suspect, as is any such contrast that is favourable to the West. Fukuyama has improved on the classic contrast, added to it, made it more sophisticated and complicated, but not refuted it. Fukuyama does not deny that there was a broad parting of the ways between Asian despotism and European liberty. But he does downplay it. China appears in Origins not as the most enduring despotism, but with a more positive spin as the pioneer of the ‘modern’ bureaucratic state.
The book ends on the eve of the French Revolution because all three elements of the modern political triad were then in place. The next volume will presumably focus on diffusion rather than innovation, the spread of the modern state, the rule of law, and accountability rather than their origins. Yet, this idea that fundamental innovation was over by 1789 can be questioned. Over the centuries, many successive political transformations have emanated from the West, not just the rule of law and accountability, but also mercantilism, nationalism, the welfare state, and international organizations, to name but a few. The West has been peculiarly innovative in politics, before and after the French Revolution and continuing into the present. Fukuyama’s triadic model of political innovation is not flexible enough to take account of the many-sided political inventiveness of the West.
One conclusion to draw from this book is that there is much continuity in political orders. The turning points that Fukuyama concentrates upon were ancient China in the wake of the Warring States period, medieval Europe, and early modern England. These events, not anything more recent, were the transformations that made the modern political world.
A more practical lesson for policy is that it is hard to create a modern state in a society in which strong extended lineages exist. It is likely that Fukuyama has drawn this lesson not only from history but also from the colossal failures of American policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fukuyama was a neoconservative and a supporter of the Iraq invasion of 2003, but subsequently changed his mind and broke with neoconservatism. (In this book, Fukuyama is silent on Iraq, but mentions learning the lesson about clans from a trip to New Guinea.)This book is post-neoconservative in its underlying emphasis on long continuities and hence on the difficulties and obstacles faced by any project of forcefully spreading democracy around the world.
The problem of political development Fukuyama phrases as the question of how to get from Somalia to Denmark. At the beginning of the book, Fukuyama promises that he will be supplying an answer. But by the end of the book we are left wondering if the answer he implicitly supplies is: the best way to get to a Demark is not to start in a Somalia.
The Origins of Political Order is a major achievement: it provides an overview of key strands of political evolution from prehistory onwards; it demonstrates that genes matter, ideas matter, and institutions matter in shaping political orders; and it manages to illuminate both questions of historical interpretation and problems of current policy. The next volume is highly anticipated.
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1261
From chimpanzee hunting groups to tribes
In his quest for the origins of political order, he first looks at the social order among chimpanzees, notes that the war-like hunting group, rather than the family, was the primary social group, and claims the same for humans. Humans went further: to survive they formed tribes, whose armies were superior to hunting groups by their sheer size.
He uses recent work in sociobiology and other sources to show that sociability built on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is the original default social state of man and not any isolated, presocial human as suggested by Hobbes and Rousseau. He suggests that Hobbes and Locke present a fallacy when they argue humans developed cooperative ability only as a result of the invention of the state. This is because chimps, the genetic ancestors to humans, engage in kin relations based on cooperation, and so Hobbes and Locke must be suggesting humans were once sociable, lost this instinct and then regained it due to the state.
Challenge of tribes on the road towards the state
The next step was to escape beyond tribalism and the "tyranny of cousins", to join tribes into larger coalitions[9] towards states, again due to the advantage of larger armies. This was done with the aid of religion. This was because as groups grew in size, maintaining cooperation became more difficult as face-to-face interactions with much of society became difficult. Religion offered a way of providing a combining social force to hold society together . For example, Fukuyama cites Mohammed as an example of what Weber labels a "charismatic leader" because he used the idea of an 'umma' (community of believers) to bind together the territory that he ruled over . This challenge to transcend tribalism partly remains today in many parts of the world that is outside Western civilization, for example in Afghanistan and in
Somalia.
Restrictions on marriage and inheritance as a strategy against corruption
Loyalty to the tribe or the family, rather than to the state, leads to corruption and weakening of the state. Various strategies were used to overcome the corruption. One such strategy was restrictions against marriage among the ruling official class to make sure that loyalties would not lie with family or tribe.
Mandarins or Scholar-officials, who were the ruling class of China, were not allowed to pass on the lands given to them by the emperor to their own children and were restricted as to whom they were allowed to marry.
Mamluk slaves, the ruling class of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, were told which slaves to marry while their children could not inherit from them. Jannisarries were originally forced into celibacy and prohibited from having a family.
Pope Gregory VII forced Catholic priests in Europe to become celibate and they too were prohibited from having a family.
Spanish administrators in South America were restricted from marrying local women and from establishing family ties in the territories they were sent to.
Three components of political order
The books develops the idea of the development of the three components of a modern political order, which are,
- State building
- Rule of law
- Accountable government
China, India, the Islamic world and Europe each developed these three components of political organization in different order, in different ways and to different degrees. Denmark and the United Kingdom arrived first at a modern balance of the three components in a single package, follow by others by the nineteenth century, as the Netherlands and Sweden.
China
China is described as having the first modern state, by the definition given, since it established an educated Mandarin bureaucracy, although Hewson objects to this conclusion since the Mandarin bureaucracy was not modern. China used extreme violence on its population (especially during the influence of legalism), but had a weak rule of law and the emperor had no accountability to anyone.
