Does your country have terminal Daddy Issues?

An 8 year late review of Francis Fukuyama's Political Order Duology

Brief Scheduling Update:

Hello, I’m back after a, uh, slightly extended break.

In my defense, I’ve had a fair amount going on. Because I am very smart, I was busy graduating from college. Because I am very dumb, I managed to get my laptop stolen which contained my completed draft of the next LOTR post, all of my notes on the industrial revolution, and my non-backed up Zotero files that contained all the papers I’ve read for it. So, LOTR Part III is coming, I just need to work up the motivation to redo a ton of work.

In the mean time—so I have external motivation to do vaguely intellectual things instead of sitting around watching pro-wrestling all day—I’m recommitting to a (mostly) weekly schedule. To make that actually doable, I’m going to be supplementing the main posts with reviews of individual books. These probably be shorter and somewhat less deranged than the main posts. If that isn’t your jam, I have graciously created a separate section called “Featherless Bipeds: Reading the Hits” that you can unsubscribe from individually in order to receive only the main posts.

Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order duology is political science’s response to the pop-academic big economic history cottage industry. Where books like Why Nations Fail and Guns, Germs, and Steel try to explain the deep historical roots of economic development, Fukuyama’s goal is to explain the roots of political development or why our political institutions are arranged in a certain manner.

Sadly, it hits most of the same pitfalls.

The books are lush with historical details and case studies, but an unwillingness to bring in rigor that could render sections illegible for the casual reader means that when Fukuyama tries to move from individual examples to general principles the evidence is less than stellar. The duology is also marred by occasional imprecisions and infelicities in language that make the arguments confusing or contradictory. 

The first of the two, The Origins of Political Order (Origins) is an attempt to trace the development of “political order” from prehistoric origins. The book is sweeping in scope; topics include primate sociology, malthusian economic constraints and details of Catholic Inheritance law in 1400.

Political order, we are told, is made up of three things: the state, the rule of law, and accountable government. Fukuyama regards these as distinct and independent concepts, where each can exist in a society separate from the others and his explanations for the drivers of each are therefore separate. This isn’t to say that they don’t affect each other, indeed Fukuyama repeatedly provides examples of interactions between the categories, just that they are not one and the same thing. 

As a strategy, this neat division makes the book much more legible. As a truth, I think it’s highly suspect; Fukuyama repeatedly has difficulty drawing the boundary between rule of law and accountable government. 

State Formation is the first of Origins topics and Fukuyama affords it the largest portion of the book's pages.

Specifically, he tries to explain how we arrived at the political group that we consider a ‘state’, by which he means a polity with a sovereign and “centralized source of authority” that possesses a monopoly on violence in its geographic area and whose authority is territorial rather than based on kin relationships. This is a rather specific set of criterion for what a state is; to put it in layman's terms, a state is a political entity that has uncontested control over an area. The United States is a ‘state’. Somalia since the 1990’s, with various armed groups contesting for control, is not.

The largess in focus on state formation is motivated by practical concern. Fukuyama is of the opinion that the failings of modern democracies are largely failures of an insufficiently powerful state and that ““Democracy’s failure…lies less in concept than in execution”. While this section of the book isn’t prescriptive nor a guide to modern statebuilding (Fukuyama has other books for that), Fukuyama clearly wants our attention on the state.

Origins presents the state as the final unit in an evolutionary process, with external forces pushing societies down a set path of development that holds across time and geography. That is, barring some countervailing force—poor geography is offered up as a villain—every society will proceed along the same path until arriving as a state.

The foundational unit of the theory is the “band” or a small kinship group. There is no need to explain how this political unit came about, because there was nothing before it. That is, there is no such thing as a ‘pre-political’ person who exists independent of their relationships with others. Whether humans originated in bands or not is a fact that I am beyond unqualified to comment on, but my understanding is that the research here is basically in agreement with Fukuyama.

From bands we move to tribes. Tribes are a collection of bands—connected on the basis of kinship, claiming descent from a common ancestor—who loosely affiliate with each other for the purpose of waging war. This onset of bellicosity can be traced back to the development of agriculture, which both raised population densities and, crucially, created surplus wealth that could be seized from each other. As warfare grew, bands were forced to develop ties with each other to survive, resulting in tribes.

Finally, tribes turn into states, once again driven by war. Well, mostly driven by war. Fukuyama is actually agnostic on what created the first state—geographical circumstance, charismatic religious leaders, and population density are all examined as suspects. However, with the emergence of the first state came immense selection pressure through warfare. Organized states are capable of bringing a much larger amount of resources to bear on warfare and tribes are therefore faced with either state building themselves or being taken over. 

