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Francis Fukuyama overlooks the political games in human society
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Francis Fukuyama overlooks the political games in human society
Francis Fukuyama
The Origins of Political Order
The Origins of Political Order is a 2011 book by political economist Francis Fukuyama about what makes a state stable. It uses a comparative political history to develop a theory of the stability of a political system. According to Fukuyama, a stable state needs to be modern and strong, to obey the rule of law governing the state and be accountable.[1]
Series of books
The book is intended as the first in a series of books on the development of political order. This book goes from its origins to the French Revolution. The next book will start with the French Revolution, and there may be a third book with a view to the future.
A companion volume Political Order and Political Decay will be published in 2014.[2]
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.[3]
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.[4]
The book is about "getting to Denmark," in other words creating stable, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and honest societies.[5] 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.[6]
Aims
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 and similar in scope to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.[7]
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.[8]
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.[9][10][11][12]
He uses recent work in sociobiology and other sources to show that sociability built on kin selection and reciprocal altruism ia the original default social state of man and not any isolated, presocial human as suggested by Hobbes and Rousseau.[13][14]
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[8] towards states, again due to the advantage of larger armies. This was done with the aid of religion.[12] 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.[12]
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.[15]
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 s to whom they were allowed to marry.[16]
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.[17]Jannisarries were originally forced into celibacy or and prohibited from having a family.[18][19]
Pope Gregory VII forced Catholic priests in Europe to become celibate and they were prohibited from having a family for the same reason.[20]
Spanish administrators in South America were restricted from to marrying local women and from establishing family ties in the territories they were sent to.[21]
Three components of political order
The books develops the idea of the development of the three components of a modern political order, which are,[1]
- A strong and modern state as defined by Max Weber, i.e. one with a territorial monopoly on violence and a bureaucracy. He traces the state from hunter gatherer groups, via tribes to states by force of the larger size of armies and the bureaucracy out of a necessity to handle large populations.
- Rule of law to which the state is subordinate. Rule of law, defined as legal restraints on the most powerful individuals, evolved from organized religion.[22]
- Accountability of the government to a non-state actor or actors.
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Modern Strong States Rule of Law governing the state Accountability of the government United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, China, Russia United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, India United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, India
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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.[23]
Origins of Political Order depend on three components, according to Fukuyama. States with all three components, are more stable, and are shown in the middle.
China
China is described as having the first modern state,[24] by the definition given, since it established an educated Mandarin bureaucracy, although Hewson objects to this conclusion since the Mandarin bureaucracy was not modern.[9] China used extreme violence on its population, but had a weak rule of law and the emperor had no accountability to anyone.[5]
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 against violence against the populace and against 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.[5][25]
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. 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.[8][26]
Europe
European countries each followed different routes.
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.[27]
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.[28] The laws gave the Gregory the authority to excommunicate Henry IV, who was forced to walk to Canossa from Germany to Italy, stand barefoot[29] in the snow for three days[30] outside Canossa and to ask forgiveness from the pope on his knees.[31] 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.[5]
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.[32] 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.[5][33]
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- Sallet suggests that this table provides a short overview of this portion of Fukuyama's careful analysis:[34]
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State building Absolutism Accountability Strong Russia United Kingdom Weak France, Spain Hungary
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Balance between the components
A successful modern liberal democracy balances all three components to achieve stability.[35]
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.[36][5]
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.[37][5]
In Europe, there was a long period when the emperors and popes were in conflict, creating a balance of power between them ,[5] 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.[23][5]
Reception
Fukuyama's book was listed in "New York Times Notable Book for 2011",[38] the Globe and Mail "Best Books of the Year 2011 Title",[39] Kirkus Reviews "Best Nonfiction of 2011 title".[40] and on the short list for The Lionel Gelber Prize.[41]
Each reviewer listed here, many of who are notable academics in the field of political economy, discovers a different lesson from the book.
The book received positive reviews, a tour de force as a new description of political history. Many of the following reviewers start out by summing up his most well known book, The End of History and sometimes they connect it to the book being reviewed.