India
India is contrasted with China. India could not use extreme force on its population due to the traditional power of the brahmin priestly caste, who protested violence against the populace and war against neighboring states, by refusing to perform ancestral rituals for the Raja leaders. The power of the Brahmins weakening the state's power over its people, and effectively forced a strong accountability on its leaders to the population of India via its priestly class. An example Fukuyama gives of the influence religion had on early Indian rulers is Ashoka (304–232 BCE) of the Maurya Dynasty, who under the influence of Buddhism (rather than Brahmanism) came to regret his conquests in the Kalinga War. He vowed to end his empire, and eventually the entire political system collapsed.
Muslim states
Certain Muslim states developed the practice of making imported slaves as the ruling class, as with the Mamluks of Egypt and the Janissaries of the Ottoman empire, a process which started around the 8th century. Since these ruling class slaves were neither beholden to family nor to any tribe, but dependent only on the state, it ensured their loyalty towards the state. A later example would be the 16th-century Ottoman Empire practice of seeking out intelligent Christian children for high civil service or military positions, who were cut off from their family for their training.
Europe
In 11th-century Europe, instead of the state having the upper hand as in China, or the Brahmins having the upper hand as in India, there was a power conflict between state and church, the Investiture Controversy between Pope Gregory VII and Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.
The papal party started to search for sources of law to strengthen its case for the universal jurisdiction of the church. They rediscovered the Justinian Code, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, in a library near Bologna in northern Italy in 1072, leading later to the student body called a "universitas", first in Bologna, and soon after in Paris, Oxford, Heidelberg, Cracow, and Copenhagen studying the code and displacing particularistic Salic law. The laws gave the Gregory the authority to excommunicate Henry IV, who was forced to walk to Canossa from Germany to Italy, stand barefoot in the snow for three days outside Canossa and to ask forgiveness from the pope on his knees. The Concordat of Worms ended the struggle between popes and emperors in 1122. It created balance between royal power and religious tradition not seen anywhere else before.
Catholic leaders became accountable to the clergy and to the pope, who historically frequently objected to violence and wars, just as their counterparts in India had done, but in Europe the clergy did not weaken the states as much as Brahmins had done in India. The papal intercessions against wars between Catholic countries also led to the survival of small states in Europe, similar to India, but in contrast to what had happened in China. The existence of small states who were restricted by the church from recruiting mass armies waging wars costly in casualties, as had been the case in China, combined with the existence of independent university scholars, led to military innovations on land and sea to empower fewer soldiers to wield wars effectively and later gave these relatively small countries a military advantage large enough to conquer colonies in the rest of the world. Western Europe began getting the best of both worlds. In England, the rise of common law also strengthened the rule of law. With the reformation, the Lutheran priest N.F.S. Grundtvig in Denmark advocated general literacy since they believed that every Christian should read the bible and established schools throughout the country, leading to voting rights 1849. In Denmark this led to the state gradually being more accountable to the general population, since they could now vote and read. In England and Denmark a balance was finally struck between the three components of political order.
Balance between the components
A successful modern liberal democracy balances all three components to achieve stability.
In China a strong modern state came to power first and the state subjugated any potential agents that might have demanded the other two components. In China, the priestly class did not develop into an organized independent religion, as the priests were in the service of the Emperor. Numerous times, therefore, imperial dynasties collapsed.
In India, the Brahmins became organised into a strong upper caste of India and the warrior/state caste was held to account by a rule of law as interpreted by the Brahmins. Because of the state was weakened by this limitation, attempts at unifying India under one rule did not last very long.
In Europe, there was a long period when the emperors and popes were in conflict, creating a balance of power between them, and ultimately leading to a situation where some small states developed a stable balance between the three components in the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden.
The Origins of Political Order - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Political_Order
There is one key idea of the book. If you wish to have a functional political order that enables economic growth and gives people freedom from arbitrariness of the sovereign or from oppression by their peers, you need three components: (i) a strong state, (ii) rule of law, and (iii) accountability.
It may seem at first that this is nothing especially new, but the way that Fukuyama presents his case is. A strong state is needed to provide public goods (most important being domestic law and order, protection of property, and defense against external attack). But the strong state has to be “penned in” from two sides. From the top (as it were) by an ideology or religion that imposes limits on the state: this is the rule of law. Sovereign himself, however powerful, has to be subject to law. The second constraint comes from below: the state needs to be accepted, that is, accountable to people (where “people” is variously defined). We thus achieve the seemingly impossible: we have a strong state that cannot behave as it pleases, and needs some form of consent of those it governs.
The three independent component parts allow Fukuyama to show how one of them was achieved by some societies, two by others, but that they came together, all three, only in the 17thcentury England. China is the case of what Fukuyama calls “precocious state formation”. Qin China was the first to create a state: a process which, according to Fukuyama, is fundamentally unnatural because to have a state means to fight “patrimonialism”, people’s innate tendency to favor their own kin and tribe. State on the contrary requires clear, impersonal rules and system of advancement based on some general criteria including merit. Qin China, through ruthless centralization, and the defeat of a number of regional aristocracies, achieved that. But, it achieved it, Fukuyama thinks, too early. China thus created a powerful state –a thing which eludes many communities still today, more than two millennia after the Chinese did it—but it never created rule of law nor accountability. It was absolutist, from the start until today.
The absence of the rule of law of course does not mean that there is no law. What is today called “rule by law” (as opposed to the rule of law) is what Legalism was in China: ability of the Emperor to create laws at will, and have them obeyed. There was no lawlessness nor anomie but there was neither rule of law that constrained the state: a set of rules that can be changed only through previously agreed procedures.
There were cases of states that had an early form of the rule of law: religious rules that limited sovereign’s ability to do whatever he wanted. But such societies lacked either accountability, or both accountability and a strong state. Religions, according to Fukuyama, were useful in producing the rule of law because they placed the sovereign under one higher law: divine. This was the case in Islam (Umayyads, Abbasids and later Ottomans and Memluks), India thanks to Hinduism and Buddhism, and Europe thanks to Christianity (or rather mostly thanks to Catholicism).
The absence of rule of law in China is seen as due to the absence of a codified religion with its divinely-ordained rules. In effect, codification of religion—being a “people of the book”—is what Fukuyama believes is needed for the creation of early rule of law. Writing down divine rules, and having them “embodied” in a group of scholars or religious orders (ulamas, Brahmins, Christian clergy) whose main purpose is to watch over their application, limited the arbitrary power of the sultans, Indian princes and European kings.
Ottomans come for a special praise because they were able to create a strong state and an early rule of law (the latter, as just explained, thanks to Islam). The strong state was built on the backs of devşirme, the practice of abducting Christian children from their parents in order to create an elite corps of soldier- and administrator-slaves. This (in many ways abhorrent) practice allowed Ottomans to create a non-patrimonial state, to keep the grandees at bay, and not let kinship and family relations dominate the state. Ottoman decay began when janissaries were finally able to parlay their advantage to their children and then, together with magnates, to repatrimonialize the state. A one-generation aristocracy is the best way to ensure a strong non-patrimonial state. But it is hard to achieve because of people’s desire to transmit their advantages to offspring.
Accountability is the last to get on the scene. Until the European democratic revolutions, accountability was mostly non-existent (the Sultans did not have to ask people for permission for their actions) and was, at best, limited. It worked through the power of aristocracy, clergy or gentry to provide checks on the sovereign, principally to control the introduction of new taxes (Cortes in Spain, regional parlements in France, zemskiy soborin Russia). But until the advent of the English parliament accountability was not only limited to a few classes, but sporadically exercised and even more sporadically obeyed. It thus waxed and waned depending on the relative powers of the sovereign and aristocracy.
When does the political order decay? When the state is incapable to reform itself to respond to new challenges (say, a powerful neighbor) and when it gets repatrimonalized. The decay section is not exactly novel (to be unable to reform is not very original), but the emphasis on repatrimonization as the source of decay allows us to better see that the state remains an unnatural organization in the sense that it is permanently in danger of succumbing to the more atavistic instincts of human nature—to prefer own kin rather than be subject to impersonal rules.
To have a strong state is therefore to be engaged in a permanent struggle against family. Christianity, according to Fukuyama, was particularly good in fighting family ties; Chinese history can be summarized as one endless conflict between the state and family. Every time you give a job to your friend or cousin, you are repartrimonalizing the state. And think how unnatural it is to behave equally toward everybody for it means, as noted by Montesquieu, that “a virtuous man has no friends”.
A Grand Fresco: The Origins of Political Order (Part 1)
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/28/03/2019/grand-fresco-origins-political-order-part-1
In the preface, Fukuyama explains his twofold motivation for writing
the book. First, he wanted to update the information in Samuel P.
Huntington's 1968 political science classic, Political Order in Changing
Societies, a book Fukuyama regards as quintessential reading for anyone
seeking a roadmap to political development in the western world. Second,
he sought to understand why so many of America's attempts to spread
democracy to other parts of the world have not achieved their intended
goals, especially those efforts undertaken since 9/11. However, Fukuyama
also makes clear that the conditions necessary for political development
prior to the Industrial Revolution were much different than the needed
conditions after. So, instead of offering insights into the modern
failures of state building, this volume lays the groundwork of thought
and ideas that came to inform later approaches to politics and the
building of institutions in other nations.
Fukuyama then
discusses the burgeoning of democracies in countries around the world
throughout the 20th century. Nevertheless, this phenomenon of forming
some sort of political or social organization is not unique to the
times. He suggests that human beings did not purposefully build their
first social order or political system. Instead, these are ideas
biologically hardwired into our biology. Fukuyama cites biological
evidence in chimpanzees that points to the fact that human beings are,
by nature, social creatures, who have, from the earliest pre-human days,
constructed communities and systems of interaction and governance,
millennia prior to the creation of political structures. They did so not
out of preference but out of pure, natural biological impulse.
The author then lays out three defining features of a functioning
political order: strong state building, a rule of law, and a government
that is answerable and accountable to the people. He goes to the roots
of each of these elements, delving into Ancient Asian, European, and
Middle Eastern cultures to show how they contributed to the meaning of
democracy that still reverberates today.
