“The Origins of Political Order” by Francis Fukuyama is a comprehensive examination of the development of political institutions and the origins of political order throughout human history. Fukuyama explores the evolution of political systems from early tribal societies to modern nation-states, drawing on a wide range of historical and anthropological evidence to analyze the factors that have shaped the development of political order.
Fukuyama begins by examining the origins of human sociality and the emergence of early human societies. He explores the role of kinship, reciprocity, and cooperation in the formation of primitive social structures, highlighting the importance of social norms and institutions in regulating human behavior and maintaining order within small-scale communities.
The author then traces the development of political institutions in ancient societies, focusing on the rise of state-level political organizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India. He examines how early states evolved to centralize power, establish bureaucratic structures, and develop legal and administrative systems to govern increasingly complex societies.
Fukuyama explores the role of religion and ideology in shaping political order, highlighting the influence of religious beliefs, moral codes, and philosophical ideas on the legitimacy and stability of political institutions. He examines the role of religion in providing moral guidance, social cohesion, and legitimacy for political authority in both pre-modern and modern societies.
The author examines the impact of war and conquest on the development of political order, highlighting the role of violence, coercion, and military power in shaping the course of history. He explores how conquest and empire-building led to the formation of large-scale political entities and the spread of political institutions across vast territories.
Fukuyama discusses the role of law and governance in maintaining political order, emphasizing the importance of legal norms, institutions, and procedures in regulating human behavior and resolving disputes within societies. He examines how legal systems evolved to codify and enforce rules of conduct, protect property rights, and uphold the rule of law.
The author explores the transition from traditional to modern forms of political order, focusing on the emergence of liberal democracy and the modern nation-state in Western Europe. He examines the factors that contributed to the rise of democratic governance, including the development of constitutionalism, the spread of literacy and education, and the rise of civil society.
Fukuyama discusses the challenges of building and sustaining political order in the modern world, highlighting the tensions between state-building, nation-building, and democracy promotion in diverse societies. He examines the role of institutions, leadership, and political culture in shaping the stability and effectiveness of modern political systems.
The author examines the impact of globalization and technological change on political order, highlighting the challenges posed by economic interdependence, transnational threats, and the erosion of national sovereignty. He explores how global trends such as migration, information technology, and climate change are reshaping the dynamics of political power and governance in the 21st century.
In conclusion, “The Origins of Political Order” offers a comprehensive analysis of the development of political institutions and the origins of political order throughout human history. Fukuyama’s multidisciplinary approach and deep historical insights provide valuable perspectives on the factors that have shaped the evolution of political systems and the challenges of building and sustaining political order in the modern world.
When technological advance come this slowly, it has a two-edged character. In the short run, it improves living standards and benefits the innovators. But greater resources promote increases in population, which then reduce per capita output and leave human beings on average no better off than before the technological change occurred. This is why many historians have argued that the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies left people worse off in many ways. Although the potential for food production was much greater, human beings consumed a narrower range of foods, which adversely affected their health; they expected a greater amount of effort to produce food; and they lived in densely populated areas and thus more subject to disease, and so on.
Life in a zero-sum, Malthusian world has enormous implications for political development and looks very different from development today. In a Malthusian world, individuals with resources have few options for investing them in things like factories, scientific research, or education that will produce long-run economic growth. If they want to increase their wealth, it often makes much more sense to take a political route and engage in predation, that is, forcibly taking resources from someone else. Predation can take two forms: those with power to coerce can take resources from other members of their own society, though taxation or outright theft, or they can organize their society to attack and steal from neighboring societies. Organizing for predation through increased military or administrative capacity is thus oftentimes a more efficient use of resources than investment in productive capacity.
Malthus himself recognized war as a factor restraining population, but the classic Malthusian model probably understates war’s significance as a means of limiting overpopulation. It interacts strongly with famine and disease as population control mechanisms, since the latter usually follow conflict. But unlike famine and disease, predation is the one way of dealing with Malthusian pressures that is under deliberate human control. As the archaeologist Steve LeBlanc points out, the prevalence of warfare and violence in prehistoric societies can be explained by the perpetual problem of human populations outrunning the economic carrying capacity of the local environment. Most human beings, in other words, would rather fight than starve.