Reviewer Jon Sallet writes that Francis Fukuyama is out to challenge the Anglo-centric perspective of the rise of democracy running from Athens directly to John Locke. "He asks, simply: What happened, why did it happen, and what does it teach us about the future?"[34]
Robert Blackburn thinks that it should be required reading for the education minister and his advisers: "A tour de force, readable, well-informed and provocative. It supplies a coherent, sustained and challenging narrative of the whole of human history."[8]
Michael Lind claims that Fukuyama, in discussing the origins of The Origins, is being modest, follows Weber, Durkheim, Marx, and Hegel and looks forward to the next book in the series. The Origins of Political Order is a rigorous attempt to create a synoptic view of human history by means of a synthesis of research in many disciplines.[13]
David Runciman explain that he phrase "to get to Denmark" means to get to a stable, prosperous, dynamic society, but complains that he does not provide the answer.[42]
The Economist sees insights into China, India and the Arab world today: "its insights are relevant to our understanding of modern states and how they became what they are."[24]
Hewson considers the book a major achievement as an overview of political evolution from prehistory and onwards.[9]
Ian Morris writes. "It is an intellectual triumph—bold in scope, sound in judgment, and rich in provocations; in short, a classic."[5]
Will Hutton uses the book in his review to show why the anti-state instincts of the Tea Party movement are wrong.[43]
Nicholas Wade's review compares the work to classics in the field, like Guns, Germs and Steel and quotes other positive comments, among them Goerg Sorensen, who proclaims "this will be a new classic", Arthur Melzer saying that it is "definitely a magnum opus." and that it is unusual because it addresses many factors like warfare, religion, and human social behaviors.[44]
At a discussion with Fukuyama at Trinity College, he explain the relevance of his ideas to the country's battle over the budget, the debt ceiling and Obamacare.[22]
Frank Furedi comments that Fukuyama is concerned about political stasis in many liberal democracies, and warns about political decay.[45]
Gerard DeGroot congratulates Fukuyama for thinking big."This is a book that will be remembered, like those of Ranke, Trevelyan and Turner. Bring on volume II."[10]
Christopher Caldwell calls Fukuyama's latest book sober but scintillating. Fukuyama’s grimmest message, he feels, is that progress in moral and culture may signal decay in politics and civilisation.[46]
Tim Soutphommasane writes that while philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau consider humans to be individualistic, Fukuyama cites modern biology research as arguments for humans being programmed for social co-operation.[47]
David Marquand writes that "It is an astonishing achievement."[11]
David Gress advises future leaders to take note, since future legitimacy depends upon a balance between strong state action and individual freedoms.[48]
Michael Burleigh is impressed by the Fukuyama combines anthropology, social biology, history and political science.[12]
Steve Sailer concludes that The Origins of Political Order offers a respectable starting point for those who want to understand how states and nations evolved.
Oh for a democratic dictatorship and not a vetocracy
By Francis Fukuyama Nov. 22, 2011 5:27 pm Financial Times
Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute. His latest book is 'The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution'
http://wen.org.cn/modules/article/view.article.php/2983
The failure of the congressional supercommittee to reach a deal on the budget is a sad reflection of the polarisation in the US today. But this failure has roots that go well beyond the individuals charged with coming up with a plan to reduce the deficit; they go to the very nature of the political system. And while this committee has failed ignominiously, it contains the seed of an idea that might show us a way out of paralysis.
Americans take great pride in a constitution that limits executive power through a series of checks and balances. But those checks have metastasised. And now America is a vetocracy. When this system is combined with ideologised parties, one of which sees even the closing of tax loopholes as an unacceptable tax increase, the result is paralysis.
The problems of the US system are all too apparent when compared with the classic British Westminster system: parliamentary, with first-past-the-post voting, no federalism or decentralisation, and no written constitution or judicial review. Under such a system, governments are typically backed by a strong legislative majority. The present government's coalition is highly unusual for the UK, which typically gives the leading party a strong parliamentary majority. A simple majority plus one in the House of Commons can make or overturn any law in the land, which is why it has sometimes been referred to as a democratic dictatorship.
The American system, by contrast, splits power between a president and a two-chamber Congress; devolves power to states and local government; and permits the courts to overturn legislation on constitutional grounds. The system is deliberately engineered to put obstacles in the way of decisive government, which in turn is the result of a political culture strongly suspicious of centralised power.