Ancient China was
the first civilization to evolve from a tribal system of governance into
one of statehood, but it has long struggled with a realistic rule of law
and an accountable government. This, Fukuyama says, is due to a lack of
a powerful and predominant authority—the same problem Ancient India
suffered from. India did, however, have a sturdy rule of law, mostly
leftover moral tenets bequeathed by Brahmin priests, though the state
fractured into various social hierarchies that damaged and prevented any
cohesiveness among the public. In the Ottoman Empire, the primary
authority and rule of law were both seen as religiously ordained, but so
enmeshed were these aspects in religion that they hindered any
progressive political evolution. Each of these, then, lacked at least
one of Fukuyama's three essential components for a successful state.
In
England, these components gelled for the first time, resulting in a
truly modern democracy that placed values on the right things. Their
social structure was strong, their government instituted more or less
clear rules separate from religious interference, and the people had a
voice in who governed them. The latter came to pass when Parliament
deposed the Catholic King James II in 1688, replacing him with the
Protestant William of Orange in what has become known as The Glorious
Revolution, perhaps gaining such an idyllic name for a reason. Denmark
was another early example of a nation that incorporated the three
critical elements. Fukuyama holds Denmark up as the perfect example of
how to do statehood the right way, devoting a lengthy discussion to how
nations can, metaphorically, "get to Denmark."
Religion
doesn't always play a damaging role in political stability, Fukuyama
argues. In fact, the Catholic Church, as a governing body, provided a
template for early state builders. It also instituted laws—and, more
importantly, respect for those laws—in ways that inspired politics for
centuries, long after politics separated from overtly religious
influences.
Fukuyama's three elements must achieve a degree
of balance in order to produce a healthy and stable political order.
Understanding history is the first step. All of the background
information provided here sets the stage for the Industrial Revolution,
the defining era that forever altered the political and economic
landscape of western societies and governments.
SuperSummary
https://www.supersummary.com/the-origins-of-political-order/summary/
The starting point is that ‘Poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions. It asks (and tries to answer) wonderfully big hairy questions like:
- why are some countries (eg Melanesia, parts of Middle East) still tribally organized?
- why is China historically centralized, while India isn’t?
- why is East Asia so special in its path of authoritarian modernization?
- what explains the contrasting fortunes of the US and Latin America?
Fukuyama’s big idea is that political order is based on three pillars: effective centralized states, the rule of law and accountability mechanisms such as democracy and parliaments. ‘The miracle of modern politics’ is achieving a balance between them, which is difficult both to achieve and then to maintain, with many states having one disproportionately stronger than the others, while others achieve it, and then lose it. Its achievement is often accidental, rather than deliberate. Analysing each state’s unique combination of the three pillars helps us understand the strengths, weaknesses and historical trajectories of different countries and empires.
His big concluding paragraph:
‘The three components of a modern political order – a strong and capable state, the state’s subordination to the rule of law, and government accountability to all citizens – had all been established in one or another part of the world by the end of the 18th Century. China had developed a powerful state early on; the rule of law existed in India, the Middle East, and Europe; and in Britain, accountable government appeared for the first time. Political development in the years subsequent to the Battle of Jena (1806) involved the replication of these institutions across the world, but not in their being supplemented by fundamentally new ones. Communism aspired to do this in the 20th Century but has all but disappeared from the world scene in the 21st.’
There is some soul-searching on the sequencing of these three. Successful democracies got the strong state first, then opened up the franchise. If you start with democracy in the absence of an effective state, a spoils war rapidly ensues – as has happened in many countries in Africa, in Fukuyama’s view. But history is not destiny and anyway, telling people who want democracy that they should first demand an undemocratic state is unlikely to wash. Fukuyama finds comfort in the history of the US, which achieved mind-boggling levels of patronage and corruption in the 19th Century, but sorted it out (more or less) over a 50 year period to the 1930s.
The dance between these three components is superimposed upon something even more primordial: the underlying tension between the construction of effective states and the human bonds of kinship – states go through periods of effectiveness, but then ‘neopatrimonialism’ reasserts itself, and political decay ensues as people try and secure jobs, power and wealth for their families and kin. History resembles centuries of whack the mole, as states try to prevent reemergence of kinship and erosion of their control, and they went to some pretty extreme lengths to do so, for example by ensuring there were no families to favour in the first place: ‘By the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), there were an estimated 100,000 eunuchs associated with the palace. From 1420 on, they were organized into an Orwellian secret police organization knows as the Eastern Depot.’ The eunuch battalion’s job was to root out corruption or disobedience among state officials.
And if you think reverting to kin-based and patronage systems is merely of historical interest or confined to today’s developing countries, I have two words for you: Bush v Clinton.
The focus on understanding China is central to the book – China, not Rome or Greece, is the first effective state with a uniform, multilevel administrative bureaucracy, and it achieved it almost two millennia before the US and Europe. But Fukuyama argues that China’s Achilles’ heel is its failure to develop Rule of Law or accountability mechanisms, leading to an extraordinarily top down system that was always vulnerable to the ‘Bad Emperor’ problem (some of the early versions make Mao look like a pussy cat).
