The Origins of Political Order
Questions about the genealogy and proper functioning of political entities are easy to ask and notoriously difficult to answer. The political systems and institutions that shape the world in which we live have been in existence for some time and are pervasive in their effects on our lives—so much so that it is quite difficult to see them for what they are: the temporal and contingent results of unpredictable, frequently unstable historical processes. Moreover, basing normative claims on historical data is always risky at best. Knowing what
Fukuyama is not unaware of these difficulties. His strategy is to begin at the most fundamental starting point, with human nature itself, in order to determine just how human beings went from being organized in terms of tribes to dividing themselves up among organized political states. (He does not, on the other hand, see himself as having to explain how we went from no social organization at all to tribal organization; in his view, human beings are essentially social creatures, and there was thus never a time during which we were
Fukuyama's approach emphasizes the role of ideas in political development. (In this and many other ways, he follows the lead of his acknowledged predecessor Samuel Huntington.) "It is impossible," he writes, "to develop any meaningful theory of political development without treating ideas as fundamental causes of why societies differ and follow distinct development paths." This will seem like common sense to anyone who is even shallowly acquainted with the history of philosophy, but as Fukuyama notes, it is not uncommon for social scientists to deny the profound causal role ideas have had on human history and to claim, instead, that "their rational utility-maximizing framework is sufficient to understand virtually all forms of social behavior."
Particularly
But the history that leads to that moment is long and complex, and, as Fukuyama is careful to insist, it is a mistake to assume that there must be one single well-defined path leading from pre-history to liberal democracy. Nor is it the case that the various goods manifested by modern liberal democratic systems—rule of law, political accountability, and high per capita levels of economic productivity, for instance—must necessarily come as a unified package, or even in a certain specific temporal sequence: the Chinese example is sufficient to show otherwise. Many centuries ago, Fukuyama argues, China invented modern bureaucracy and, in essence, the modern state. "But it created a modern state that was not restrained by a rule of law or by institutions of accountability to limit the power of the sovereign."
China, then, is an exceptional case in so far as it succeeded in attaining some characteristically modern elements very early on, while managing throughout its entire history to avoid certain others. Europe, in Fukuyama's view, is also exceptional, and in certain ways surprisingly akin to China:
The process of Chinese state formation is particularly interesting in a comparative perspective, since it sets precedents in many ways for the process Europe went through nearly one thousand years later. Just as the Zhou tribes conquered a long-settled territory and established a feudal aristocracy, so too did the Germanic barbarian tribes overrun the decaying Roman Empire and create a comparably decentralized political system. In both China and Europe, state formation was driven primarily by the need to wage war, which led to the progressive consolidation of feudal lands into territorial states, the centralization of political power, and the growth of modern impersonal administration.
Europe's progression to modernity turns out to be highly idiosyncratic in its own way, due to the influence of Christianity, a socially and politically potent religion with no real analogue in Chinese history. The Germanic tribes that overran the Roman Empire were soon converted to Christianity by the Catholic Church, with the result that a shift from kinship to individualistic contract-based relations occurred much earlier in Europe than elsewhere. From this Fukuyama concludes the following:The reduction of relationships in the family to "a mere money relation" that Marx thundered against was not, it appears, an innovation of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie but appeared in England many centuries before that class's supposed rise. Putting one's parents out to pasture in a nursing home has very deep historical roots in Western Europe. This suggests that, contrary to Marx, capitalism was the consequence rather than the cause of a change in social relationships and custom.
For a variety of complex reasons, these and successive developments happened even earlier and more quickly in England than in other parts of Europe, with the result that that country became, in effect, the birthplace of modern liberal democracy.
There is a good deal more in volume one of
And then there is the United States, which has been unable toseriously address long-term fiscal issues related to health, social security, energy, and the like. The United States seems increasingly caught in a dysfunctional political equilibrium, wherein everyone agrees on the necessity of addressing long-term fiscal issues, but powerful interest groups can block the spending cuts or tax increases necessary to close the gap. The design of the country's institutions, with strong checks and balances, makes a solution harder. To this might be added an ideological rigidity that locks Americans into a certain range of solutions to their problems.
More than once he compares the contemporary American situation to the France of the
It
In a broader sense, his diagnosis of America's current situation and his forecasts for its future are hard to evaluate. This is so not only because we have only the first volume of the total work before us—a work whose historical account comes to a halt over two hundred years ago—but also because historical comparisons and future prognostications are inevitably simplifications that attempt to render an impossibly complex array of empirical facts down to a small set of graspable and conceptually palatable theses. The parallels between ancien régime
Fukuyama himself does not expect the current American crisis, as challenging as it is, to erupt into a twenty-first century version of the French Revolution. Still, one senses, by the end of the current book, a certain pessimism on its author's part as to whether the United States will be able to overcome its present difficulties without considerable hardship for its people. Fukuyama's pessimism (some would simply label it realism) will not, I hope, dissuade anyone from reading this book. Indeed, whatever one may think of its particular claims and predictions—and there is surely something for everyone to disagree with here—The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Posted Wed, 05/11/2011 - 19:01 by Fishville at tongjiyiren.com
Information provided by:
HYP Pathway (雅美途
An Expert on College Admission in the
E-mail:
