The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
By Francis Fukuyama
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 585 pp., $35)
Ideas about what it means to be modern are soon dated. Not so long ago theories were in vogue claiming that a “scientific-technical revolution” was under way that would lead to a single type of government spreading throughout the world. Originally promoted by Daniel Bell in the 1950s, the theory of convergence suggested that the Soviet Union would evolve to become like the advanced industrial societies of the West. The idea was given a new lease of life during the Gorbachev era, when the long-awaited convergence seemed about to occur. In fact, as is now known and some suspected at the time, the Soviet Union was not evolving toward any kind of Western-style modernity. Lacking internal legitimacy, the Soviet state could not reform itself, and instead it collapsed. After a period of chaos a new system of government did emerge, but it was a hypermodern version of despotism rather than a modern democratic state. The convergence with the West that Bell and others believed was under way has not happened, and there is nothing to suggest that it will happen.
Such are the vagaries of academic reputation that Bell’s name does not appear in the index of Francis Fukuyama’s new book. Yet in many ways Fukuyama is continuing Bell’s project, which was itself a continuation of earlier theories. There have been many attempts to show that only one kind of government is viable in modern conditions. Comte was confident that modern development could lead only to a type of hierarchical technocracy; Marx was convinced that so long as industrial society did not relapse into barbarism it would end in communism; Spencer was adamant that industrialism and laissez-faire capitalism would prove to be one and the same. Sidney and Beatrice Webb had no doubt that the future of civilization could be secured only by adopting something like the collectivism that existed in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Other theorists—including Hayek, who in later years revived a variant of Spencer’s crackpot evolutionism to argue that the free market was destined to spread throughout the world—could be added to the list. But the thinker in recent years who has been most prominent in claiming that modernization can have only one destination has been Fukuyama.
Like earlier theories, Fukuyama’s proposes an end point of political evolution that accords with prevailing notions of progress. Comte, Marx, Spencer, the Webbs, and Hayek each claimed to have identified laws of social development that (without being entirely deterministic) impelled humanity in a specific direction. In every case, the direction was the one that the author of the theory viewed as the most desirable for the species. Perhaps it is not surprising that there should be such an unfailing coincidence of putative laws of social development with progressive political hopes. Thinkers who produce grand theories of history are no less provincial in their outlook than any other section of humanity, and it is only to be expected that they would imagine that their values should be those of the species at large—if not at present, then in the future that is unfolding. What is harder to explain is how these theorists could believe—as they all did—that science underwrites their faith that their values will prevail.
Modern thinkers pride themselves on their objectivity. But if there are discoverable laws of social development—a large and problematic assumption—why should they conform to our changing conceptions of progress? If, like the laws that natural science aims to discover, these laws of development reflect objective features of the world, why should they be impelling humanity toward a better life? Few modern thinkers have entertained the possibility that social evolution might be moving in a direction that is thoroughly undesirable. (Joseph Schumpeter, who hated socialism but saw it as inevitable, is one of the handful who come to mind.) In any case, how could laws of history underpin human progress when views about what constitutes progress are so ephemeral and so divergent? Some human values are universal and enduring, but ideas of progress come and go like fashions in hats. Theories of convergence reflect disparate and incompatible ideals of human betterment. What all such theories have in common is that they have come to nothing. None of the regimes that was believed to be the near-inevitable end point of modern development has emerged anywhere in the world.
FUKUYAMA SHOWS NO SIGN of being discouraged by this record of failure. The faith that the world is set to converge on a single type of government is central to his view of things, pervading this bulky and tiresome book of nearly six hundred pages, the first of two projected volumes. The same faith animated the celebrated essay that he published in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, called “The End of History?,” in which he proclaimed that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy” is “the final form of human government.” To any detached observer at the time, it was perfectly clear that history had not stopped but resumed: like the past, the future would be shaped by ethnic and religious conflicts and resource wars, while more complex types of ideological conflict would replace the cold war stand-off. Yet three years later, when Fukuyama published a book-length version of his claim, called The End of History and the Last Man, the question mark attached to the essay had disappeared. Like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose monumental eulogy to Stalin’s Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), appeared in later editions with the question mark removed, Fukuyama was completely confident that a new era in the history of humanity had arrived.
