The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.

• Author: Alley, Roderic
• Position: Book review

THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER:

From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Author: Francis Fukuyama

Published by: Profile Books, London, 2011, 585pp, $44.

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Francis Fukuyama came to public notice in 1989 with an article in the National Interest proclaiming 'the end of history'. People everywhere, he argued, would eventually--note eventually--aspire to a society grounded in liberal values. Such Whigish determinism is eschewed in this latest offering, a remarkable, even audacious attempt to sweep the pages of history from primordial tribal times to the eve of the French and American revolutions. This is the point when it is considered that fully modern politics properly emerged.

To the book's central question as to why some political entities survived and others collapsed, answers begin with Fukuyama's mentor, Samuel

Huntington (in whose memory the book is dedicated), and who published the widely noted Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press) in 1968. This argued that political processes followed their own contingent logic, related to, yet independent of economic and social determinations. Political decay could occur where economic and special modernisation outran political development, and where emerging social groups did not get accommodated within existing political orders. Despite a glaring failure to discuss religion in any depth, the book was heeded for its argument that political order assumed a higher priority than democratisation, justifying so-called 'authoritarian transitions' as seen in Turkey, Taiwan and Indonesia.

In his long, magisterial historical sweep Fukuyama sees sufficient evidence to confirm Huntington's basic insights. Nothing if not eclectic, this study begins with primary kinship groups, and what is termed 'the tyranny of cousins'. Doing almost anything to preserve their extended family units, these individuals took no prisoners when combating outsiders, which resulted in endemic low-level conflict. After Chinese dynasties and European feudalism, the author then explores evolved political orders and how and why many fell by the wayside: Spain overwhelmed by its parasitic aristocracy; the Ottomans eventually falling prey to lethal dynastic rivalries, notwithstanding their previous circumvention through bureaucratic promotion by merit and mobilisation of forced military conscription; the Chinese utilising competitive examination entry to the mandarinate when attempting to...