The advantage of the British system with its fewer opportunities to cast vetoes is clear when it comes to passing budgets. The budget is written by the chancellor of the exchequer, who as an executive agent makes the difficult trade-offs between spending and taxes. This budget is passed by parliament, with little modification, a week or two after the government introduces it.
In the American system, by contrast, the president announces a budget at the beginning of the fiscal cycle; it is more an aspirational document than a political reality. The US constitution firmly locates spending authority in Congress, and indeed all 535 members of Congress use their potential veto power to extract concessions. The budget that eventually emerges after months of interest group lobbying is the product not of a coherent government plan, but of horse-trading among individual legislators, who always find it easier to achieve consensus by exchanging spending increases for tax cuts. Hence the permanent bias towards deficits.
In addition to the checks and balances mandated by the constitution, Congress has added a host of further opportunities for legislators to use their veto power to blackmail the system, such as the anonymous holds that any of 100 senators may place on executive branch appointments. A particularly egregious example of this is taking place today. The Obama administration has wanted to appoint Michael McFaul ambassador to Russia, but the foreign relations committee has put off action indefinitely due to the objections of certain unnamed Republican senators. Mr McFaul - formerly a professor at Stanford (and also a longtime friend) - has been senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council for the past three years and is widely regarded even by the Republicans as well qualified for the job. Foreign Policy magazine has reported that one of the holds is due to a senator wanting the federal government to build a facility in his state. As a result, the US may not have an ambassador in place in Moscow next March as the Russians vote for a new president.
If we are to get out of our present paralysis we need not only strong leadership, but changes in institutional rules. If constitutional amendments are off the table for the moment, there is nonetheless a list of reforms the US could undertake to reduce the number of veto points and simplify decision-making. One would be to eliminate senatorial holds; another would be a rollback of the filibuster for routine legislation; and a third would be a rule that would prevent legislative blackmail through irrelevant amendments.
But the most important potential change would be to move the budgeting process towards something that looked more like the Westminster system. Budgets would be formulated, as in the case of the failed supercommittee, by a much smaller group of legislators. Unlike today's strongly partisan committee, it would have heavy technocratic input from a non-partisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office that would be insulated from the interest group pressures that afflict the sitting legislators. A completed budget would be put before Congress in a single, unamendable up-or-down vote. The procedure has already been used successfully to get around interest group deadlock in fast-track trade legislation and by the non-partisan commission that decided which military bases to close.
This proposal has no chance of being accepted in the current climate of polarisation. Newt Gingrich, one of the Republican contenders for the party's presidential nomination, recently called the CBO a "socialist" institution. But our unaddressed fiscal problem is so great that something like it would seem essential as our economy continues to stagnate. Serving legislators are unlikely to be willing to give up their veto power soon. That is why political reform must first and foremost be driven by popular, grassroots mobilisation.
The Origins of Political Order: From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution, By Francis Fukuyama
Robin Blackburn Friday 13 May 2011
Robin Blackburn is research professor at the University of Essex; his new book 'The American Crucible: Slavery, emancipation and human hights' is published by Verso in June
It is as well to be clear at the outset that this book is a tour de force, readable, well-informed and provocative. It supplies a coherent, sustained and challenging narrative of the whole of human history up to the eve of the late 18th-century Age of Revolutions. You would have to be very knowledgeable not to learn from this book and not to be grateful for the bird's-eye view it affords of the development of political institutions across several millennia.
Francis Fukuyama traces the slow and uneven emergence of three institutions which he believes boosted the survival-chances of the societies which developed them: the unitary territorial state, the rule of law and the accountability of rulers. Despite his conservative credentials, this does not involve the conventional Anglo-American story from Plato to Nato, by way of Magna Carta and the American Revolution.
Indeed, with its insistence that those who know the history of only one country know no history, the book should be required reading for the education minister and his advisers. Fukuyama develops his argument with respect to the history of China, India and the Middle East before focusing on Europe. When Europe claims a central role, Spain and Russia are considered side by side with Britain and France.
In Fukuyama's view, the initial political challenge was to escape beyond tribalism and the "tyranny of cousins". The author's evident respect for the lingering potency of tribal institutions was to be reinforced by the great difficulties discovered by US invaders in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a Paris seminar he is said to have referred to his own position – aware of the constraints of historical development – as "Marxist", in contrast to the impatient "Leninism" of the neo-cons. The whole emphasis of this work is on the slow gestation of the prerequisites of political development.