The ability of societies to innovate institutionally thus depends on whether they can neutralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform. Sometimes economic change weakens the position of existing elites in favor of new ones, who push for new institutions. The relative decline of returns to landed property when compared to commerce or manufacturing in England empowered the bourgeoisie to make political gains at the expense of the old aristocracy in the 17th century. Sometimes, new social actors are empowered by the rise of a new religious ideology, as in the case of Buddhism and Jainism in India. The peasantry in Scandinavia ceased being an inert mass of dispersed individuals after the Reformation, due to the promotion of literacy and lay access to the Bible. At other times, it is the sheer force of leadership to change, as in the case of Gregory VII’s organization of the papal party during the investiture conflict. This is, in effect, the essence of politics: the ability of leaders to get their way through a combination of authority, legitimacy, intimidation, negotiation, charisma, ideas, and organization.
The stability of dysfunctional equilibria suggests one reason why violence has played such an important role in institutional innovation and reform. Violence is classically seen as the problem that politics seeks to solve, but sometimes violence is the only way to displace entrenched stakeholders who are blocking institutional change. The fear of violent death is a stronger emotion than the desire for material gain and is capable of motivating more far-reaching changes in behavior. We already noted that economic motives like the desire to put in place a large irrigation system were highly implausible causes of pristine state formation. Incessant tribal warfare or fear of conquest by better-organized groups is, by contrast, a very understandable reason why free and proud tribesmen might agree to live in a centralized state.
In Chinese history, patrimonial elites stood in the way of the creation of modern state institutions both during the rise of the state of Qin and during the Sui and Tang dynasties when they had made a comeback. In the first case, incessant warfare led by aristocrats decimated their ranks and opened the way for nonelite military recruitment. In the latter case, the rise of the empress Wu to power early in the Tang Dynasty led to a general purge of traditional aristocratic families, and thus the empowerment of a broader elite. The two world wars performed a similar service for the democratic Germany that emerged after 1945 by eliminating the aristocratic Junker class, which could no longer block institutional change.
It is not clear that the democratic societies can always solve this type of problem peacefully. In the US in the period leading to the Civil War, a minority of Americans in the South passionately sought to defend their “peculiar institution” of slavery. The existing institutional rules under the Constitution allowed them to do this as long as the westward expansion of the country did not lead to the admission of enough free states to permit an override of their veto. The conflict was ultimately one that could not be solved under the Constitution and necessitated a war that claimed more than six hundred thousand American lives.
While religious beliefs cannot be verified, they are also difficult to falsify. All of this reinforces the fundamental conservatism of human societies, because mental models of reality once adopted are hard to change in the light of new evidence that they are not working.
The universality of some form of religious belief among virtually all known human societies suggests that it is somehow rooted in human nature. Like language and rule following, the content of religious belief is conventional and varies from society to society, but the faculty for creating religious doctrines is innate. Nothing of what I say here about the political impact of religion rests, however, on whether or not there is a “religion gene.” Even if it were a learned behavior, it would still have a large effect on political behavior.
People in all human societies create mental models of reality. These mental models attribute causality to various factors - oftentimes invisible ones - and their function is to make the world more legible, predictable, and easy to manipulate. In earlier societies, these invisible forces were spirits, demons, gods, or Nature; today they are abstractions like gravity, radiation, economic self-interest, social classes, and the like. All religious beliefs constitute a mental model of reality, in which observable events are attributed to or caused by non- or dimly observable forces. Since at least the time of David Hume, we have understood that it is not possible to verify causality through empirical data alone. With the rise of modern natural science, however, we have moved toward theories of causation that can at least be falsified, through either controlled experiments or statistical analysis. With better ways of testing causal theories, human beings can more effectively manipulate their environment, using fertilizer and irrigation, for example, rather than the blood of sacrificial victims to increase crop yields. But every known human society has generated some type of causal model of reality, suggesting that this is a natural rather than an acquired faculty.
Shared mental models - most particularly those that take the form of religion - are critical in facilitating large-scale collective action. Collective action based merely on rational self-interest is wholly inadequate in explaining the degree of social cooperation and altruism that actually exists in the world. Religious belief helps to motivate people to do things they would not do if they were interested only in resources or material well-being, as we saw in the case of the rise of Islam in 7th-century Arabia. The sharing of belief and culture improves cooperation by providing common goals and facilitating the cooperative solution of shared problems.
Human beings are not completely free to socially construct their own behavior. They have a shared biological nature. That nature is remarkably uniform throughout the world, given the fact that most contemporary humans outside of Africa descended from a single relatively small group of individuals some 50,000 years ago. This shared nature does not determine political behavior, but it both frames and limits the nature of institutions that are possible. It also means that human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures. This shared nature can be described in the following propositions.
