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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama
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Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
Francis Fukuyama, author of the bestselling The End of History and the Last Man and one of our most important political thinkers, provides a sweeping account of how today’s basic political institutions developed. The first of a major two-volume work, The Origins of Political Order begins with politics among our primate ancestors and follows the story through the emergence of tribal societies, the growth of the first modern state in China, the beginning of the rule of law in India and the Middle East, and the development of political accountability in Europe up until the eve of the French Revolution.
Drawing on a vast body of knowledge—history, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and economics—Fukuyama has produced a brilliant, provocative work that offers fresh insights on the origins of democratic societies and raises essential questions about the nature of politics and its discontents.
- Sales Rank: #173502 in Books
- Published on: 2011-04-12
- Released on: 2011-04-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.19" h x 1.76" w x 6.35" l, 1.92 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 608 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The evolving tension between private and public animates this magisterial history of the state. In his hominids-to-guillotines chronicle of humanity's attempts to build strong, accountable governments that adhere to the rule of law, international relations scholar Fukuyama (The End of History) advances two themes: the effort to create an impersonal state free from family and tribal allegiances, and the struggle—often violent—against wealthy elites who capture the state and block critical reforms. Fukuyama's multifaceted comparative approach grounds politics and government in the demands of biology, geography, war, and economics, and pays appropriately lavish attention to China (he styles the Qin Dynasty of 221 B.C.E. the world's first modern state), India, and the Islamic countries. A neo-Hegelian, he's especially trenchant on the importance of ideology—especially religious beliefs—as an autonomous instigator of social and political change. (He cogently ascribes Europe's distinctively individualistic culture to the medieval Catholic Church's "assault on kinship.") Fukuyama writes a crystalline prose that balances engaging erudition with incisive analysis. As germane to the turmoil in Afghanistan as it is to today's congressional battles, this is that rare work of history with up-to-the-minute relevance. (Apr.)
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From Booklist
Political theorist Fukuyama presents nothing less than a unified theory of state formation, a comparative study of how tribally organized societies in various parts of the world and various moments in history have transformed into societies with political systems and institutions and, in some cases, political accountability. Drawing upon a diverse range of sources—sociobiology and anthropology as well as macroeconomics and legal history—and paying particular attention to political development in Asia, Fukuyama describes a somewhat evolutionary mechanism wherein political systems develop in response to certain societal conditions and become institutionalized because of, among other things, their ability to adapt. Very much a continuation of his former teacher Samuel Huntington’s interest in political decay, this wide-ranging and frequently provocative work also carries the mantel of the great nineteenth-century sociologists, who addressed many of the same questions. Though Fukuyama hints at his theory’s relevance to present-day political challenges, readers seeking commentary on anything more recent than the French Revolution will need to be patient; this is volume 1 of 2. --Brendan Driscoll
Review
“Ambitious and highly readable.” ―The New Yorker
“Political theorist Francis Fukuyama's new book is a major accomplishment, likely to find its place among the works of seminal thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, and modern moral philosophers and economists such as John Rawls and Amartya Sen . . .It is a perspective and a voice that can supply a thinker's tonic for our current political maladies.” ―Earl Pike, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“An intellectual triumph--bold in scope, sound in judgment, and rich in provocations; in short, a classic.” ―Ian Morris, Slate
“A sweeping survey that tries to explain why human beings act as they do in the political sphere. Magisterial in its learning and admirably immodest in its ambition.” ―David Gress, The Wall Street Journal
“In many respects, Fukuyama is an ideal guide for this enormous undertaking. He combines a deep expertise in political institutions with an impressive familiarity of world history, philosophy and social theory. An engaging writer, his prose crackles with sharp observations and illuminating comparisons, and the book marshals a breathtaking array of stimulating facts and provocative generalizations. Who knew, for instance, that the tsetse fly retarded the spread of Islam into sub-Saharan Africa? Simply as a compendium of fascinating minutiae and social science theory, the book offers a treasure trove to the casual student of political history. More important, Fukuyama's book can help us appreciate why so many countries fail to combine the strong institutions, rule of law and accountability that are the hallmark of peaceful and prosperous nations.” ―Eric Oliver, San Francisco Chronicle