Ever since his original essay appeared, and was widely and witheringly criticized, Fukuyama has complained that his central idea has been wickedly caricatured. In the introduction to The End of History and the Last Man, he responded indignantly to critics who pointed out that history had not in fact stopped. When informed of Fukuyama’s writings, Margaret Thatcher is reported to have exclaimed, “The end of history? The beginning of nonsense!” For Fukuyama, Thatcher was laboring under a misunderstanding. He had never claimed that historical events were grinding to a halt. It was “history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process” that had come to an end. Nor had he asserted that there would be no more historical conflicts—he had always accepted that there would be plenty. But one type of conflict has ended, he insists: with the triumph of liberal democracy, the conflict over what is the best form of government has been resolved definitively and finally. Charting the development of the state, the rule of law, and accountable government, his new book maintains that together they define a universal regime: “A successful modern liberal democracy combines all three sets of institutions in a stable balance.” An idealized version of American government—this is the only regime that can be fully legitimate in modern conditions.
It is a grandiose assertion, which only re-states, in more specific terms, the end-of-history thesis to which Fukuyama claims never to have subscribed. History—the history of modern politics, at any rate—largely consists of conflicts about what is the best form of government. The ideological rivalry of the cold war is only one example among many such antagonisms. The French Revolution sparked a contest between two rival versions of democracy, the first a version of limited government and the second a vehicle for popular will. (From one point of view, the present regime in Iran can be seen as a popular theocracy of a kind whose outlines are sketched in the writings of Rousseau.) It is often conveniently forgotten, but there were many in the interwar years who viewed fascism and communism as legitimate alternatives to the failing regime of liberal capitalism—a position defended, with some qualifications, by James Burnham in 1941 in The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World.
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Brilliant. Gray is a spendid writer. My question is, will civilization survive the end of this century? Also, will artificial intelligence make human intelligence (an oxymoron, probably) necessary much longer?
Shell, Shell, Shell, Shell. I hear and obey. Must buy petroleum products. Must buy petroleum products. The TNR web site has gained control of my mind.
Brilliant. Gray is a spendid writer. My question is, will civilization survive the end of this century? Also, will artificial intelligence make human intelligence (an oxymoron, probably) necessary much longer?
Shell, Shell, Shell, Shell. I hear and obey. Must buy petroleum products. Must buy petroleum products. The TNR web site has gained control of my mind.
Kudos to TNR for getting Gray to review FF's latest; the contrast between opposing viewpoints could not be starker. I suppose that I'm inclined toward a linear view of history; unconsciously, perhaps, because I am a Christian. But I consider myself a realist, and, having read enough books about the founders, have come to realize how arbitrary events shaped the American revolution and the government that followed. Who is right, FF or Gray? Only history will tell (that's both a lame joke and the only possible answer). I will make one observation about the social sciences. For what purpose do we study history if not to offer guidance to the future; just as the study of DNA in the natural s ... view full comment
Kudos to TNR for getting Gray to review FF's latest; the contrast between opposing viewpoints could not be starker. I suppose that I'm inclined toward a linear view of history; unconsciously, perhaps, because I am a Christian. But I consider myself a realist, and, having read enough books about the founders, have come to realize how arbitrary events shaped the American revolution and the government that followed. Who is right, FF or Gray? Only history will tell (that's both a lame joke and the only possible answer). I will make one observation about the social sciences. For what purpose do we study history if not to offer guidance to the future; just as the study of DNA in the natural sciences may provide guidance to the future, one's propensity for illness and the ways to avoid it.
John Gray is a great writer but he is wasting his time attacking a minor thinker like Fukuyama.
John Gray is a great writer but he is wasting his time attacking a minor thinker like Fukuyama.
I agree with the previous comment by arnon: "John Gray is a great writer but he is wasting his time attacking a minor thinker like Fukuyama." Bravo, arnon.
I have never really understood why Francis Fukuyama is held in such high regard as a public intellectual. But I have been happily rewarded today by reading John Gray's review. And I have learned more in these three pages than I had reading Fukuyama's first book, The End of History.
The entire thesis seems flawed and superficial to me: the study of the history of ideas in which this discipline somehow follows immutable, empirical laws borrowed from the rigorous, empirically verified laws of science.
Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote ... view full comment
I agree with the previous comment by arnon: "John Gray is a great writer but he is wasting his time attacking a minor thinker like Fukuyama." Bravo, arnon.
I have never really understood why Francis Fukuyama is held in such high regard as a public intellectual. But I have been happily rewarded today by reading John Gray's review. And I have learned more in these three pages than I had reading Fukuyama's first book, The End of History.
