Fukuyama Origins Of Political Order Epub Download
Mitsue Cialella
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman times to the French Revolution is a 2011 book by political economist Francis Fukuyama. 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 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 to the early modern period.[1] Fukuyama refers to Amartya Sen's view that democracy remains the default political condition.[2] 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.
The book is the first of two books on the development of political order. This book goes from its origins to the French Revolution. 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.[3]
The book is about "getting to Denmark," in other words creating stable, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and honest societies.[6] Fukuyama points out that at the time of writing ninety contemporary 'primitive' societies had been engaged in war,[7] 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.[8]
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.[16][17][18][19]
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, followed by others by the nineteenth century, as the Netherlands and Sweden.[33]
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.[45] 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.[6][46]
Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins.
Francis Fukuyama examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions, spanning such diverse disciplines as economics, anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the emergence of mankind as a political animal, by one of the most eminent political thinkers writing today.
In brief, the above comparison between the modernization approach and the contextual approach reveals that the neglect of history and context is the biggest defect in the dominant modernization framework. Because of this neglect, the modernization approach has intrinsic difficulties in recognizing the varied origins and development of middle classes in Pacific Asian societies. With ethnic history and country-specific context out of its picture, the modernization approach tends to assume that all middle classes and all democratizations will follow the Western model, because the latter invents, defines, and exports these things to the rest of the world. In other words, this defect is also ideological in nature. The same could be said about its efforts to explain the China phenomena. To correct this ontological/ideological defect, we need to bring political history back into the center of political science research.
The China genes under our purview are the quest for great unification (dayitong), the preference over political order, the orientation towards substance, and the deference to authority and hierarchy. They are more or less mentioned in or connected to the afore-mentioned China aspects (Yu 2000; Pines 2012; Zhao 2015; Yang 2021a). For each item, we will track its trajectory to check its historical continuity and examine its current contours in comparison to the West, using evidence from the latest survey data.
The above historical politics analysis shows us that the maintenance of political order has been a prominent preoccupation along the course of Chinese history, hence qualifying itself as a historic continuity. If the zest for political order really constitutes a China gene, we should also see a large gap in emphasis on this concept between China and its Western counterparts. We use three WVS questions to measure this as follows: (1) If you had to choose which one of the things on this card would you say is most important (a. maintaining order in this country; b. giving people more say; c. fighting rising prices; d. protecting freedom of expression)? (2) Please choose the one which best describes your own opinion (a. society must be radically changed; b. society must be gradually improved by reform; c. society must be valiantly defended). (3) Most people consider both freedom and security to be important, but if you had to choose between them, which one would you consider more important?
The rule of law, understood as rules that are binding even on the most politically powerful actors in a given society, has its origins in religion. It is only religious authority that was capable of creating rules that warriors needed to respect. Religious institutions in many cultures were essentially legal bodies responsible for interpreting a set of sacred texts and giving them moral sanction over the rest of society. Thus in India, the Brahmin class of priests was understood to be higher in authority than the Kshatriyas, the warriors who held actual political power; a raja or king would have to seek legitimation from a Brahmin before he could rightly rule. In Islam as well, the law (sharia) was presided over by a separate hierarchy of scholars known as the ulama; a network of qadis or judges did the routine work of administering religious law. Though early caliphs united political and religious authority in the same person, in other periods of Islamic history the caliph and sultan were separate individuals, and the former could act as a constraint on the latter.
Thus in Western Europe, law was the first of the three major institutions to emerge. China never developed a transcendental religion; perhaps for this reason, it never developed a true rule of law. There, the state emerged first, and up to the present day law has never existed as a fundamental constraint on political power. The sequence was reversed in Europe: law preceded the rise of the modern state. When European monarchs aspired to behave like Chinese emperors from the late sixteenth century on and create modern, centralized absolutist states, they had to do so against the backdrop of an existing legal order that limited their powers. The result was that few European monarchs ever acquired the concentrated powers of the Chinese state, despite aspirations to do so. Only in Russia, where the Eastern Church was always subordinated to the state, did such a regime emerge.
Political development is change over time in political institutions. This is different from shifts in politics or policies: prime ministers, presidents, and legislators may come and go, laws may be modified, but it is the underlying rules by which societies organize themselves that define a political order.
The rule of law has many possible definitions, including simple law and order, property rights and contract enforcement, or the modern Western understanding of human rights, which includes equal rights for women and racial and ethnic minorities. The definition of the rule of law I am using in this book is not tied to a specific substantive understanding of law. Rather, I define it as a set of rules of behavior, reflecting a broad consensus within the society, that is binding on even the most powerful political actors in the society, whether kings, presidents, or prime ministers. If rulers can change the law to suit themselves, the rule of law does not exist, even if those laws are applied uniformly to the rest of society. To be effective, a rule of law usually has to be embodied in a separate judicial institution that can act autonomously from the executive. Rule of law by this definition is not associated with any particular substantive body of law, like those prevailing in the contemporary United States or Europe. Rule of law as a constraint on political power existed in ancient Israel, in India, in the Muslim world, as well as in the Christian West.
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