“Fukuyama's intellectual instincts hard-wire him into the most geopolitically strategic--not to mention dangerous--corners of the world….[He] is arguably the world's bestselling contemporary political scientist... His new book, The Origins of Political Order, which hits bookstores this week, seeks to understand how human beings transcended tribal affiliations and organized themselves into political societies... His books have taken on not only politics and philosophy, but also biotechnology and that tinderbox of an idea: human nature. ‘He's incredibly intellectually honest,' says Walter Russell Mead, a historian of American foreign policy. ‘He goes where his head takes him. His first duty is to the truth as he sees it.'” ―Andrew Bast, Newsweek
“The history profession is today dominated by small minds studying small topics. Specialists trade in abstractions, taking refuge in tiny foxholes of arcane knowledge. It was not always this way. In the 19th century, men like Leopold von Ranke, George Macaulay Trevelyan and Frederick Jackson Turner used the past to try to understand the present. Their ideas were big, and sometimes too were their mistakes. Francis Fukuyama is at heart a Victorian. As he admits, he wants to revive a ‘lost tradition' when historians were big thinkers. In The Origins of Political Order, his topic is the world, his starting point the chimpanzee. He charts how states evolved, in the process explaining why, despite humans' common origin in Africa perhaps 50,000 years ago, great political diversity exists today...[It is] impressive to see such a huge and complicated topic covered in such an accessible and engaging fashion....The Origins of Political Order tries to make sense of the complexity that has cluttered the last two decades. It is a bold book, probably too bold for the specialists who take refuge in tiny topics and fear big ideas. But Fukuyama deserves congratulation for thinking big and not worrying about making mistakes. This is a book that will be remembered, like those of Ranke, Trevelyan and Turner. Bring on volume II.” ―Gerard DeGrott, The Washington Post
“The Origins of Political Order "begins in prehumen times and concludes on the eve of the American and French Revolutions. Along the way, Fukuyama mines the fields of anthropology, archaeology, biology, evolutionary psychology, economics, and, of course, political science and international relations to establish a framework for understanding the evolution of political institutions. And that's just Volume One….At the center of the project is a fundamental question: Why do some states succeed while others collapse?” ―Evan Goldstein, The Chronicle of Higher Education
“The evolving tension between private and public animates this magisterial history of the state....Fukuyama writes a crystalline prose that balances engaging erudition with incisive analysis. As germane to the turmoil in Afghanistan as it is to today's congressional battles, this is that rare work of history with up-to-the-minute relevance.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred, and a Top 10 Politics Pick for the Spring Preview)
“Ambitious, erudite and eloquent, this book is undeniably a major achievement by one of the leading public intellectuals of our time.” ―Michael Lind, The New York Times Book Review
“Stimulating. . . With impressive erudition, the author travels across China, India, the Islamic world and different regions of Europe looking for the main components of good political order and at how and why these emerged (or failed to) in each place. . . Mr. Fukuyama is still the big-picture man who gave us The End of History, but he has an unerring eye for illuminating detail. Books on political theory are not often page-turners; this one is.” ―The Economist
“This exceptional book should be in every library.” ―David Keymer, Library Journal
“Human social behavior has an evolutionary basis. This was the thesis in Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology that has caused such a stir . . . In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University presents a sweeping new overview of human social structures throughout history, taking over from where Dr. Wilson's ambitious synthesis left off. . . Previous attempts to write grand analyses of human development have tended to focus on a single causal explanation, like economics or warfare, or, as with Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, on geography. Dr. Fukuyama's is unusual in that he considers several factors, including warfare, religion, and in particular human social behaviors like favoring kin. . . 'You have to be bowled over by the extraordinary breath of approach,' said Arthur Melzer, a political scientist at Michigan State University who invited Dr. Fukuyama to give lectures on the book. 'It's definitely a magnum opus.'” ―Nicholas Wade, The New York Times
“Sweeping, provocative big picture-study of humankind's political impulses. . . Endlessly interesting -- reminiscent in turns of Oswald Spengler, Stanislaw Andreski and Samuel Huntington, though less pessimistic and much better written.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Political theorist Fukuyama presents nothing less than a unified theory of state formation, a comparative study of how tribally organized societies in various parts of the world and various moments of history have transformed into societies with political systems and institutions and, in some cases, political accountability. . . This wide-ranging and frequently provocative work also carries the mantel of the great nineteenth-century socioloists.” ―Brendan Driscoll, Booklist
Most helpful customer reviews
120 of 125 people found the following review helpful.