Two other threads are worth teasing out: the roles of violence and religion. Religion, it seems, played a central role in the creation of at least two of Fukuyama’s three pillars. It promoted the idea that there were rules and sources of authority above and beyond the ruler of the day, which eventually transmogrified into the rule of law (China’s lack of a transcendental religion is one explanation for its continuing law-lessness). In Europe, ‘‘Two of the three basic institutions that became crucial to economic modernization – individual freedom of choice with regard to social and property relationships, and political rule limited by transparent and predictable law – were created by a premodern institution, the medieval Church. Only later would these institutions prove useful in the economic sphere.’ You’ll have to go to the book for the fascinating basis of that claim (page 275).
On violence, Fukuyama extends Charles Tilly’s claim that in Europe ‘war made the state and the state made war’ to much of the rest of the world, particularly China, where the original centralized state of the Qin dynasty (3rd Century BC ) was born out of extraordinary bloodshed. Violence or the threat of violence is often necessary to break the hold of incumbents who are blocking social or political change. War drove the rise of nation states in Europe, as conquest and amalgamation both reduced the number of polities from over 500 to today’s couple of dozen, and prompted the creation of strong states to raise taxes and conscripts for war.
That raises an intriguing problem – has the decline in war and violence since the mid 20th Century, which in any other sense we should be celebrating, closed off a vital driver of change? I’ll return to that tomorrow.
The Origins of Political Order: Review of Francis Fukuyama’s impressive history of the state – FP2P
https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/review-of-francis-fukuyama-the-origins-of-political-order/
Fukuyama describes this book as focusing “on the political dimension of [economic and social] development, the evolution of government institutions” (p. 19). The book’s historical commentary documents and explains the appearance and political growth of human societies from bands, tribes, and chiefdoms to states (p. 53). Fukuyama describes his largely inductive method as “putting the theory [of political development] after the history,” noting that “all too often social science begins with an elegant theory and then searches for facts that will confirm it. This, hopefully, is not the approach I take” (p. 24). He notes that much of the existing literature “falls short of being a real theory of political development . . . and it is not clear whether it will ever be possible to generate such a theory. The problem, to put it in social science terms, is that there are too many variables and not enough cases. . . . The prospects of producing a predictive general theory out of this soup of causal factors and outcomes seem to be very slim indeed” (p. 327). The book accordingly describes instead “several important paths of European political development and the range of causal factors associated with each one. From this range of cases it may be possible to generalize about which factors were most and least important, but in ways that fall short of providing a genuine predictive theory” (p. 327). He concedes in fact that his book’s “general framework amounts to something less than a predictive theory of political development” (p. 23). Thus are we prepared to wonder anew whether “political science” deserves to be called “science” at all.
The book is styled in part as an update of Samuel Huntington’s classic work Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, [1968] 2006), for which Fukuyama wrote the reprint edition’s introduction. Fukuyama’s present work attaches historical meat to the bones of Huntington’s thesis. He approvingly characterizes this thesis as arguing that “contrary to modernization theory’s progressive assumptions, there was no reason to assume that political development was any more likely than political decay. Political order emerges as a result of the achievement of some equilibrium among the contending forces within a society. But as time goes on, change occurs internally and externally: the actors who established the original equilibrium themselves evolve or disappear; new actors emerge; economic and social conditions shift; the society is invaded from the outside or faces new terms of trade or imported ideas. As a result, the preceding equilibrium no longer holds, and political decay results until the existing actors come up with a new set of rules and institutions to restore order” (p. 139).
Fukuyama also seeks to build on Huntington’s concept of a “third wave of democratization: liberal democracy as the default form of government” (p. 3). This elaboration will not appear in full until volume 2, which will cover the period ranging from the French Revolution to the present. Volume 1 nevertheless provides generous hints as to what lies beyond the Malthusian world that disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century. The reader is duly warned that “the conditions for political development today are very different from what they were in the periods covered by Volume 1. . . . So while the historical material in this book may explain how different societies got to where they are now, their paths to the present do not determine their futures, or serve as models for other societies” (pp. 18–19).
The French Revolution is synecdoche, standing in not only for the French, American, and Industrial revolutions, but also for the 1806 Battle of Jena- Auerstadt, “when Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy and brought the principles of liberty and equality to Hegel’s part of Europe. . . . [T]he basic principles of modern government had been established by the time of the Battle of Jena: the task thereafter was not to find new principles and a higher political order but rather to implement them through larger and larger parts of the world” (p. 420). The end of volume 1 thus coincides with the emergence, out of the historical process of dialectical contradictions, of G. W. F. Hegel’s ideal “liberal state” and hence with the “end of history.”
The emergence of liberal democracy as the “default” political order remains a modern development. As recently as 1973, only 45 of the world’s 151 countries were regarded as being “free.” That number had increased to 120 “electoral democracies” by the late 1990s, a development that rekindled dialectical and teleological views of history. The number of recognized democracies has declined somewhat since reaching this peak, owing to political backsliding by countries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran (pp. 3–4). The book attributes this reversal and other developing glitches in liberal democracy—such as legislative gridlock and the ballooning of public debt—to “execution” rather than to “concept” (p. 11), thereby implying an eventual regression to the developmental mean. True to Hegelian idealism, the “end of history” is predicted to continue no matter how eventful the transient failures of liberal democracy happen to be.