Human being never existed in a presocial state. The idea that human beings at one time existed as isolated individuals, who interacted either through anarchic violence (Hobbes) or in pacific ignorance of one another (Rousseau), is not correct. Human beings as well as their primate ancestors always lived in kin-based social groups of various sizes. Indeed, they lived in these social units for a sufficiently long period of time that the cognitive and emotional faculties needed to promote social cooperation evolved and became hardwired in their genetic endowments. This means that a rational-choice model of collective action, in which individuals calculate that they will better off by cooperating with one another, vastly understates the degree of social cooperation that exists in human societies and misunderstands the motives that underlie it.
Natural human sociability is built around two principles, kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The principle of kin selection or inclusive fitness states that human beings will act altruistically toward genetic relatives in rough proportion to their shared genes. The principle of reciprocal altruism, says that human beings will tend to develop relationships of mutual benefit or mutual harm as they interact with other individuals over time. Reciprocal altruism, unlike kin selection, does not depend on genetic relatedness; it does, however, depend on repeated, direct personal interaction and the trust relationships generated out of such interactions. These forms of social cooperation are the default ways human beings interact in the absence of incentives to adhere to other, more impersonal institutions. When impersonal institutions decay, these are the forms of cooperation that always reemerge because they are natural to human beings. What I have labeled patrimonialism is political recruitment based on either of these two principles. Thus, when bureaucratic offices were filled with the kinsmen of rulers at the end of the Han Dynasty in China, when the Janissaries wanted their sons to enter the corps, or when offices were sold as heritable property in ancien regime France, a natural patrimonial principle was simply reasserting itself.
Human beings are born with a suite of cognitive faculties that allow them to solve prisoner’s-dilemma-type problems of social cooperation. They can remember past behavior as a guide to future cooperation; they pass on information about trustworthiness through gossip and other forms of information sharing; they have acute perceptual faculties for detecting lies and untrustworthy behavior through vocal and visual cues; and they have common modes for sharing information through language and nonverbal forms of communication. The ability to make and obey rules is an economizing behavior in the sense that it greatly reduces the transaction costs of social interaction and permits efficient collective action.
The human instinct to follow rules is often based in the emotions rather than in reason, however. Emotions like guilt, shame, pride, anger, embarrassment, and admiration are not learned behaviors in the Lockean sense of being somehow acquired after birth through interaction with the empirical world outside of the individual. Rather, they come naturally to small children, who then organize their behavior around genetically grounded yet culturally transmitted rules. Our capacity for rule making and following is thus very much like our capacity for language: while the content of the rules is conventional and varies from society to society, the “deep structure” of the rules and the ability to acquire them is natural.
This propensity of human beings to endow rules with intrinsic value helps to explain the enormous conservatism of societies. Rules may evolve as useful adaptations to a particular set of environmental conditions, but societies cling to them long after those conditions have changed and the rules have become irrelevant or even dysfunctional. The Mamluks refused to adopt firearms long after their usefulness had been demonstrated by the Europeans, because of their emotional investment in a certain form of cavalry warfare. This lead directly to their defeat by the Ottomans, who were far more willing to adapt. There is thus a general principle of the conservation of institutions across different human societies.
Human beings have a natural propensity for violence. From the first moment of their existence, human beings have perpetrated acts of violence against other human beings, as did their primate ancestors. Pace Rousseau, the propensity for violence is not a learned behavior that arose only at a certain point in human history. At the same time, social institutions have always existed to control and channel violence. Indeed, one of the most important functions of political institutions is precisely to control and aggregate the level at which violence appears.
Human beings by nature desire not jut material resources but also recognition. Recognition is the acknowledgment of another human being’s dignity or worth, or what is otherwise understood to be status. Struggles for recognition or status often have a very different character from struggles over resources, since status is relative rather than absolute, or what the economist Robert Frank calls a “positional good.” In other words, once can have high status only if everyone else has lower status. Unlike cooperative games, or the gain from free trade, which are positive sum and allow both players to win, struggles over relative status are zero sum in which a gain for one player is necessarily a loss for another.
A great deal of human politics revolves around struggles for recognition. This was true not just of would-be Chinese dynasts seeking the Mandate of Heaven but also of humble peasant rebels seeking justice under banners like the Yellow or Red Turbans, or the French Bonnets Rouges. Arab tribes were able to settle their differences and conquer much of North Africa and the Middle East because they sought recognition for their religion, Islam, much as European warriors conquered the New World under the banner of Christianity. In more recent times, the rise of modern democracy is incomprehensible apart from the demand for equal recognition that lies at its core. In England, there was a progressive shift in the nature of demands for recognition, from the rights of the tribe or village, to the rights of Englishmen, to Locke’s rights of man.
