The Origins of Political Order
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''The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman times to the French Revolution'' is a 2011 book by
political economist Political economy is the study of how economic systems (e.g. markets and national economies) and political systems (e.g. law, institutions, government) are linked. Widely studied phenomena within the discipline are systems such as labour m ...
Francis Fukuyama Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer. Fukuyama is known for his book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992), which argue ...
. The main thesis of the book covers three main components that gives rise to a stable political order in a state: the state needs to be modern and strong, to obey the rule of law governing the state and be accountable. This theory is argued by applying comparative
political history Political history is the narrative and survey of political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, voters, parties and leaders. It is closely related to other fields of history, including diplomatic history, constitutional history, socia ...
to develop a theory of the stability of a political system. The book covers several regions (China, India, Papua New Guinea as well as Western and Eastern Europe separately), and uses case studies of political developments from these regions, the scope is wide and consists of
ancient history Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history to as far as late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient history cove ...
to the early modern period. Fukuyama refers to
Amartya Sen Amartya Kumar Sen (; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, econom ...
's view that democracy remains the default political condition. Though not universally accepted as a form of government, even autocratic leaders have maintained semblance of democracy for legitimisation of their rule and use of media for their projection as democratic leaders. However, the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan challenges the assumption as there is no default reset to democracy once the sitting governments or leaders are removed.


Series of books

The book is the first of two books on the development of
political order In political science, a political system means the type of political organization that can be recognized, observed or otherwise declared by a state. It defines the process for making official government decisions. It usually comprizes the govern ...
. This book goes from its origins to the
French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
. The next book '' Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day'', published in September 2014, starts with the French Revolution and carries the analysis to the present day.


Why states and institutions fail

The book is an attempt to understand why modern statebuilding and the building of institutions in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone and Liberia have failed to live up to expectations. In the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US administration seemed genuinely surprised when the Iraqi state itself collapsed in an orgy of looting and civil conflict. The book is about "getting to Denmark," in other words creating stable, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and honest societies. Fukuyama points out that at the time of writing ninety contemporary 'primitive' societies had been engaged in war, suggesting that political order is preferable to primitive social structures if stability is to be achieved. The author describes how attempts at shaping countries outside the western world into western type democracies failed, and that this book was an attempt to find out why, by trying to find the true origins of political order, by tracing the histories of China, India, Europe and some Muslim countries from the point of view of three components.


Aims and the Analytical Framework

Since the aim of the book is to understand how institutions and states develop in different countries, it is also a book on comparative historical research. It is an extension of Samuel P. Huntington's ''
Political Order in Changing Societies With his famous book ''Political Order in Changing Societies'', published in 1968, the American political scientist and Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington is considered to be one of the ”Founding Fathers” of neo-institutionalism, the hist ...
'' and similar in scope to
Jared Diamond Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American geographer, historian, ornithologist, and author best known for his popular science books '' The Third Chimpanzee'' (1991); ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Priz ...
’s ''
Guns, Germs, and Steel ''Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies'' (subtitled ''A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years'' in Britain) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for ge ...
''. Fukuyama admits that while developing foreword to a reprint edition of Samuel P. Huntington's classic he felt the need for serious updating of the content given that the world had witnessed momentous development from the collapse of Soviet Union and the communism as an ideology to the rise of East Asia. While developing the foreword to Huntington's work, Fukuyama considered it necessary to go back in history and look at the origins of political development and decay. Taking forward Samuel P. Huntington's framework for analysis of political order in societies and applying it to the problems of democracy, Fukuyama asked two questions; firstly, why certain societies had adopted democratic route and reached stable political order while some could not go beyond a certain stage in their march towards democracy and got stuck in autocracy? The second strand of the framework focused on the question as to whether democracy could respond and adapt to the new threats and challenges it is confronted with. Fukuyama also confessed that he did not have the insights of an anthropologists, economist or biologist but his broader landscape covering history of multiple countries across time and space revealed political patterns which might not be available to the experts in the fields mentioned above. The task that he had set for himself was too broad a landscape to cover in one volume particularly when civilisations like the Chinese, Indians or Muslims were involved. These societies had intricate power structures that drove strength from cultural and social values developed over centuries.
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
was quite critical in its review stating that
"Fukuyama borrows a phrase from contemporary social science to explain what he's really interested in: how to get to Denmark (ie a stable, prosperous, dynamic society, and one that now even has the world's best restaurant). But the history he offers here doesn't provide the answer. On its own, this book is ''Hamlet'' without the prince".
Fukuyama develops his argument with respect to the history of China, India and the Middle East before focusing on the way European countries developed in a variety of directions.