“Electoral democracy” as a measure of “liberal democracy” falls short of Fukuyama’s political ideal, which he describes as being “more than majority voting in elections; it is a complex set of institutions that restrain and regularize the exercise of power through law and a system of checks and balances” (p. 4). Political institutions fall under three heads: (1) the state; (2) rule of law; and (3) accountable government (p. 16). An ideal political order is said to develop by converging on an optimum institutional balance that supports liberal democratic values while also permitting the state sufficient power to respond efficiently to a society’s legitimate needs and periodic crises. The present volume’s historical case studies demonstrate not only how political institutions develop along these lines, but also and equally important in Fukuyama’s view how and why they also happen to decay. Fukuyama adopts Huntington’s definition of institutions as “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior” (p. 450). He regrettably pays relatively little systematic attention to the problems of rent seeking by sovereigns, politicians, bureaucrats, elites, and other interested factions whose political entrepreneurship routinely prevents political institutions from ever becoming as sharp as the idealized instrumental concepts that spawn them. We read instead that “[w]hat we understand as modern constitutional government arose as a result of . . . unwanted and unplanned compromise” (p. 325).
Fukuyama’s methodological approach is distinguished by the laudable effort to anchor political theory in biological evolution. His earlier book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) signaled not only his interest in the genetic roots of human behavior, but also his concern that manipulation of the human genome ultimately might perturb the “end of history.” Of course, many previous writers have explained the evolution of political systems using the primal Darwinian concepts of “variation” and “selection.” Writers also have noted the essential differences between biological and political evolution: unlike biological evolution, political institutions result from deliberate choice and design; they are transmitted culturally rather than genetically; and they embody subjective values that make them resistant to change (p. 23). Fukuyama’s treatment of evolution is unique, however, in that it also incorporates two fundamental principles of sociobiology: “kin selection” (by which individuals are genetically predisposed to favor family, the political consequence of which Fukuyama terms “patrimonialism”) and “reciprocal altruism” (by which individuals are both genetically predisposed and rationally equipped for cooperation). These concepts are patently applicable to political theory because biological evolution and politics alike are direct consequences of the perpetual competition for scarce resources. The treatment of evolution and self-interest in The Origins of Political Order unfortunately does not do justice to their common foundation; for example, it subordinates self-interest to Hegel’s notion of the human desire for “recognition,” which Fukuyama claims “ensures that politics will never be reducible to simple economic self-interest” (p. 45). He similarly makes no attempt to analyze religion—another key causal factor in his political-order stew—by the lights of either evolution or self-interest. As a result, his analysis is free to drift away from its only a priori moorings.
Drift is most evident when Fukuyama deals with economics’ role in the development of political order. He aptly notes that political institutions “come into being in the first place because people find that they can protect their interests, and the interests of their families through them. . . . Self-interest and legitimacy thus form the cornerstones of political order” (p. 16). He nevertheless argues throughout the book that political development “is not only about economics” (p. 19), by which he appears to mean that political development is not simply about maximizing pecuniary economic values. Hence, he chides neoclassical economics’ working assumption that a “rational utility-maximizing framework is sufficient to understand virtually all forms of social behavior. Those who think otherwise, the Nobel laureate Gary Becker once implied, just weren’t looking hard enough” (p. 162). The book thus denies to rational human action the same weight it accords to genetically driven behavior even though both are direct consequences of human evolution.
Fukuyama similarly dismisses the economist Mancur Olson’s theory of the “stationary bandit,” which explains how government could have arisen as a consequence of roaming entrepreneurial gangs’ discovery that they could improve their private lot by providing public goods to disorganized populations rather than by forcibly extorting them seriatim. Fukuyama argues that “[t]he only problem with Olson’s theory is that it isn’t correct. The rulers of traditional agrarian societies often failed to tax their subjects at anything close to Olson’s posited maximizing rate. . . . There is no better illustration of the inadequacies of Olson’s model than China during the Ming Dynasty, where there is broad scholarly consensus that tax rates were set far below their theoretical minimum, and indeed far below a level that was necessary to provide the minimal public goods, particularly defense, that were needed to keep the society viable” (p. 304).
This bit of analysis stumbles badly on three levels. First, it provides no theoretical refutation of Olson’s a priori theory, offering instead only some possibly contrary examples. Second, it compares political decay to Olson’s theory of political origins. Once-entrepreneurial political dynasties easily decay when sovereignty passes into the hands of a generation that is indifferent, incompetent, or insane. Moreover, sovereigns who achieve political monopolies—such as the Chinese emperors whose “Mandate of Heaven” gave them virtually unlimited political power—can be expected to behave like a rational monopolist in any other field of professional endeavor; that is, they tend to maximize the combined value of pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns to office. The Nobelist John Hicks famously quipped that “the best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life,” an aphorism that aptly characterizes ancient Chinese history; to wit, Fukuyama states, “An enormous complacency pervaded Ming China in all walks of life. It was not just emperors who didn’t feel it necessary to extract as much as they could in taxes; other forms of innovation and change simply didn’t seem to be worth the effort” (p. 311). But things were not always thus, as Fukuyama explains: “The draconian powers of taxation and confiscation held by the emperor also tended to be a wasting commodity. It could be used only early on in a dynasty when the emperor was consolidating power and settling scores with former opponents. But as time went on, the palace found it often needed the cooperation of those same elites and dramatically reduced tax rates in the areas [where] it had earlier confiscated property” (p. 306). Fukuyama’s example not only fails his argument but also appears on close consideration to refute it.