It is important to resist the temptation to reduce human motivation to an economic desire for resources. Violence in human history has often been perpetrated by people seeking not material wealth but recognition. Conflicts are carried on long beyond the point when they make economic sense. Recognition is sometimes related to material wealth, but at other times it comes at the expense of material wealth, and it is an unhelpful oversimplification to regard it as just another type of “utility.”
One of the Glorious Revolution’s main accomplishments was to make taxation legitimate because it was henceforth clearly based on consent. Democratic publics do not necessarily always resist high taxes, as long as they think they are necessary for an important public purpose like defense of the nation. What they dislike is taxes being taken away from them illegally, or public monies that are wasted or that go to corrupt purposes.
The contrast with absolute France was stark. Because France admitted no principle of consent, taxes has to be extracted by force. The government was never able to collect more than 12-15 percent of its national product in taxes over the same period, and often achieved much less. The elites in French society who could best afford to pay them succeeded in buying themselves special exemptions and privileges, which meant that the tax burden fell on the weakest members of society.
The Moscow regime’s motive for building this kind of army was similar to that of the Ottomans: it created a military organization dependent on it alone for status, which nonetheless did not have to be paid in cash. This force could be used to offset the power of the princes and boyars who held their own land and resources.
Hamilton goes on to say that the states within a federal structure are comparable to feudal baronies. The degree to which they can maintain their independence from the central government depends on how they treat their own citizens. A powerful central government is neither intrinsically good or bad; its ultimate effect on freedom depends on the complex interplay between it and the subordinate political authorities. This is a truth thay played out in the history of the US, much as it did in Hungarian and Polish history.
On the other hand, when a strong state sides with a strong oligarchy, freedom faces a particularly severe threat. This was the situation that emerged in Russia with the rise of the principality of Moscow in the same century that the Hungarian state came to an end.
The government’s perpetual failure to live up to debt obligations was an alternative to taxing the same elites directly, which the regime found much more difficult to do politically. It is a tradition carried on by contemporary governments in Latin America, such as that of Argentina, which after the economic crisis of 2001 forced not just foreign investors but also its own pensioners and savers to accept a massive write-down of its sovereign debt.
Acien regime France was an early prototype of what is today called a rent-seeking society. In such a society, the elites spend all of their time trying to capture public office in order to secure a rent for themselves - in the French case, a legal claim to a specific revenue stream that could be appropriated for private use.
Was this rent-seeking coalition a stable one? It lasted for almost two centuries and provided a political basis for France’s emergence as the dominant continental power. On the other hand, we know that the grandeur of the French court masked enormous weaknesses. The most important was the vivid sense of anger and injustice felt by those left out of the coalition, which eventually erupted in the revolution. But even those inside the coalition were not committed to it in principle. The monarchy would have been perfectly happy to abolish venal officeholding altogether, and tried to do so toward the end of its existence. The officeholders themselves had little sympathy for anyone but themselves. But they could not tolerate the idea of reform because of their own deep personal stake in the system. This was, then, a perfect collective-action problem: the society as a whole would have benefited enormously from abolishing the system, but the individual interests of the parties making it up prevented them from cooperating to bring about change.
The French case teaches a lesson about the role of the rule of law in political development. The rule of law that had emerged in the Middle Ages before modern states existed acted as a constraint on tyranny, but it also acted as a constraint on modern state building since it protected old social classes and customs that would have be to abolished for a truly modern society.
But European monarchs overall met far greater resistance in this project, because the other political actors in their society were better organized and those faced by the Chinese or Turks. State building proceeded, but it was often stymied by organized opposition, which forced rulers to seek allies and compromises. A landed nobility was deeply entrenched, living in physically impregnable castles with independent sources of income and their own military forces. The Chinese aristocracy never had this kind of independence, and the Ottomans did not allow such aristocracy to emerge in the first place. Elements of a capitalist economy had also appeared in Western Europe by the time that the state-building project got into full swing. Large amounts of wealth were being generated by traders and early manufacturers, independent of state control. Autonomous cities had grown up, particularly in Western Europe, which lived by their own rules and deployed their own militias.
