The title of the last book by Francis Fukuyama, "The Origins of Political Order. From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution", 2012, is difficult to swallow. "Political Order"? Which one? There are many. The term is derived from Samuel Huntington’s "Political Order in Changing Societies" (1968). Huntington himself has asked Fukuyama to write a foreword to a reprint edition of his 1968 classic. Fukuyama set out to work on it but gradually realized that the book needed "some serious updating". It was written shortly after the start of the wave of decolonization and in the following very unstable situation while since its publication "momentous changes ... like the economic rise of East Asia, the collapse of global communism, the acceleration of globalization, and what Huntington himself labeled as the "third wave" of democratization that started in the 1970s" have occurred. Besides this there was another impulse, namely a preoccupation with "the real-world problems of weak and failed states". "From much of the period since September 11, 2001, I have been working on the problems of state and nation building in countries with collapsed or unstable governments". (I don’t know what September 11, 2001 has got to do with this subject but it sounds to me like "CE".) "I began to wonder how any society had ever made the transition from a tribal- to a state-level society, how property rights had evolved out of customary ones, and how formal legal systems , dependent on a kind of third-party enforcement ... first made their appearance." Political development seemed to Fukuyama to be "movement beyond patrimonial relationships and personalistic politics..." The book of Huntington "took for granted the political world of a fairly late stage in human history, where such institutions as the state, political parties, law, military organizations, and the like all exist..." which was not sufficient for Fukuyama’s aims. So he began to work on the prehistory of political order.
I hope Fukuyama does not want to suggest that the history of political order began sometimes at the end of the 18th century and that all the foregoing was just prehistory, i.e. not history, especially as he observes himself that "these practices survived in many places and ... seemingly modern systems often reverted to them". So political order is only the modern system? What, then, is "personalistic politics"? In other words: what is the difference between politics and political order? Looking into the table of contents one is surprised to see that part 1 treats "before the state". As it is, for Fukuyama political order has three ingredients or "basic political institutions" (pg. 15): state, rule of law and accountable government, and parts 2 through 4 of the book are about each of these elements. Thus, we have a prestate situation and a prehistory. The prehistory comprises the prestate condition plus the period of the development of the state until the French Revolution. The state as it is defined by Fukuyama has reached his historical phase, after many an "historical experiment" (my term), perpetrated by many a national state, only with the French and American Revolutions. This is all very confusing. Fukuyama seems to be aware of this and has cleverly concealed his confusion by using the term "origins". (The correct title of his book might have been: "A Worldhistory of Politics".)
Be this the bad news, the good consists of the content of the book. On balance, it is a history of the state, a subject that in Europe conventionally was known as part of the "Staatslehre". What is maybe the most interesting thing about the book of Fukuyama is its scope. "Staatslehre" was confined to the western state, be it often comparing different western states (and sometimes the system of the Sovjet-Union as an alternative). "The Origins of Political Order" pretends to have a global scope. It treats the systems of China and India along with western states. It shows that the state already was instituted in China, but that the rule of law and governmental accountability are western creations of a later date. Most of the book analyses national and consequentially different histories of these creations as it does with China and India in its part on the state, China and India occasionally returning in the third and fourth parts on the history of the rule of law and governmental accountability (mainly to show that they lacked it).
Within its global and worldhistorical scope the book answers to the wonder Fukuyama refers to in his foreword: "how any society has ever made the transition... etc.". This indeed is a very remarkable phenomenon. The answer seems already been given by Hegel who choses the rise of the state as the beginning of history. History for him was the realization of the self-conscious community and the state was the most supreme form of this self-consciousness, it was the general consciousness. State formation, thus, was an act of consciousness, consisting in the organization of a community into a political capacity, elevating, as it were, a community to its proper constitution, a fascinating process like the take-off of a plane or a large bird, overcoming its gravity. This wonder is a legitimate start for an enquiry like Fukuyama has undertaken and it is adequately formulated: the starting point is the wonder at the object to be researched, in this case the act of state formation, itself being a miracle of political craftsmanship. How does one leave his belonging to a tribe, his personal politics or his patrimonial relationship or, for that matter, his own religion behind oneself to replace with the state? How can one accept "a kind of third-party enforcement" instead of his own pleasure or will? Fukuyama tries to find the answers in the history of the state.
(This book is the first volume of two to deal with this subject. The second volume is not yet published. In fact, I realize, a full review has to wait until the appearance of the second volume.)