For Fukuyama, tribal organisation responds to structural imperatives in social evolution but also blocks the path to further development. The early account of the origins of state-like forms relies heavily on Lawrence Keeley's military-focused argument in War Before Civilisation (1996) and does not consider the evidence assembled by Keith Otterbein in How War Began (2004): that warfare greatly declined in importance following the hunting to extinction of the larger mammals. Keeley himself grants that early settlement cultures, such as the Natufian, "furnish no indication of warfare at all".
However, Fukuyama's argument that earlier social forms have a way of surviving in and through subsequent development is compelling. So is his idea that the state had to limit the power of clans and lineages while realising that it could not abolish them.
During most of the long period covered by this book, China was the world's most effective large-scale state and its remarkable recent recovery owes much to this fact. Likewise Indian democracy, in this account, may owe something to the legacy of the British Raj but much more to the vigour of civil society in the sub-continent stretching back for over two millennia. However, the political institutions of these two great civilisations were often compromised by survivals of dense networks of kin which weakened China's state bureaucracy or corrupted India's sacred order.
The institution of slavery furnished a solution to several Islamic states because it supplied a core of kinless state administrators, the Mamluks. At the age of six or seven, promising boys were seperated from their families and trained to become soldiers and civil servants. The tenacity of the Ottoman Empire showed how successful this device could be.
However, in Fukuyama's view the most thoroughgoing break with kinship was brought about by the rise of Western Christendom. He often contrasts his schema of historical development to the supposed economic determinism of Karl Marx and the Marxists, but at this point his argument has a historical-materialist twist.
Christianity succeeds in diminishing family ties when the Church takes a strong stand against practices which enhanced the power of lineages such as cousin marriage, divorce, adoption and marriage to the widows of dead relatives. The looser family pattern favoured by the practices of Latin Christianity have the effect of channelling assets to the Church itself (eg through widows' bequests). Fukuyama further urges that "contrary to Marx, capitalism was the consequence rather than the cause of a change in social relationships". Yet he soon acknowledges that "the most convincing argument for the shift has been given by the social anthropologist Jack Goody", an authority whose work could be seen as a distinctive fruit of Cambridge Marxism.
In Fukuyama's view, the path to modern capitalism required institutions not only freed from kin entanglements but limited by the rule of law and accountable to at least some of the ruled. He sees European feudalism as replacing kinship ties, with an implicit contract of dependency and protection in their place. However, the book devotes little attention to the emergence of capitalism and fails to scrutinise what was very possibly the crucial development –the emergence of wage labourers and tenant farmers in the English countryside in the 16th century. The enclosure of common land by private landlords and the dissolution of the monasteries are not discussed, and curious references are made to English "peasants". While Fukuyama offers a vivid sketch of the "evil Empress Wu" in China (624-705), there is no matching portrait of Henry VIII.
Fukuyama's discussion of the "rule of law" insists that respect for law requires political actors always scrupulously to act within the existing framework. In such a view, the American Revolution would have to be seen as a blow to the rule of law; the later US emancipation of the slaves had several extra-Constitutional features.
There is also difficulty when Fukuyama argues that the rule of law is defined by the fact that, where it holds, rulers are not above the law. This neglects the doctrine of the king's "two bodies" – an earthly body subject to the law, and a heavenly body that could do no wrong. For a while, the English Parliamentarians in the 1640s insisted that their indictment of the corporeal actions of the king was in the name of the sacred covenant between king and people. Indeed, the formula that the king can do no wrong was re-affirmed by the Restoration. Yet Fukuyama still seems to count the United Kingdom as an example of a polity bound by the rule of law.
In a work of this sort there are bound to be over-simplifications and mistakes but they do not undermine its achievement: to provide a plausible or provocative reading of the course of human history. Fukuyama's criteria have an undeniably conservative bent, but since he is focusing on the requirements of order, this has a certain logic.
The book is offered as the first part of a two-volume study, the second of which will concern itself with the late 18th century and after. This period sees a huge divergence between the material condition of the West and of most of the rest of humanity, and many other developments which should test Fukuyama's apparent faith in modernity, capitalism and rampant competitive violence.