The early development of law in Europe was also very important in establishing limits to state power. Monarchs encroached on the property rights of their subjects constantly, but few rulers felt free to simply confiscate private property without legal cause. As a consequence, they did not have unlimited taxing authority and needed to borrow money from bankers to finance their wars. European aristocrats were also more secure in their persons against arbitrary arrest or execution. Apart from Russia, European monarchs refrained from launching campaigns of outright terror and intimidation against the elites in their societies.
The very lateness of the European state-building project was the source of the political liberty that Europeans would later enjoy. For precocious state building in the absence of rule of law and accountability simply means that states can tyrannize their populations more effectively. Every advance in material well-being and technology implies, in the hands of an unchecked state, a greater ability to control society and to use it for state’s own purposes.
One of dynastic China’s great legacies, then, is high-quality authoritarian government. It is no accident that virtually all of the world successful authoritarian modernizers, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and modern China itself, are East Asian countries sharing a common Chinese cultural heritage. It is very hard to find authoritarian rulers with qualities like those of Lee Kuan Yew and Park Chung Hee in Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East.
The legal tradition that emerged in Western Europe was distinctly different from the one that existed in the lands under the influence of the Eastern church. It was not Christianity per se, but the specific institutional form that Western Christianity took, that determined its impact on later political development. In the Eastern Orthodox church, bishops continued to be appointed by the emperor or by local political rulers, and the church as a whole never declared independence from the state. While the Eastern church never lost the tradition of Roman law the way the Western church did, it also never asserted the same kind of primary over the Byzantine emperor.
The discontinuity between medieval and modern rule of law is more apparent than real, moreover, if one understands law as an embodiment of a broad social consensus regarding rules of justice. This is what Hayek meant when he said that law was prior to legislation. In a religious age like the twelfth century, or in the contemporaneous Muslim or Indian worlds, social consensus was expressed religiously because religion played a far greater role in people’s daily lives than it does today. Religious laws were not something dropped on societies from outer space. Even when they initially imposed through violence and conquest, they coevolved with the societies and were taken up by them as indigenous moral codes. There was no separation between the religious and secular realms, and therefore no way to articulate social consensus other than in religious terms. Today, in an age when religion plays a much more restricted role, it is inevitable that social consensus has to be determined in other ways, such as by voting in democratic elections. But law remains an expression of broadly shared rules of justice regardless of whether it is expressed in religious or in secular terms.
This was wrong, according to Hayek, for a number of reasons, the most important of which was the fact that no single planner could ever have enough knowledge about the actual workings of a society to rationally reorder it. The bulk of knowledge in a society was local in character and dispersed throughout the whole society; no individual could master enough information to anticipate the effects of a planned change in the laws or rules.
Social order was not, according to Hayek, the result of top-down rational planning; rather, it occurred spontaneously through the interactions of hundreds or thousands of dispersed individuals who experimented with rules, kept the ones that worked, and rejected those that didn’t. The process by which social order was generated was incremental, evolutionary, and decentralized; only by making use of the local knowledge of myriads of individuals could a working “Great Society” ever appear. Spontaneous orders evolved in the manner Darwin posited for biological organisms - through decentralized adaption and selection, and not through the purposeful design of a creator.
According to Hayek, the law itself constituted a spontaneous order, and “there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he could make or alter it.” Indeed, “individuals had learned to observe (and enforce) rules of conduct long before such rules could be expressed in words.” Legislation - the conscious decreeing of new rules - came relatively late in the history of mankind, and the idea that all law is, can be, and ought to be, the product of the free invention of a legislator is factually false, an erroneous product of constructivist rationalism.
In contemporary developing countries, one of the greatest political deficits lies in the relative weakness of the rule of law. Of all the components of contemporary states, effective legal institutions are perhaps the most difficult to construct. Military organization and taxing authority arise naturally out of people’s basic predatory instincts. It is not difficult for a warlord to throw together a militia and use it to extract resources from the community. At the other end of the spectrum, democratic elections are relatively easy (if expensive) to stage, and there is today in place a large international infrastructure to help facilitate them. Legal institutions, on the other hand, must be spread throughout the entire country and maintained on a regular ongoing basis. They require physical facilities as well as huge investments in the training of lawyers, judges, and other officers of the court, including the police who will ultimately enforce the law. But most important, legal institutions need to be seen as legitimate and authoritative, not just by ordinary people but also by powerful elites in the society. Bringing this about has proved to be no easy task. Latin America today is overwhelmingly democratic, but the rule of law is extremely weak, from the bribe-taking police officer to a tax-evading judge. The Russian Federation still stages democratic elections, but particularly since the rise of Putin, its elites from the president on down have been able to break the law with impunity.