From pre-human origins to states


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 Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influe ...
and
Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (, ; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolu ...
. For Fukuyuma, human beings do not enter into political life because of a conscious rational decision, instead, this communal organisation comes to them naturally. 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 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 Charismatic authority is a concept of leadership developed by the German sociologist Max Weber. It involves a type of organization or a type of leadership in which authority derives from the charisma of the leader. This stands in contrast to two o ...
" because he used the idea of an '
umma Umma ( sux, ; in modern Dhi Qar Province in Iraq, formerly also called Gishban) was an ancient city in Sumer. There is some scholarly debate about the Sumerian and Akkadian names for this site. Traditionally, Umma was identified with Tell J ...
' (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.Fukuyama 2011 Mandarins or
Scholar-official The scholar-officials, also known as literati, scholar-gentlemen or scholar-bureaucrats (), were government officials and prestigious scholars in Chinese society, forming a distinct social class. Scholar-officials were politicians and governmen ...
s, 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 Mamluk ( ar, مملوك, mamlūk (singular), , ''mamālīk'' (plural), translated as "one who is owned", meaning " slave", also transliterated as ''Mameluke'', ''mamluq'', ''mamluke'', ''mameluk'', ''mameluke'', ''mamaluke'', or ''marmeluke'') ...
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 State-building as a specific term in social sciences and humanities, refers to political and historical processes of creation, institutional consolidation, stabilization and sustainable development of states, from the earliest emergence of stateh ...
# Rule of law # Accountable government China,
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
, 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, followed by others by the nineteenth century, as the Netherlands and Sweden.


China

China is described as having the first modern state under the
Qin dynasty The Qin dynasty ( ; zh, c=秦朝, p=Qín cháo, w=), or Ch'in dynasty in Wade–Giles romanization ( zh, c=, p=, w=Ch'in ch'ao), was the first dynasty of Imperial China. Named for its heartland in Qin state (modern Gansu and Shaanxi), ...
, by the definition given, since it established an educated Mandarin bureaucracy, although Hewson objects to this conclusion, arguing that the Mandarin bureaucracy was not characteristically modern. Qin China wielded extreme violence to cow its population (especially under 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 Brahmin (; sa, ब्राह्मण, brāhmaṇa) is a varna as well as a caste within Hindu society. The Brahmins are designated as the priestly class as they serve as priests (purohit, pandit, or pujari) and religious teachers (gur ...
priestly caste The priestly caste is a social group responsible for officiating over sacrifices and leading prayers or other religious functions, particularly in nomadic and tribal societies. In some cases, as with the Brahmins of Vedic India and the Kohanim a ...
, who protested violence against the populace and war against neighboring states, by refusing to perform ancestral rituals for the
Raja ''Raja'' (; from , IAST ') is a royal title used for South Asian monarchs. The title is equivalent to king or princely ruler in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The title has a long history in South Asia and Southeast Asia, being attested f ...
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 Ashoka (, ; also ''Asoka''; 304 – 232 BCE), popularly known as Ashoka the Great, was the third emperor of the Maurya Empire of Indian subcontinent during to 232 BCE. His empire covered a large part of the Indian subcontinent, s ...
(304–232 BCE) of the
Maurya Dynasty The Maurya Empire, or the Mauryan Empire, was a geographically extensive Iron Age historical power in the Indian subcontinent based in Magadha, having been founded by Chandragupta Maurya in 322 BCE, and existing in loose-knit fashion until 1 ...
, 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
Mamluk Mamluk ( ar, مملوك, mamlūk (singular), , ''mamālīk'' (plural), translated as "one who is owned", meaning " slave", also transliterated as ''Mameluke'', ''mamluq'', ''mamluke'', ''mameluk'', ''mameluke'', ''mamaluke'', or ''marmeluke'') ...
s 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 The Investiture Controversy, also called Investiture Contest ( German: ''Investiturstreit''; ), was a conflict between the Church and the state in medieval Europe over the ability to choose and install bishops ( investiture) and abbots of mona ...
between Pope Gregory VII and
Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV (german: Heinrich IV; 11 November 1050 – 7 August 1106) was Holy Roman Emperor from 1084 to 1105, King of Germany from 1054 to 1105, King of Italy and Burgundy from 1056 to 1105, and Duke of Bavaria from 1052 to 1054. He was the so ...
. 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 The ''Corpus Juris'' (or ''Iuris'') ''Civilis'' ("Body of Civil Law") is the modern name for a collection of fundamental works in jurisprudence, issued from 529 to 534 by order of Justinian I, Byzantine Emperor. It is also sometimes referred ...
, 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 Excommunication is an institutional act of religious censure used to end or at least regulate the Koinonia, communion of a member of a congregation with other members of the religious institution who are in normal communion with each other. The ...
Henry IV, who was forced to
walk to Canossa The Humiliation of Canossa ( it, L'umiliazione di Canossa), sometimes called the Walk to Canossa (german: Gang nach Canossa/''Kanossa'') or the Road to Canossa, was the ritual submission of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII ...
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 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.


See also

*
Political history of the world The political history of the world is the history of the various political entities created by the human race throughout their existence and the way these states define their borders. Throughout history, political systems have expanded from ...


References

;Bibliography * * *


External links

*
The Origins of Political Order.
' Audio of
Mark Colvin Mark Colvin (13 March 1952 – 11 May 2017) was an Australian journalist and radio and television broadcaster for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and worked on most of the flagship current affairs programs. Notably, based in Sydne ...
interviewing Fukuyama.
Late Night Live ''Late Night Live'' is a radio program broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National and podcast and streamed over the World Wide Web. Since 1991, the program has been hosted by farmer, writer and public intellectual P ...
. 13 June 2011 10. Retrieved 12 July 2012.
Presentation by Fukuyama on ''The Origins of Political Order'', April 25, 2011
{{DEFAULTSORT:Origins of Political Order History books about politics Books in political philosophy Universal history books Works by Francis Fukuyama Political history Political science Political systems Comparative historical research World history 2011 non-fiction books Farrar, Straus and Giroux books Profile Books books