Of course, while war provides pressure in favor of statebuilding there are competing pressures that can lead to state failures. Fukuyama’s villain of the peace is ‘patrimonialism’ or attempts by elites to undermine the apersonal nature of the state in favor of distributing benefits to relatives and friends. Even if collectively the benefits of the state are immense, elites stand to gain personal benefits and security by undermining the institutions that make the state so effective. Thus, states are forced into a constant vigilance trying to prevent elite undermining.

Fukuyama marshals an impressive array of historical cases to argue for this model. His specific focus on China, India, and the Islamic world’s different responses to patrimonialism is both engaging and refreshing. I am entirely sick of discussions around state formation spending all of their time looking at warfare in Early Modern Europe and Charles VII’s Italian Vacation. But this focus on somewhat neglected cases of state formation seems to risk going too far. China is not just presented as a tragically neglected source of historical data, but, according to Fukuyama’s criterion, the first state. 

This is because China was the first to succeed in “developing a centralized, uniform system of bureaucratic administration that was capable of governing a huge population and territory”. I am not an ancient historian or a classicist, but this seems patently absurd. Fukuyama is aware that entities—such as Rome, Greece, Egypt, and various Mesopotamian civilizations—predate China, but commits himself to arguing that they do not constitute a “state”, presumably because they lack either non-patrimonial rule or sufficient projection of power to meet his criteria. 

This claim is unconvincing. Rome possessed a clear—if odd—non-patrimonial path for selecting important officials in the cursus honorum and clearly must have possessed a somewhat sophisticated bureaucracy and territorial control to allow for the sophisticated military operations it engaged in. Three millennia before the rise of the Chinese empire Shulgi, King of Ur, claimed to have developed a communication and travel network sufficient to travel 200 miles in a day, even allowing for exaggeration this seems to suggest bureaucratic and power projection capabilities on par with a state.

The China first claim also places Fukuyama into a double bind. If Rome and Greece were not states, what were they? By his own model they must be tribal societies, which they are clearly not. Fukuyama is exacting in his criteria for tribal societies, it is not some catchall for groups between bands and states, rather it is exactly ““Segmentary lineages… based on a principle of descent from a common ancestor, [that] are sustained by religious belief in the power of dead ancestors and unborn descendants over the living” Rome absolutely engaged in ancestor worship, but the claim that it was a society composed of horizontally associated lineages with no hierarchical state seems farcical. The only hope here is that, at one point in the second book, Fukuyama attempts to distinguish between Patrimonial and Modern states, but any division that places China on one side and Rome on the other would seem ad-hoc. Similarly, The Athenian Republic does not seem to be accurately described as tribal (for those who would note the existence of the Ten Tribes of Athens, they were actually geographic units created by Cleisthenes, not tribes in Fukuyama’s sense.) Lastly, what are we to make of the weak states of medieval warlords? These polities clearly didn’t associate by virtue of some common lineage, but didn’t possess the criteria to be a state. These middle grounds are rendered invisible by Fukuyama’s rigid categorizations.

The next pillar of political order that Fukuyama tackles is the Rule of Law which “can be said to exist only where the preexisting body of law is sovereign over legislation, meaning that the individual holding political power feels bound by the law.” This, I think, is an odd definition and not one that Fukuyama holds to precisely throughout the two volumes (an amusing fact given that he spends the first few pages of this section critiquing earlier literature for lack of clarity and consistency regarding the meaning of the term). 

Consider both an absolute monarch who is a Lockean devotee, utterly convinced of the moral commandment to respect property rights and a constitutional president who believes he should rule absolutely but never succeeds, as a constitutional court blocks all attempts to seize power. By locating rule of law entirely in the leader’s own beliefs, the absolutist monarchist becomes a better example of the rule of law than the failed autocrat. The ridiculousness of this result seems to be recognized, as throughout the books Fukuyama treats Rule of Law as referring to actual rather than perceived constraints on the sovereign. Indeed, oftentimes they seem to run together.

The reason for the oddity of his definition becomes clear when one arrives at his argument for the historical origins of law, which he places squarely on religion. Specifically, whether the Rule of Law emerged is dependent on religion emerging as a separate and distinct entity from the state that could make claims about moral obligations of the state. In India, with the rise of the Brahmins as a separate class from the warriors, we saw the subordination of the state to higher moral claims. In China, where the state and religion neverly cleanly disentangled, we saw no such claims on the obligations of the state.

This is an interesting proposal if just because—in what is sure to send marxists into an apoplectic fit of rage— it grants ideas non-derivative casual status.

At least, I think this is the case?