- There can be no royal authority without the military
- There can be no military without wealth
- The reaya produce the wealth
- The sultan keeps the reaya by making justice reign
- Justice requires harmony in the world
- The world is a garden, its wall are the state
- The state’s prop is the religious law
- There is no support for the religious law without royal authority
It suggest that Turkish rulers did not see their objectives as the narrow maximization of economic rents, but rather the maximization of overall power through a balance of power, resources, and legitimacy.
Socrates leads them to agree that the just city would need a class of guardians who are particularly spirited or proud in their defense of the city. The guardians are warriors whose first principle is to do good to friends and harms to enemies; they must be carefully trained to be public-spirited through the proper use of music and gymnastics.
Book V of the Republic contains the famous discussion of the communism of women and children of the guardians. Socrates points out that sexual desire and the desire for children are natural, but that ties to the family compete with loyalty to the city that the guardians protect. It is for that reason, he argues, that they must be told the “noble lie” that they are children of the earth, and not of biological parents. He argues that they must live in common, and that they not be allowed to marry individual women but rather have sex with different partners and raise their children in common. The natural family is the enemy of the public good.
No Chinese political entity during the Warring States period could afford not to copy its neighbors in developing modern state-level institutions; Indian political entities obviously did not feel anything like this pressure.
The Chinese developed a professional priesthood to preside over the rites that legitimated kings and emperors. But state religion in China never developed beyond the level of ancestor worship. The priesthood presided over the worship of the emperor’s ancestor, but they did not have a universal jurisdiction. When emperors lost legitimacy at the end of a dynasty, or when there was no legitimate ruler in the interdynastic periods, it was not up to the priesthood to declare, as an institution, who held the Mandate of Heaven. Legitimacy in that sense could bestowed by anyone, from peasant to soldier to bureaucrat.
These considerations just beg the question, though, of why the military received so little prestige in the Chinese system. And here the answer is likely to be normative: somehow, in the crucible of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the idea arose that true political authority lies in education and literacy rather than in military prowess. Military men who wanted to rule found they had to garb themselves in Confucian learning if they were to be obeyed and have their sons educated by learned academics if they were to succeed them as rulers. If it seem unsatisfying to think that the pen is mightier than the sword, we should reflect on the fact that all successful efforts by civilian authorities to control their militaries are ultimately based on normative ideas about legitimate authority. The US military could seize power from the president tomorrow if it wanted; that it has not done so reflects the fact that the vast majority of officers wouldn’t dream of overturning the US Constitution, and that the vast majority of soldiers they command would not obey their authority if they tried to do so.
One of the great metahistorical questions addressed by scholars such as Victoria Hui is why the multipolar Chinese state system of the 3rd century BC ultimately consolidated into a single large empire, while that of Europe did not.
There are a number of possible explanations for this. First on the list is geography. Europe is cut up into multiple regions by broad rivers, forests, seas, and high mountain ranges: the Alps, Pyrenees, Rhine, Danube, Baltic, Carpathians, etc. One very important factor is the presence of a large island, Britain, offshore, which acted for much of European history as a deliberate balancer that tried to break up hegemonic coalitions. The first Chinese empire, by contrast, emerged in only a portion of present day China, along a northerly west-east axis from the Wei River valley to the Shangdong peninsula. This entire region was easily traversed by the armies of the day, particularly following the construction of numerous roads and canals in the Warring States period. Only after this core region consolidated as a single, powerful state did it expand to the south, north, and southwest.
A second factor is related to culture. There were ethnic differences between the Shang and Zhou tribes, but the states that emerged during the Zhou Dynasty were not clearly differentiated by ethnicity and language to the extent that Romans, Germans, Celts, Franks, Vikings, Slavs, and Huns were. Different dialects of Chinese were spoken across northern China, but the ease with which individuals like Shang Yang and Confucius moved from one jurisdiction to another, and the circulation of ideas between them, testifies to a growing level of cultural homogeneity.
A third factor is leadership, or the lack thereof. As Victoria Hui points out, a multipolar system is not a mechanical, self-regulating machine that always achieves balance to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic power. States are run by individual leaders who interpret their self-interest. Qin’s leaders exercised acute statecraft in using divide-and-rule tactics to break up hostile coalitions, and their opponents often fought suicidal wars among themselves without recognizing the danger that Qin represented.
