“This book has two origins,” Francis Fukuyama writes in the preface to The Origins of Political Order. “The first arose when my mentor, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, asked me to write a foreword to a reprint edition of his 1968 classic, Political Order in Changing Societies. Its second inspiration was the decade that Fukuyama spent studying “the real-world problems of weak and failed states” and that inspired his 2004 book State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century.
In discussing the origins of The Origins, Fukuyama is being modest, if not disingenuous. He is best known for the international sensation caused by the publication of his 1989 essay “The End of History?” in the foreign policy journal The National Interest and the subsequent book The End of History and the Last Man. His thesis ignited a global debate: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the cold war, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such; that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
In the 20 years since, Fukuyama has qualified his argument, but he has not abandoned it. In The Origins of Political Order, the first of a projected two volumes, he writes: “Alexandre Kojève, the great Russian-French interpreter of Hegel, argued that history as such had ended in the year 1806 with the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt, when Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy and brought the principles of liberty and equality to Hegel’s part of Europe.” And he continues: “I believe that Kojève’s assertion still deserves to be taken seriously. The three components of a modern political order — a strong and capable state, the state’s subordination to a 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.”
By chance, these three elements were united for the first time in Britain, although other northwestern European countries that were influenced by the Reformation, like the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, “also succeeded in putting together the state, rule of law and accountability in a single package by the 19th century.” But before their combination in Britain and its neighbours at the time of the industrial and democratic revolutions, the three elements of modern political order had evolved separately in different premodern civilizations: “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.”
Most of The Origins of Political Order is devoted to telling the story of how the state, the rule of law and accountability happened to evolve independently in different societies, before their combination in 18th-century Britain. Having been accused of determinism by some critics of his earlier work, Fukuyama emphasises the role of contingency. The origins of modern political institutions were “complex and context-specific.” For example, the decline in importance of extended families in early modern Europe, which resulted in part from the power of the medieval church, meant that “an emerging capitalist economy in Italy, England and the Netherlands in the 16th century did not have to overcome the resistance of large corporately organised kinship groups with substantial property to protect, as in India and China.”
Fukuyama rejects reductionist attempts to explain political and social institutions as mere epiphenomena of underlying economic or technological structures. “It is impossible to develop any meaningful theory of political development without treating ideas as fundamental causes of why societies differ and follow distinct development paths.” In particular, “religion can never be explained simply by reference to prior material conditions.”
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For this reason, The Origins of Political Order, like Fukuyama’s earlier work, is at odds with the contemporary elevation of neoclassical economics as the paradigmatic social science. His intellectual affinities are with the great thinkers of the 19th-century sociological tradition like Weber, Durkheim and Marx, as well as with Hegel, whom Fukuyama tellingly identified as a social scientist in The End of History? With this sociological tradition, Fukuyama shares a view of politics as a product of history and evolution, and a rejection of the absolutism of Lockean natural rights theory and market fundamentalism, or “Manchester liberalism.” Against libertarians like Friedrich Hayek, who try to explain society in terms of Homo economicus, he says that a strong and capable state has always been a precondition for a flourishing capitalist economy.
Some readers, however, may think Fukuyama goes too far in de-emphasising the natural rights tradition that inspired the Renaissance and Enlightenment liberalism. Here Fukuyama’s historicism and his insistence that ideas themselves shape political order are arguably at odds.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER
From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Francis Fukuyama
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
585 pages; $35