Fukuyama is much less clear than I would like him to be. When he uses phrases like “In a tradition anchored by Legalism, the Chinese thought of their law primarily as positive law. The law was whatever the emperor decreed.”, it seems like he is saying that initial conditions are driven by religious belief. Thus, we end up with a model like the following:

This is believable as an explanation, if religion emerged as a separate entity with independent institutions—for instance, the Catholic Church—this would provide a check on the power of rulers. What is disappointing is that Fukuyama never gets around to describing exactly how this checks rulers. We might imagine several options here: the ruler may refrain from acting because they believe they shouldn’t; the ruler may be unable to act because subordinates will see it as immoral; or  the ruler may be unable to act because religious norms provide a coordination point that, when violated, allows the public to take collective action against them. We receive some vague words that “And yet, the degree to which [religious beliefs that rulers are constrained] would impose real restrictions on their behavior depended not just on this theoretical acknowledgment but also on the institutional conditions surrounding the formulation and enforcement of law.”, but we aren’t told why this is the case. As such, Fukuyama seems to be missing a large section of how we get from ideas to restraints.

Following rule of law, Origins turns to explaining olitical accountability. This term encoumpasses a much broader range of mechanisms than elections, which we tend to think of as the main mechanism of accountability. Indeed accountability is anything that “means that the rulers believe that they are responsible to the people they govern and put the people’s interests above their own”. Here we again reach the benevolent dictator problem. It might have been in the people of Singapore’s interest that Lee Quan Yew engaged in rapid economic development, but that does not mean he was accountable to them. Fukuyama’s account misses this out.

Setting aside persistent definitional oddities, this section attempts to explain the emergence of non-rulers having some sort of say in their government. 

Here, Fukuyama abandons the idea-based account from the previous section in favor of explaining accountability in terms of conflict between various groups in society. Whether the government is accountable depends on historical artifacts about what alliances emerged between groups like the upper nobility, peasantry, state, and so on. This is a very reasonable proposal, but not much of a theory. Of course whether the sovereign is accountable is dependent on how effective groups were at getting concessions out of the sovereign—it doesn’t seem like anything interesting is being said here. 

I think the most generous case that can be made is that Fukuyama is deliberately leaving the emergence of accountability to the domain of tactics and that there is no fundamental driver to explain here. Nonetheless, even though the historical cases he brings to bear are fascinating, it’s difficult to draw any general principles out of the evidence.

There is a subtler oddity here as well. If we can appeal to idealism about the Rule of Law, why can’t we do so with accountability? It seems like Fukuyama is arbitrarily privileging some ideas over others. It seems incorrect to deny that the works of authors like Montesqueiu and Locke on the moral equality of persons—not that they would have actually extended their arguments to all or even most—had no influence on the direction of governments, given our willingness to admit similar elsewhere. 

The second book of the series, Political Order and Political Decay is Fukuyama’s attempt to extend his analysis to modern conditions. The main difference is that the onset of persistent exponential economic growth during the industrial revolution changes the drivers of statebuilding and accountability — rule of law largely falls by the wayside in the sequel, likely because he considers its determinants rooted in premodern religious belief. 

On state building, Fukuyama thinks that growth has introduced both new pathways to the state as well as new constraints. He focuses on two derivative effects of growth: the emergence of an educated middle class with distinct interests and development of new communications technologies. 

The former is interesting as it creates a group who is directly incentivized to fight against patrimonialism. When you are one of a small few elite, engaging in family handouts and the degradation of state capacity is beneficial. When you are one in a large mass of people interested in working for a state job, your best bet is fighting for fair and impartial apportionment of state jobs. This creates an additional path to statehood outside of warfare.

The second development, communication technology, is alleged to introduce new pathways and requirements for statehood. The mechanism at work here is the creation of the nation — a shared sense of identity created through media and communication. This capacity to create a shared identity eases some of the burdens of statebuilding by creating buy-in from relevant parties. However, the more stringent claim Fukuyama makes is that this sense of shared identity is necessary for statebuilding in the modern era. Oddly, I can’t seem to find any point in the book where he explains why this is. Indeed, he himself has made the case that statebuilding can occur without shared national identity in the first volume. Perhaps the idea is that nowadays if people do not share an identity, they will have affiliations elsewhere, whereas in the premodern era there was no need to fight against other identities. Whatever the case, I can’t find an explanation in the book.

The model for the drivers of democracy is largely the same as statebuilding — middle class pushes for it and new technology helps spread ideas about democracy (Fukuyama appears to be an idealist about democracy here). He does introduced interesting ideas about the importance of timing of democracy vis a vis state capacity, arguing that less developed countries are not ready for democracy and it will have pernicious results. I don’t have a great deal to say about this other than that this thesis is incredibly contentious and empirical results testing this hypothesis are very mixed.

So, should you read these books? Despite my nitpicking, I don’t think they are useless or even bad. I came away feeling much more informed about the particulars of countries and examples that Fukuyama dives into. If you apply a critical eye to the claims of general patterns and rules there are a plethora of provoking insights and ideas, they just may not form a cohesive whole.