Francis Fukuyama’s Theory of the State
By MICHAEL LIND
THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER
From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
By Francis Fukuyama
585 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.
“This book has two origins,” Francis Fukuyama writes in the preface to “The Origins of Political Order.” “The first arose when my mentor, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, asked me to write a foreword to a reprint edition of his 1968 classic, ‘Political Order in Changing Societies.’ ” Its second inspiration was the decade that Fukuyama spent studying “the real-world problems of weak and failed states” and that inspired his 2004 book “State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century.”
In discussing the origins of “The Origins,” Fukuyama is being modest, if not disingenuous. He is best known for the international sensation caused by the publication of his 1989 essay “The End of History?” in the foreign policy journal The National Interest and the subsequent book “The End of History and the Last Man.” His thesis ignited a global debate: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the cold war, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
In the 20 years since, Fukuyama has qualified his argument, but he has not abandoned it. In “The Origins of Political Order,” the first of a projected two volumes, he writes: “Alexandre Kojève, the great Russian-French interpreter of Hegel, argued that history as such had ended in the year 1806 with the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt, when Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy and brought the principles of liberty and equality to Hegel’s part of Europe.” And he continues: “I believe that Kojève’s assertion still deserves to be taken seriously. The three components of a modern political order — a strong and capable state, the state’s subordination to a rule of law and government accountability to all citizens — had all been established in one or another part of the world by the end of the 18th century.”
By chance, these three elements were united for the first time in Britain, although other northwestern European countries that were influenced by the Reformation, like the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, “also succeeded in putting together the state, rule of law and accountability in a single package by the 19th century.” But before their combination in Britain and its neighbors at the time of the industrial and democratic revolutions, the three elements of modern political order had evolved separately in different premodern civilizations: “China had developed a powerful state early on; the rule of law existed in India, the Middle East and Europe; and in Britain, accountable government appeared for the first time.”
Most of “The Origins of Political Order” is devoted to telling the story of how the state, the rule of law and accountability happened to evolve independently in different societies, before their combination in 18th-century Britain. Having been accused of determinism by some critics of his earlier work, Fukuyama emphasizes the role of contingency. The origins of modern political institutions were “complex and context-specific.” For example, the decline in importance of extended families in early modern Europe, which resulted in part from the power of the medieval church, meant that “an emerging capitalist economy in Italy, England and the Netherlands in the 16th century did not have to overcome the resistance of large corporately organized kinship groups with substantial property to protect, as in India and China.”
Fukuyama rejects reductionist attempts to explain political and social institutions as mere epiphenomena of underlying economic or technological structures. “It is impossible to develop any meaningful theory of political development without treating ideas as fundamental causes of why societies differ and follow distinct development paths.” In particular, “religion can never be explained simply by reference to prior material conditions.”
For this reason, “The Origins of Political Order,” like Fukuyama’s earlier work, is at odds with the contemporary elevation of neoclassical economics as the paradigmatic social science. His intellectual affinities are with the great thinkers of the 19th-century sociological tradition like Weber, Durkheim and Marx, as well as with Hegel, whom Fukuyama tellingly identified as a social scientist in “The End of History?” With this sociological tradition, Fukuyama shares a view of politics as a product of history and evolution, and a rejection of the absolutism of Lockean natural rights theory and market fundamentalism, or “Manchester liberalism.” Against libertarians like Friedrich Hayek, who try to explain society in terms of Homo economicus, he says that a strong and capable state has always been a precondition for a flourishing capitalist economy.
Drawing on recent work in sociobiology as well as older critiques of abstract natural rights liberalism, Fukuyama writes: “Human beings never existed in a pre social state. The idea that human beings at one time existed as isolated individuals, who interacted either through anarchic violence (Hobbes) or in pacific ignorance of one another (Rousseau), is not correct.”
Some readers, however, may think that Fukuyama goes too far in de-emphasizing the natural rights tradition that inspired the Renaissance and Enlightenment liberalism. Here Fukuyama’s historicism and his insistence that ideas themselves shape political order are arguably at odds. He takes the theology of ancient Brahmins seriously as an explanation for the organization of Indian society, but does not do the same for the thinking of 17th-century English Levellers and Lockeans who influenced the English, American and French revolutions. Like 19th-century historicists, who accepted much of modernity while seeking to trace the origins of modern Western institutions to the customs of Germanic tribes or the corporations of medieval society, Fukuyama is in the position of favoring a democratic political order while arguing that the theories that first justified it, like universal rights and moral and epistemological individualism, were mistaken. It will be interesting to see how Fukuyama deals with the ideas that shaped the republicanism of the American and French revolutions in his promised second volume.
That said, “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. Even those who doubt that such an enterprise can succeed or who take issue with particular details or conclusions can be impressed by Fukuyama’s audacity and stimulated by his arguments. Ambitious, erudite and eloquent, this bookis undeniably a major achievement by one of the leading public intellectuals of our time.
Michael Lind is the policy director of the economic growth program at the New America Foundation.