The Origins of Political Order
Francis Fukuyama
Profile Books
Origins of Political Order is magisterial and mammoth. It reinaugurates a style of scholarship that is mostly absent in present-day history departments: the tendency to develop “grand narratives”, which journey through the centuries, through the longue durée, to offer a coherent tale of history.
Fukuyama evidently shares none of the hesitation for such grand theorising, which atrophied historians during the post-colonial backlash of the 1980s. For them, the grand narrative is always indelibly inked from the Eurocentric mind. Refusing to accept this allows the author to develop an expansive, commanding survey of how political institutions came to be, from – as the subtitle of the first volume in a planned series of two states – “Pre-human Times to the French Revolution.”
Fukuyama is familiar to us for his controversial thesis of the 1990s. In the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, he prophesied the End of History: “We may be witnessing,” he wrote, “not just the end of the Cold War, (but) the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
The essay – and subsequent book from which this quotation is taken – was met with widespread rejections from Derrida to Fredric Jameson. Origins, then, appears to act as an atonement for so aggressively neoconservative an opinion.
The transmission of liberal democracy enacted through “civilising missions” in the Middle East and elsewhere is a farce, Fukuyama would aver, fully unconscious to the complexity of politics and its circumstances of deployment.
The book arrives timeously, no doubt in reaction to the perceived nihilism and failures of American conservatism. Its central subject matter – how and why liberal democracy develops in some countries and not in others – takes as its locus the question of the State.
The State becomes for the Political Right a dreadful antagoniser, interposed between themselves and the neo-liberal dream of a minimal state, as Will Hutton writes, “in a universe of moral individuals, families and companies freely contracting with one another in free markets.”
As a conservative commentator, Fukuyama opposes this logic from within. Too often, he remarks, do critics forget the organising and stabilising power of the State. Without the political order afforded by this institution, we regress into primordial barbarism, dragged deep into “the tyranny of cousins”, or our tendency to favour kin.
Fantasies of statelessness never know how to replace existing political structures and political problems are often “not of the absence of resources but the ineffectiveness of the institutions which govern them”.
To accomplish his narrative of institutional development, he draws upon vast resources from disparate disciplines such as anthropology and evolutionary biology, bypassing the savage reluctance with which the humanities usually meets the hard sciences.
The paragon of liberal democracy is supplied by the synechdoche of Denmark – and so the question, borrowed from the economists’ parlance, becomes “how do we get to Denmark?”
Fukuyama isolates the three pillars of state, which require each other in order for flourishing: the state, the rule of law, and governmental accountability. Without a properly symbiotic relationship between the three, politics is open to exploitation and cronyism.
So, he dives deep into history, even devoting a few slim sections to behavioural similarities between chimpanzees and humans. From here, he hopes to discover the enduring and universal evolved traits of humankind, like reciprocal altruism and the favouring of relatives.
Also of interest to him are “political decay” and the function of religion, spirituality, and inherent human conservatism in the development of an incipient politics.
Along this multi-generational odyssey, Fukuyama explores the development of his three pillars of successful governance, and how throughout history their ability to co-exist has determined the triumph or failure of nations, according to his Denmark paradigm.
China, for example, achieves the first truly modern centralised state, but lacking accountability, it grew too powerful and consumed the prospects of civil society. Elsewhere, 13th century Hungary offers an antidote to China which errs on another side of the balance – limitations on the monarch which ultimately rendered worthless its political strength.
Fukuyama’s book is possessed of extraordinary scholarship, and he never reveals himself to be anything less than fully aware of his project and its implications. However, the normative slant of the work is lacking. Exploring a bloodied history of struggle and witnessing the emergence of tentative order does not strictly give us a methodology by which to “get to Denmark”. Fukuyama may be accused of a certain impatience in the grand posture of the work, but it is hard to deny its intellectual consequences for the neoconservative position.
Superbly written and widely researched, Fukuyama offers a fantastic, insightful take on the story of political development.
l Chetty is a graduate scholar of critical theory and literature.