The entire thesis seems flawed and superficial to me: the study of the history of ideas in which this discipline somehow follows immutable, empirical laws borrowed from the rigorous, empirically verified laws of science.
Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote an interesting study in the history of ideas, The Crooked Timber of Humanity. It was based on a quote from Immanuel Kant: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." Now, that makes sense to me in so many ways.
This is not a review of Fukuyama's new book, "The Origins of Political Order." It may be a review of his previous books, but that does not make it a competent review. As an ardent Liberal who never read another book by Fukuyama, but heard a lot about them, I picked up this book expecting to dislike it. Contrary to my expectation, I found it one of the most interesting and impressive works in the humanities/social sciences that I have read in years. It is unfortunate that the New Republic has missed an opportunity to publish a serious review of an exceptional book.
Contrary to John Gray's assertions, this book neither trumpets the superiority of the West, nor argues that anything is inevit ... view full comment
This is not a review of Fukuyama's new book, "The Origins of Political Order." It may be a review of his previous books, but that does not make it a competent review. As an ardent Liberal who never read another book by Fukuyama, but heard a lot about them, I picked up this book expecting to dislike it. Contrary to my expectation, I found it one of the most interesting and impressive works in the humanities/social sciences that I have read in years. It is unfortunate that the New Republic has missed an opportunity to publish a serious review of an exceptional book.
Contrary to John Gray's assertions, this book neither trumpets the superiority of the West, nor argues that anything is inevitable. Fukuyama argues that China had the first modern state, and that nothing about the Greek or Roman states can compare. Moreover, he ends with a comparison of China and the U.S. in which he faults each of them equally for being less than fully modern. Still further, so far from asserting that anything is inevitable, he constantly points out the contrary.
What Fukuyama does is he analyzes the concept that most of us, at least in the U.S., have of a "modern" political system. He asks what differentiates it from the systems that prevailed in prior millenia, and, in the places where one or more modern political elements came into being, how did the society get there--which varies from example to example--and in the instances where the society did not get there, why not? He does suggest in a few places that a fully modern political system is economically or militarily advantageous, but this is a decidedly minor note.
Whether one agrees with that minor note or not, his approach leads to numerous thought provoking and, sometimes, brilliant insights, because Fukuyama has analyzed a commonly used concept into constituent parts, and then applied it accross thousands of years and around the world. Whether or not the reader agrees with the minor note that a "modern" political system has certain economic or military advantages, is largely beside the point. By accepting the terms of Fukuyama's investigation, many things previously muddy become more clear. I personally would definitely argue against some aspects of Fukuyama's core interpretation regarding how his "modern" model evolved, but John Gray's review appears utterly unaware of what that core analysis is about, much less does he engage it.
Moreover, even on the irrelvant points that John Gray argues, his argument is utterly unsupported. For example, he argues that Fukuyama ignores Japan because Japan modernized along a path totally different from that of the West. First of all, Gray is arguing about industrial modernization, not political modernization, and, as pointed out above, this is, at most a very minor note in the book. Second of all, even on this minor point, Gray is wrong. Here is an example:
Fukuyama argues that the key characteristic of a modern state is that it operates through a merit based bureaucracy rather than kin based chains of patrons or other patronage chains that resemble kin based patronage chains (keep in mind, this is only one of three characteristics of a modern political system, in Fukuyama's analsysis). In The Rise of the West, the great historian William H. McNeill wrote the following about Japan:
"By the nineteenth century, the raw, barbarian warlikeness of both the West and Japan had been organized (and in Japan almost supressed) by bureaucratic governments. But the Japanes way of the warrior, with its sense of honor and social precedence, had almost exact analogues in European life. What was perhaps even more decisive, in both societies the values and attitudes of the professional warriors were in considerable degree shared and admired by other ranks and classes."
McNeill wrote this 48 years ago, so he cannot be accused of trying to make Fukuyama look good.
I have a Harvard Ph.D. in American Civlization. Moreover, in 40 years of voting for politicians at all levels, the single time that I ever voted for a Republican was when the Republican Senate candidate was more liberal than his opponent (and opposed the War in Vietnam). This review is nothing more than the kind of thoughtless ideological rant that has come to characterize the output of Western academia. And THAT view of mine is no example of Western "triumphalism."
Rich Joffe
NYC