HISTORY: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French RevolutionBy Francis Fukuyama Profile, 584pp. £25
HOW CAN THE nepotism that is hard-wired in man be counteracted so that vested interests are prevented from wielding excessive influence? What are the conditions needed to reduce corruption, make rulers accountable and ensure states act in citizens’ interests? Why did indigenously ruled India remain politically fragmented, China and Russia tend towards centralised absolutism and western Europe invent accountability and the rule of law? In his latest book Francis Fukuyama attempts nothing less than an overarching explanation of how humans organise themselves. Many of the issues are directly relevant to political reform here.
Any attempt to cover so much ground requires enormous intellectual ambition, and few thinkers are more ambitious than Fukuyama. Since he exploded on to the world’s radar, in 1989, he has written about the reasons for rising crime in most developed countries, how advances in medical technology herald a “post-human” future and how levels of trust in societies influence economic performance. Most famously – and the reason he rocketed to intellectual superstardom just over two decades ago – he wrote history’s obituary after the collapse of communism.
His latest work is partly inspired by his involvement in state-building efforts, from East Timor to Iraq, and by a desire that the lessons of history, rather than ideology, inform those efforts. (Fukuyama once dabbled in neoconservatism, before rejecting that ideology and falling out bitterly with some of its most ardent proponents, including this newspaper’s one-time columnist Charles Krauthammer.) The book, the first of two volumes, is firmly in the world-history genre, concerning itself with commonalities and differences in development and decay – social, political and economic – over time and space.
“He who knows only one country knows no country,” Fukuyama, one of the world’s most influential living political thinkers, approvingly quotes the late Seymour Martin Lipset, one of its most influential sociologists. To find the origins of political order the author looks far and wide. The big themes in Chinese and European political evolution are compared and contrasted, though Fukuyama buys into neither the Sinocentric nor the Eurocentric accounts of world history. Most interestingly, and originally, he draws on the experience of the two other major civilisations of the past 1,000 years, the Indian and the Ottoman.
Meritocracy is now usually associated with democracy, but it did not originate in what is now the core of the democratic world: Europe. Advancement by ability was invented by the Chinese and was a central organising principle of the Ottoman Empire. Fukuyama notes how amazed classist Europeans were to observe on the banks of the Bosporus a political system in which a mere shepherd could rise to the most exalted positions.
Class, or rather caste, is also put forward as a factor explaining the political evolution of the Indian subcontinent. The existence of a priestly caste that interpreted sacred texts constrained princes, thus preventing the rise of absolutism. But it did not generate the structures of accountability that, along with the rule of law, are so central to democratic political order.
The author places great emphasis on the relationship between representation and taxation in generating systems of accountability and the creation of a virtuous cycle of effective representative government.
At the height of the protracted Anglo-French wars of the 18th century British taxes reached 30 per cent of gross domestic product. France could manage only half of that. The reason, Fukuyama believes, is that France remained absolutist, and its state predatory, while Britain had become more consent driven, its state more legitimate. In one of a number of swipes at free-market economists – political scientists believe dismal scientists to be much overrated and often resent their greater influence in public discourse – he adds that, “needless to say”, high taxes in Britain did nothing to stop that country’s capitalist revolution.
This book is not only an important contribution to thought on how the world works; it is directly relevant to this country at a time when the political system has failed so badly. One passage could have been written to describe events here in recent years. It is worth quoting at length:
The ability of societies to rule themselves depends not only on the degree to which they can mobilise opposition to centralised power and impose constitutional constraints on the state. It must also have a state that is strong enough to act when required. Accountability does not run in just one direction, from the state to society. If government cannot act cohesively, if there is not broader sense of public purpose, then one will not have laid the basis for true political liberty.
As people in Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Brussels and Washington squabble among themselves over what the Irish government should be told to do under the terms of its bailout, that loss of true political liberty has already come to pass. As Fukuyama notes, some societies just fail to rise to the challenges they face. Decay then sets in.
With each page turned this reviewer could hear an ever-louder echo of Edmund Burke’s famous and, for Ireland in 2011, timely warning: a society without the means of change is a society without the means of its own preservation.
Dan O’Brien is economics editor of
The Irish Times
and author of
Ireland, Europe and the World: Writings on a New Century