But the final reason has to do directly with the different paths that political development took in China and in Europe. Europe never saw the emergence of a powerful absolutist state like Qin except for the Duchy of Moscow, which developed late and was peripheral to European politics until the second half of the 18th century. (When Russia did enter the European state system, it quickly proceeded to overrun a good deal of Europe, both under Alexander I in 1814 and then under Stalin in 1945.)
It seems highly unlikely that the first state arose out of an explicit social contract if the chief issue motivating it were simply economic, like the protection of property rights or the provision of public goods. Tribal societies are egalitarian and, within the context of close-knit kinship groups, very free. States, by contrast, are coercive, domineering, and hierarchical, which is why Nietzsche called the state the “coldest of all cold mosnters.” We could imagine a free tribal society delegating authority to a single dictator only under the most extreme duress, such as the imminent danger of invasion and extermination by and outside invader, or to a religious figure if an epidemic appeared ready to wipe out the community. Roman dicators were in fact elected in this fashion during the Republic, such as when the city was threatened by Hannibal in 216 BC. But this means that the real driver of state formation is violence or the threat of violence, making the social contract an efficient rather than a final cause.
Part of what makes politics an art rather than a science is the difficulty of judging beforehand the strength of the moral bonds between a group of retainers and their leader. Their common interests are often heavily economic, since they are organized primarily for predation. But what binds followers to a leader is never simply that. When the US fought Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and 2003, it believed on both occasions that battlefield defeat would lead to Saddam’s rapid overthrow because his inner circle would calculate they were better off without him. But that inner circle hung together in a remarkably durable way, as a result of family and personal ties, as well as fear.
Among the noneconomic sources of cohesion is simple personal loyalty through the reciprocal exchange of favors over time. Tribal societies invest kinship with religious meaning and supernatural sanctions. Militias, moreover, are typically made up of young men without families, land, or assets, but with ranging hormones that incline them toward lives of risk and adventure. For them, economic resources are not the only objects of predation. We should not underestimate the importance of sex and access to women as a driver of political organization, particularly in segmentary societies that routinely use women as a medium of exchange. In these relatively small-scale societies, one could often follow the rules of clan exogamy only through external aggression due to the lack of non-related women.
A leader and his retinue in a tribal society are not the same as a general with his army in a state-level society, because the nature of leadership and authority is very different.
Anyone was free to organize a war party if he could convince others to follow him, but such individuals had leadership role only when others voluntarily followed, and only for the period of the raid.
Rousseau pointed out that the origin of political inequality lay in the development of agriculture, and in this he was largely correct. Since band-level societies are preagricultural, there is no private property in any modern sense. Like chimp bands, hunter-gatherers inhabit a territorial range that they guard and occasionally fight over. But they have a lesser incentive than agriculturalists to mark out a piece of land and say “this is mine.” If their territory is invaded by another group, or if it is infiltrated by dangerous predators, band-level societies may have the option of simply moving somewhere else due to low population densities. They also tend to have fewer investments in cleared land, houses, and the like.
The misconceptions and oversimplifications of the Marxist development model led generations of later scholars down the blind alleys, looking for an “Asiatic mode of production” or trying to find “feudalism” in India.
Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.
Finally, the desire for recognition ensures that politics will never be reducible to simple economic self-interest. Human beings make constant judgments about the intrinsic value, worth, or dignity of other people or institutions, and they organize themselves into hierarchies based on those valuations. Political power ultimately rests upon recognition - the degree to which a leader or institution is regarded as legitimate and can command the respect of a group of followers. People may follow out of self-interest, but the most powerful political organization are those that legitimate themselves on the basis of a broader idea.
Biology gives us the building blocks of political development. Human nature is largely constants across different societies. The huge variance in political forms that we see both at the present time and over the course of history is in the first instance the product of variance in the physical environments that human beings came to inhabit. As societies ramify and fill different environmental niches across the globe, they develop distinctive norms and ideas in a process known as specific evolution. Groups of humans also interact with each other, and this interaction is as much a driver of change as is the physical environment.
At the base of the phenomenon of recognition are judgments about the intrinsic worth of other human beings, or about the norms, ideas, and rules that human beings create. Coerced recognition isn’t meaningful; the admiration of a free individual is far more satisfying than the obeisance of a slave. Political leadership emerges initially because members of a community admire a particular individual who demonstrate great physical prowess, courage, wisdom, or the ability to adjudicate disputes fairly. If politics is a struggle over leadership, it is also a story about followership and the willingness of the great mass of human beings to accord leaders higher status than themselves and subordinate themselves to them. In a cohesive and therefore successful community, this subordination is voluntary and based on belief in the leader’s right to rule.
