I have been planning to begin writing book reviews here on My Oregon for a while now, and decided to start with Francis Fukuyama’s long awaited book: The Origins of Political Order. Having seen him explain his book so well, I am primarily going to just share with you my notes from his presentation. Arguably the most eminent political thinker alive today, Fukuyama spoke to a packed pearl room at Powell’s Books last night. In introducing himself, Fukuyama admitted this was his first time inside this famous book store even though he has long been a customer of its website.

Fukuyama identified two motives for writing this book. First, he wanted to create an updated alternative to the 1968 classic Political Order in Changing Societies by his mentor Samuel P. Huntington, a book he uses in many of his courses at Stanford University. Second, he has been deeply involved development work in Melanesia, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea, making him want to build a robust theory to explain why they have so much trouble establishing state authority despite years of developmental assistance from the international community. In this work, Fukuyama has boiled political order down to three cardinal features: the state, the rule of law, and political accountability.

In understanding the state, Fukuyama wants to go beyond the enlightenment era social contractarianism of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. They assume a moment when free individuals decided to give up their freedom to the state in exchange for the public goods that the state could provide them. Fukuyama points out this is ahistoric, not supported by archeology, nor anthropology. Fukuyama argues that humans were political from the very beginning. Being inherently social animals, political behavior comes naturally to us. The human experience of individual rights and liberties arrived much later and are learned behavior. We see in contemporary pre-state societies, the archeological record, and Chimpanzees two natural forms of cooperation: altruism to kin and reciprocal altruism to non kin neither of which has to be learned.

What caused the origin of the state? Fukuyama argues it was warfare. He identifies China as having developed the first modern state. Sumeria, in Mesopotamia, was likely the first state, but when Shang Yang developed a high-quality, impersonal bureaucracy to rule the state of Qin, the first modern state was born in the 4th century BC. After a great deal of analysis as to what causes the rise of the state, Fukuyama points out that knowing that would not be enough. It is hard to keep an effective state going; after the rise of the state there will always be the phenomenon of political decay. The people in power will favor their kin causing a return to what Fukuyama calls “repatrimonialization.” The rule of law and political accountability become essential traits of a political system to buttress against decay.

The rule of law means the development of rules that are above the prince. Fukuyama argues that the development of the rule of law in history seems always to come from religion. Political accountability is the processes that a political system develops to sustain the effectiveness of government. This may not necessarily mean democracy. China has developed a system of accountability among its rulers for centuries by socializing them into Confucian norms of virtue.

To illustrate the diversity of political development, Fukuyama gave the example of India vs. China that he acknowledges is the raving debate among MBA students as to which is better governed. China wants to build the three gorges dam so they just do it, forcibly relocating 1.4 million people. Tata motors wants to build a new factory that requires the relocation of a few hundred peasants, but protests prevent them from doing so. China seems to have an advantage here, but it might not seem so advantageous if China ever gets another “bad emperor” like Mao Zedong. Fukuyama asks a more interesting question: why are they different? Is India more democratic because they were colonized by the British? No Fukuyama argues, these differences go back three thousand years. India has never been able to sustain the kind of centralized authority China developed.

Fukuyama asks: why have the Anglo/European political institutions been so difficult to transplant? His answer is twofold: first Europe developed individualism at a very early stage. Second, Europe’s sequence of legal development was different than the rest of the world. Europe developed the rule of law before it developed the modern state. The rest of the world built state power first. Fukuyama identifies this as an accident of history from the investiture controversy between King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. After that point, European kings tried to create a China, but they couldn’t.

Then Fukuyama opened it up for questions. The first question was if he accepted Jared Diamond’s argument that development has been mostly determined by geography. Fukuyama said he did, pointing out that it is no accident that it is in mountainous areas where we see stateless tribalism linger today, much to the frustration of US Central Command! The terrain is critical in explaining political development. The first pristine states all developed in alluvial plains where fertile agriculture provided a surplus. After saying that he agrees with Jared Diamond, Fukuyama pointed out that he has been scheduled to debate him in Los Angeles next week.

The second question was asked by me. I wanted to know if the measurement of individual liberty in a society can be a metric for measuring and comparing development. As time goes to infinity, do we become freer? Fukuyama said there is no single measure for development because there are always three tradeoffs that societies must make between liberty, equality, and order, and time will not go to infinity for humanity because global warming will kill us all.

The third question was sort of a “what about the Incas?” question: who says they have nothing to contribute to our understanding to the state? Fukuyama reminded her of his argument that the state is formed by warfare. The Incas were destroyed by warfare as have many different nations in history. The state is also often strengthened by external threats. He pointed out how Commodore Perry of the US Navy arrived in Japan with cannon and rifles in 1853 prompting the Japanese to quickly embark on a crash course in modernization. By 1905, they defeated the Russian Navy in the battle of the Tsushima Straits.

The fourth question was if the form of government in Singapore is so effective because it is a combination of Confucianism and Oxford education. Fukuyama answered that Singapore is great, but he would not consider it a model for the rest of the world. It would be a mistake for us to expect an African nation to produce a Lee Kuan Yew, or more importantly how long will Singapore be governed so well after he has passed away?

The fifth question is what first brought out Fukuyama’s shocking retraction of his “End of History” theory. He was asked if history is cyclical. Do we develop along a permanent trajectory or are we doomed to revisit our old historical social problems. Fukuyama paused for a moment and then said that when he wrote The End of History, he did not see anything on the horizon that could be considered progress over liberal democracy in the West, but now China’s model of governance is a new competitor. You could hear a pin drop were it not for a few gasps heard in the room when he said that. He may have said that publicly before, but it was news to me and many others in the room. The basic problem in the development of political institutions, he went on to explain, is that all human institutions are sticky. We tend to want to preserve our old habits of behavior. When old institutions are subject to external threats and new circumstances, they may adapt or they may collapse.

The sixth question was if his book was influenced by Hegel. Fukuyama said no, not this one, but his first one was. (His first one was of course The End of History). He said that he is more influenced my Weber and Durkheim. He loves elegant writing on history that seeks broad explanations for general human behavior. He is tired of the colonization of the various social sciences by economists who seem to think that if a regression analysis cannot be found then nothing happened.

The seventh question was the final one. Did we hear him correctly? Did he really say that liberal democracy once again has a universal, ideological competitor? Has history returned? The question was posed directly this time. Does China offer an alternative form of political order that might succeed liberal democracy? Fukuyama said: “yes, but I would put my money on liberal democracy, because China still has to address the ‘bad emperor’ problem.” But it cannot be ruled out that China could develop a new method of political accountability to mitigate political decay. We will have to wait and see.

I suspect that when he was a student of Samuel P. Huntington he might have asked his professor the same question about the Soviet Union. What are the odds Dr. Huntington gave him the same answer?