Third, the book blithely describes other instances in the development of political order that stand on all fours with Olson’s a priori theory of political order. An example is its description of the medieval church’s role in establishing political order and the rule of law and also coincidently in fostering gender equality by promoting property rights for women. Fukuyama explains, as if channeling Adam Smith, that fostering gender equality per se was no part of the church’s intention. Rather, “[t]he relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church’s self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby reconvey her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself. A woman’s right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church, since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows and spinsters” (p. 238). This commentary might usefully have been extended to explain how the right of women to own property also led to tens of thousands of widows with families being cast as witches and subsequently burned at the stake so that the church could confiscate their wealth “legally.” The church became perhaps the greatest of all stationary bandits when in 1199 C.E. Pope Innocent III decreed that the property of heretics would be forfeited to the church, which brazenly shared these spoils with the victims’ accusers. Fukuyama’s argument that the rule of law emerged from religion is ironic on several levels.
Fukuyama duly notes that “[t]he factors driving the development of any given political institution are multiple, complex, and often dependent on accidental or contingent events” (p. 23). This caveat enables him to spin a “just so” and sometimes inconsistent story about the origins of political order by drawing freely on selected historical examples for support.
James A. Montanye
Falls Church, Virginia
The Origin of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution:
https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=870
entire outline to preserve formatting
Outline of “The Origins of Political Order” by Francis Fukuyama 2011 | Information Knoll
At the core of Fukuyama’s thinking is the notion of an institution as a “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior that persist beyond the tenure of individual leaders.”
The British Parliament persists even though its members come and go. It is stable and persists beyond an individual human lifespan. It is a habit that exists not at the level of a single individual, but a group.
He points out that most countries today face one (or more) of three challenges as it relates to political institutions.
- No functioning institutions – E.g. Post-Qaddafi Libya where there is no single, central source of authority that can provide security or the conditions for individuals to flourish.
- Decaying institutions – E.g. United States where many government institutions that are supposed to serve public purposes have been captured by powerful private interests to at least some meaningful degree.
- Social change outstripping existing institutions – E.g. Turkey and Brazil where social change as a result of rapidly expanding middle classes don’t have sufficient institutional support.
But what are political institutions in the first place and how did they come to exist?
The basis of institutions is in evolutionary biology: specifically kin selection and reciprocal altruism.
The first human groups were family-based bands. You and a bunch of your cousins, aunts and uncles would all hang out and walk around to wherever there was food.
This works because of the biological factor of kin selection, a recurring pattern where all sexually reproducing animals behave altruistically towards those they share genes with. (Except, apparently, for that uncle that won’t shut up on Thanksgiving and Christmas).
Reciprocal altruism is another well-observed tendency that unrelated
individuals will engage in ongoing exchanges of favors that are mutually
beneficial, a cornerstone of game theory, and the iterated
prisoner’s dilemma. If you help out a friend that shares no genes
with you, they tend to want to help you out back *unless they are a
sociopath/a**hole) and that works out better for both of you in the long
run.
Human beings, in other words, are social animals by nature and we tend to cooperate better with friends and family than strangers. This system, based on biology, worked fine when we lived in small bands of dozens of individuals.
So how did we get beyond hunter-gatherer bands to nation-states?
Humans are also norm-following creatures. We follow norms of behavior of others around them. This tends to get derided by some as being conformist, but it’s generally very useful and was essential for the rise of institutions that could scale beyond the level of small bands.
Norms have often been given an intrinsic value and even worshipped as in the religious laws of many societies. Since an institution is nothing more than a norm that persists over time, human beings have a natural tendency to institutionalize their norms and behavior.
The transition from bands to tribal-level societies is rooted in kinship but required the emergence of religion. Tribal-level societies tended to believe in the ability of dead ancestors and unborn descendants to affect their health and happiness today and so rules that were said to honor them won out.
It just so happened that these rules also tended to promote effective cooperation. Rules such as those chronicled in the Ten Commandments fundamental to both Judaism and Christianity tend to include those which make it easier to cooperate and have a stable society. Thou shalt not murder, commit adultery or steal are all pretty useful rules for helping people get along in a way that allows them to maintain a stable social order and amass more resources over time.
By contrast, a religion based on the idea that it was totally cool to murder everyone would pretty quickly die out.
The next transition was from tribal societies to state-level societies where the state possesses a monopoly on coercion in a defined territory. “War made the state and the state made war.” If you try to set up a military force in Idaho and claim control over the territory, then some well-trained men and women from the American State will not take too kindly to that. They will show up with big guns and you will be in deep doo-doo.
Though we tend to take it for granted, the monopoly on coercion and violence in a given geographic area is central to the existence of a nation-state.