A thoughtful addition to the world-historical theorizing genre
By Ryan
The Origins of Political Order is an engaging read for anyone willing to grant the author license to do some old school multidisciplinary broad-scope theorizing on a hugely important question: What are the origins of political order? Why did key political institutions -- a centralized state with a monopoly on the use of force, enforcement of legal norms by third parties, and accountability of the state to outside forces -- develop in some places and not others?
The real standard for evaluating this kind of book, a work in the world-historical Guns, Germs, and Steel genre, is not whether the author gets details wrong, or misconstrues some of the theories or cultures he discusses. This is inevitable. No one can be an expert in biology, the history of China, cultural anthropology, primate behavior, and legal history. But as Fukuyama correctly argues, that the task is necessarily imperfect and difficult doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. The standard for success is whether the necessarily imperfect effort nonetheless tells us something new and interesting. And Fukuyama succeeds on this metric.
Fukuyama abolishes any doubts the reader might harbor about political development as separate from economic or social development, and destroys any notion the reader might have that political order is somehow automatic or natural. Fukuyama will persuade you that political order is instead fragile and contingent. And he'll do it while taking you on a fascinating tour of the history of several different nations as well as the history of humans as a species. You'll learn about geography, primate behavior, and religion. Indeed, the pages are brimming with interesting theories on the various sub-topics that make up the volume, each of which could form its own PhD project. That none is quite fully explored is a necessary byproduct of the scope of the work.
Fukuyama, of course, has his biases. He gleefully and rightly eschews political correctness. Some readers might flinch, for example, at the characterization of societies that use women as chattel as essentially egalitarian and free. But Fukuyama's biases are not Right or Left; readers of any partisan persuasion will find things to like and dislike about Fukuyama's conclusions.
If nothing else, the book is a sterling example of clear, concise prose that is well-edited. You won't find yourself puzzling over poorly written sentences, awkward constructions, or unfocused structure.
It's hard to a imagine a reader of nonfiction who wouldn't find something to like about this book. Give it a shot.
251 of 270 people found the following review helpful.
Fukuyama's Magnum Opus
By Justin Hyde
Since publishing his essay "The End of History?" in The National in 1989, Fukuyama has cemented himself as an important public intellectual and historical anthropologist. A former neo-conservative, Fukuyama, 58, now serves as the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
In this book, Fukuyama attempts to understand how humans moved from tribal and familial connections to organized institutions of states and governments. He writes, "In the developed world, we take the existence of government so much for granted that we sometimes forget how difficult it was to create."
Fukuyama artfully navigates the transition of humans from hunter-gather bands to tribalized communities to states and organized forms of government. Fukuyama emphasizes China because the Qin Dynasty was the first "state" to gain victory over tribalism. He contrasts this with Europe, which did not overcome tribalism until 1000 years later, and had to progress through feudalism before creating citizens loyal to the state.
Fukuyama's approach to historical anthropology stands in stark contrast to the "single cause" approach of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (2005). Fukuyama points to familial connections, human behavior, organized religion, and the human propensity for war as variable causes to the evolution of societies. Fukuyama engages disciplines outside of his usual realm including anthropology, economics, and biology. He notes, "It does seem to me that there is a virtue in looking across time and space in a comparative fashion."
Many readers have already labeled this as Fukuyama's "magnum opus" including Arthur Melzer (political scientist at Michigan State University), George Sorensen (political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark), and Teru Kuwayama (Newsweek). Fukuyama himself referred to this book as "the primer I wished I had had when I started in political science" (in an interview at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies).