As political systems develop, recognition is transferred from individuals to institutions - that is, to rules or patterns of behavior that persist over time, like the British monarchy or the US Constitution. But in either case, political order is based on legitimacy and the authority that arises from legitimate domination. Legitimacy means that the people who make up the society recognize the fundamental justice of the system as a whole and are willing to abide by its rules. In contemporary societies, we believe that legitimacy is conferred by democratic elections and respect for the rule of law. But democracy is hardly the only form of government that has been regarded as legitimate historically.
Political power is ultimately based on social cohesion. Cohesion may arise out of calculations of self-interest, but simple self-interest is frequently not enough to induce followers to sacrifice and die on behalf of their communities. Political power is the product not just of the resources and numbers of citizens that a society can command but also the degree to which the legitimacy of leaders and institutions is recognized.
Human beings also invest emotion in metanorms, norms about how to properly formulate and enforce norms, and can display what the biologist Robert Trivers labels “moralistic aggression” when proper metanorms are not carried out. They want to see that “justice is done,” even when they have no direct self-interest in the outcome of a particular case. This explains the extraordinary popularity of crime shows and courtroom dramas on TV, and the often obsessive attention with which people follow certain high-profile scandals or crimes.
The grounding of normative behavior in the emotions promotes social cooperation and has clearly conferred survival benefits as the human species evolved into its present form. Economists argue that blindly following rules can be economically rational, since calculating optimal outcomes in every situation is often costly and counterproductive. If we had to constantly negotiate new rules with our fellow human beings at every turn, we would be paralyzed and unable to achieve routine collective action. The fact that we become attached to certain rules not as means to short-term goals but as ends in themselves greatly enhances the stability of social life. Religion simply reinforces that stability and widens the circle of potential cooperators.
The problem this poses for politics, however, is that rules that have a clear utility when applied over a large number of cases may not be useful under specific short-run circumstances and frequently become dysfunctional when the conditions that gave rise to them change. Institutional rules are “sticky” and resistant to change, which is one of the chief sources of political decay.
The desire for recognition is fundamentally different from the desire for material resources that underlies economic behavior. Recognition is not a good that can be consumed. Rather, it is an intersubjective state of mind by which one human being acknowledges the worth or status of another human being, or of that human being’s gods, customs, and beliefs. I may believe in my own worth as a pianist or a painter but feel greater satisfaction when that sense is validated through a prize or the sale of a painting.
Collective action begins to break down as the size of the cooperating group increases. In large groups, it becomes harder and harder to monitor the individual contributions of members; free riding and other forms of opportunistic behavior become much more common.
Religion solves this collective action problem by presenting reward and punishments that greatly reinforce the gains from cooperation in the here and now. If I believe that my tribe’s chief is just another fellow like me following his own self-interests, I may or may not decide to obey his authority. But if I believe that the chief can command the spirits of dead ancestors to reward or punish me, I will be much more likely to respect his word. My sense of shame is potentially much greater if I believe that I am being observed by a dead ancestor who might see into my real motives better than a live kinsman. Contrary to the views of both religious believers and secularists, it is extremely difficult to prove or falsify any given religious belief. Even if I am skeptical that the chief is really in touch with dead ancestors, I may not want to take the risk that he really is.
Game theory suggests that individuals who interact with one another repeatedly tend to gravitate toward cooperation with those who have shown themselves to be honest and reliable, and shun those who have behaved opportunistically. But to do this effectively, they have to be able to remember each other’s past behavior and to participate likely future behavior based on an interpretation of other people’s motives. This isn’t so easy to accomplish, since it is the appearance of honesty and not honesty itself that is the marker of a potential collaborator. That is, I will agree tow work with you if you seem to be honest based on experience. But if you have deliberately built up a fund of trust in the past, you can put yourself in a position to take even greater advantage of me in the future. So while self-interest propels individuals to cooperate in social groups, it also creates incentives for cheating, deceiving, and other forms of behavior that undermine social solidarity.
Putting the theory after the history constitutes what I regard as the correct approach to analysis: theories ought to be inferred from facts, and not the other way around. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure confrontation with facts, devoid of prior theoretical constructs. Those who think they are empirical in that fashion are deluding themselves. But all too often social science begins with an elegant theory and the searches for facts that will confirm it. This, hopefully, is not the approach I take.