The key to this development of modern states was the shift of political organizations away from family and friends to impersonal institutions.
The transition from kin level (just family) to tribal level societies (friends and family) was pretty similar in all parts of the world, presumably because they are both rooted in human biology that we all share – kin selection and reciprocal altruism.
However, the transition from tribal level societies to modern states occurred differently in different places and the legacy of how these transitions happened is still visible today. More significantly, it explains the root of much geopolitical and cultural conflict.
There are three major elements of this transition to modern states: the state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability.
The State
In China, the state emerged earlier than anywhere else (3rd century BC) through civil service examinations, creating institutional norms around a strong central government.
The Arabs and Ottomans used slave-soldiers which were non-Muslim boys who were captured and taken from their families then raised to be soldiers and administrators loyal to the current ruler. Because they had no ties to the surrounding society, they effectively formed a military and bureaucracy that transcended kinship.
In Europe, the state emerged much later, however it came the Catholic Church changed the rules of inheritance to make it much more difficult for kin groups to pass resources down to their extended families. This was done in large part so that those resources would get left to the Church, but it had the long term effect of establishing the Catholic Church as a separate institution.
The Rules of Law
As a result, the rule of law, those rules that are binding on even the most politically powerful individuals, became most deeply institutionalized in Western Europe. The Church emerged as a political actor that could affect the fortune of Kings and Emperors.
In the eleventh century, the Catholic Church clashed with the Holy Roman Emperor over the question of the emperor’s interference in religious matters. In the end, the Church won and had the right to appoint its own priests and bishops – merging as the guardian of a revived Roman law based on the Justinian Code.
By contrast, China never developed a transcendental religion. Perhaps, for this reason, it never developed a true rule of law that its leaders were bound to. The Chinese state thus emerged without any constraint on the political power of its central leaders.
Democratic Accountability
The final institution to emerge was democratic accountability which grew out of the European feudal institution of estates, the elites on which the king relied to raise taxes and armies.
Under the feudal system, the elites controlled the wealth from the land and had small military forces so the king needed the elites to maintain a monopoly on force in his territory. This gave European elites leverage over the king that didn’t exist elsewhere in the world, though the exact balance of power evolved differently in different parts of Europe.
French and Spanish monarchs largely succeeded in reducing the power of elites and being more authoritarian.
In contrast, the elites in Poland and Hungary won out leading to a very weak central authority. Since the elites could not effectively coordinate to defend their borders, they were conquered by stronger neighbors and failed to develop a sufficiently strong central state.
Russia, somewhat similarly to France and Spain, had weaker elites and law exerted a weaker influence and so a more robust form of absolutism emerged there.
England was the one place where there was a relatively even balance between the power of the monarch and the Estates. When the early Stuart kings sought to build absolutist powers, they found themselves blocked by a well-organized and armed Parliament. The two sides fought a civil war which ultimately culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, where the Stuart dynasty was deposed and a new monarch, William of Orange, agreed to a constitutional settlement embodying the principle of “no taxation without representation”.
The next big development in democratic accountability was the founding of the United States.
The American experiment was unique in that it was the first state to fully acknowledge individual rights and equality. The Declaration of Independence said this in no uncertain terms:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
The Constitution squarely vested sovereignty not in a king or an amorphous state but rather in “We the People.”
This was a big deal. These documents did not seek to re-create Britain’s hierarchical, class-defined society in North America, but establish a new system. While there have been many political and social barriers to de facto equality in the United States since, the burden has always been on anyone claiming special rights or privileges for a particular class to justify how they were compatible with the nation’s founding creed.
The basic political order established first in England by the Glorious Revolution then further expanded by the American Revolution would prove remarkably durable.
No one in the West subsequently argued that the government should not be accountable to “the People”; later debates and conflicts revolved entirely around the question of who counted as a full human being whose dignity was marked by the ability to participate in the democratic political system. These changes, though extremely important, were changes of degree more than of kind.
The institutions established in Europe, China, India, and The Middle East centuries ago are still the basis on which the nation-states in those areas operate today and help explain some of the conflicts we are witnessing today, perhaps most notably between China and Europe and it’s former colonies.
Consider a leaked internal Chinese Communist party directive from 2013 which describes the party as being in the midst of an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival. According to the directive, the ideas that threaten China with “major disorder” include concepts such as “separation of powers,” “independent judiciaries,” and “universal human rights.”
For most people that grow up in the West, the idea of “universal human rights” as being a threat is almost inconceivable. All those things are mostly taken for granted as good and worth striving for. But, in the light of China’s historical lack of a transcendental religion or a strong institution outside the state, one can start to make a certain sense of how China might view that differently.
I have no idea what the future geopolitical order is going to look like. However, I do know both that it will not look like the past and that it will at the same time be grounded in the past. Many of our debates are grounded in these histories and we would do well to heed the context they provide.
The Origins of Political Order Review and Summary
https://taylorpearson.me/bookreview/the-origins-of-political-order/
Book Two to the present time
The Evolution of Political Order | Journal of Democracy
https://journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-evolution-of-political-order/
Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay
https://theconversation.com/francis-fukuyamas-political-order-and-political-decay-37882
Francis Fukuyama: The Origins of Political Order