The Origins of Political Order is a broad, sweeping analysis of human development from pre-human times to the French Revolution. The book ends with the 18th century; a second volume will bring the story to the present day. Indeed, Fukuyama notes in the Preface, "It is extremely important to read this volume in anticipation of what is to come in the second. As I make clear in the final chapter of this book, political development in the modern world occurs under substantially different conditions from those in the period up until the late eighteenth century."
In spite of Fukuyama's readable style and engaging content, this book is academic and dense. Yet it serves as a helpful entry point into Fukuyama's current thought and research. It will no doubt become required reading in institutions across the globe in the following months and years and eventually revered as a classic.
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
A great primer for students of political science; tackles overly simplified theories of political development
By Kindle Customer
I read this book after getting through Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist." I thoroughly enjoyed Ridley's book but was skeptical about his single-minded emphasis on evolutionary bottom-up processes (a free market of ideas) as drivers of political development/order. Whereas Ridley almost always sees top-down governmental action as an impediment to development--something that stifles the naturalistic order produced by free market exchanges--Fukuyama takes a more even-handed, multi-dimensional and one might argue, accurate approach.
Fukuyama ascribes the development of political order to the rise of governmental accountability, the rule of law, and a centralized, impersonal state/bureaucracy. To defend this premise, he tackles some of the simplifications offered by Enlightenment thinkers, Marxists and free-marketers/libertarians. For one, he shows how Enlightenment thinkers got the 'state of nature' wrong: humans evolved to hunt and gather in groups--there never was a time when individuals acted as free-agents who, in their rational self-interest, came to establish a 'social contract' wherein they would give up some liberty in order to provide for the common security (government). Instead, there was an ongoing interplay between an emergent market morality (provided by tit-for-tat exchanges), the need to wage war, and ideas (religion, ideology & normative beliefs regarding the law) that together have tended to promote the development of political order in societies. And political development, rather than being a constant progression toward some liberal-democratic or Marxist-utopian goal, is fragile and just as likely to decay as it is to progress. Furthermore, Fukuyama explains why it is futile to try to radically impose a new social order on a state (evidenced by the excesses of the French Revolution and failures of collectivist farming reform in communist societies); and also, why one cannot count on limited governments and free markets to produce political development.
Fukuyama does not offer any simple causes or solutions to the problems of political development in this volume--and that's a good thing. Polemical condemnations of American imperialism, authoritarianism, and centralized government are, thankfully, nowhere to be found. Instead, some of the major contributors of political decay/disorder are described as patrimonialism (nepotism), a lack of social unity (collective exploitation by any one group), "collective action problems" (whereby individuals interests benefit from a suboptimal order) and a lack of faith in the law. The author does not expound democratic models over authoritarian models of development; nor does he consider economic development to be contingent on the rise of democratic institutions. He discusses the deficiencies of weak (inability to act decisively & tackle entrenched interests) and strong governments (potential for abuse of power). Furthermore, he provides evidence against the cynic's view that governments and political actors alway seek to maximize their 'rational self-interests'--desire for recognition, institutional conservatism, and ideas being curbing factors. In all, I would say his treatment of the subject is even-handed, thorough and copiously defended with examples from across time and regions.
Fukuyama has called this book the primer that he wished he'd had as an undergrad student in political science. His style of writing is direct and well-organized. Fukuyama provides enough background information to make his discussions of most concepts and various instances of political development across regions and time comprehensible, but I still found myself getting a bit lost at times. Thankfully, he summarizes his points often and at the end of chapters. If I had to critique this book as a primer for undergrads, I'd say that perhaps it might be a bit too heavy-duty in the length and the number of examples provided by Fukuyama to make his points. However, this book is immense in scope and scale, well-reasoned and dispels a number of misconceptions starting political science students might have or might develop over time--making it invaluable to serious students. And, then again, what are professors for if not to challenge their students with "impossible" readings and then help make the difficult points understandable?
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