The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

"Right now, as you just indicated, what’s probably under the greatest attack is the liberal part of that three-legged stool, that is to say the constitutional rules that limit power. So, if you look at Erdoğan in Turkey or Orbán in Hungary, or Donald Trump in the United States, they’re all elected. The democratic accountability part is working fine and people still think that elections are legitimate and so forth. Even Putin still feels he has to hold fraudulent elections. But what they do, in the first instance, is they try to pack the courts, they put their own people in the bureaucracy, they attack the independent media, who are the watchdogs. It’s the constraints on executive power that have come under severe attack. And I think that’s also the part that needs to be defended because, as I said, the legitimacy of people voting and regimes reflecting popular choice isn’t all that controversial in the present-day world. I don’t think so. I’m in the process of writing a book that will be published by Profile next spring, on liberalism and its discontents. I’m going to focus on the rule of law part of liberal democracy. The reason I’m writing it is that it’s come under severe attack from both the right and the left. So you’ve got this global populist right-wing movement that takes a nationalist form in Hungary and in the United States. It takes a religious form in India and in Turkey. It’s a severe challenge to the basic principles of the rule of law that seeks to concentrate power in the hands of a single executive leader. Vladimir Putin famously said in an FT interview that liberalism is an outmoded doctrine. So that’s one attack. But it’s also coming under attack from progressive people on the left, who are very frustrated that liberalism has not brought about greater racial equality in the United States, for example, that it’s denied the legacy of colonialism and slavery and a lot of other bad things that have happened under liberal regimes. It’s led to an intolerance of certain forms of speech, which begins in elite places—like universities and in Hollywood and in the arts—but is gradually spreading to other parts of society. Liberalism itself, as a principle, needs to be defended against both the critiques from the right and the left. That’s what I’ve been trying to do in the last few years and I think it’s a pretty urgent agenda right now. That’s a very hard question to answer because, obviously, it depends on how you define liberal democracy. Freedom House has an annual “Freedom in the World” survey that scores different countries. My colleague Larry Diamond keeps track of this and I think that he would say that the number has gone from about 35 back in 1970, to maybe 115-120 in the early 2000s. But, since then, it’s fallen by perhaps 15-20 countries. “Liberalism itself, as a principle, needs to be defended against both the critiques from the right and the left” But I think that quantitative estimate doesn’t really capture the seriousness of what’s happened. Freedom House this year downgraded both the United States and India, two of the world’s largest democracies. India fell out of the ‘free’ category because of the very illiberal policies that Prime Minister Modi has been following towards Muslims in India. In the United States it was because of Donald Trump’s most recent attacks on American democracy—denying a peaceful transfer of power once he lost an election. Whatever the numbers may say, there’s clearly also a qualitative change that’s going on in the world when the United States, which has traditionally been the world’s leading democracy, is itself leading the way towards all these illiberal, bad practices."

"Most of us, when we are first exposed to history in high school, learn an extremely dull, non-analytical version of history which is just one damned fact after another. It’s very unsatisfying. The way we are taught history also typically serves certain regional political purposes. In countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, it might be much more deliberately political. In liberal democracies, it’s a bit more open. History is taught with a genuine intent to foster some sort of critical appreciation and developing a sense of history. But it’s still pretty banal: this king then that king and so forth. Once you re-engage with history as an adult—and by this I mean intellectually aware, curious people not professional historians—there are very few treatments of all of history that truly satisfy your urge to understand just how human society functions and how it came to function the way it does. What are the variety of ways in which it functions around the world? How is the system in China different from the system in the United States. How did they each get to be where they are? All of these are questions that you could call analytical history. Francis Fukuyama is best known for his 1989 article declaring the end of history. He approaches the end of history from the perspective of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a precipitating event, but he’s coming from an intellectual tradition that goes back to Hegel. It’s a metaphysical thesis about history that holds together very coherently. His basic argument was that liberal democratic forms, as they exist in the West and certain other parts of the world like Japan and India, represent the end state of political evolution, in a certain sense. It’s not that history itself ends as in stops happening, but that a certain aspect of evolution ends. I like the biological analogy, that in the primordial soup there were a huge number of replicator molecules that could self-produce but at some point DNA became the dominant monopolistic molecule that became the basis of all life. In that sense, history ended when liberal democracy emerged as the global standard for governance. “There are a lot of people who sincerely believe that the unexamined life is not worth living. The contrasting sentiment is that the unlived life is not worth examining.” Over the next 25 years, Fukuyama’s ideas were tested by the unfolding of history. Some people think that the events of the 1990s and 2000s proved him definitively wrong. Others think they proved him absolutely right. I happen to be in the second category. I think that events since he wrote that famous paper and book in 1989 have fundamentally proved him right. This two-volume book is basically a very extended study of history from that starting point of ‘What happens if you look at history as a convergent evolutionary path that seems to end in liberal democracy? How did we get there?’ There are three basic pillars of liberal democracy that we are familiar with, the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive. He generalizes these into a strong state, the rule of law, and mechanisms for consent by individuals, so accountability mechanisms. He traces the evolution of these mechanisms around the world from as far back in recorded history as we can go and what he offers is a really nuanced story of how different pieces of the puzzle emerge in different parts of the world. For example, the idea of a strong central state with an impersonal bureaucracy and civil service examinations first emerged in China. The idea of a rule of law, as in a body of legal thinking that applies to rulers, just as it does to the ruled, did not emerge in China—a lack that still shows today—but it did emerge in India. And Europe was the first place where all three mechanisms came together for the first time: a rule of law, accountability, and a strong state. So that is his basic framework. In between, there are very interesting chapters, about what happened in the Ottoman Empire, say. He traces how these three building blocks slowly develop, and how somewhere around the 18th century, in pre-modern Germany, the elements first began coming together in a way that we would recognize today as a modern, liberal democratic state. The first volume deals with that whole story until about 1800. The second volume deals with the story from 1800 to today and it covers all the things you would expect. If you think of traditional history as Kepler’s theory of how the planets move in ellipses, in relation to that, Fukuyama’s model stands as a Newtonian gravitational model of how history works. That is why I think it is a very powerful appreciative model of a significant part of human existence. We spend all of our time living in states where we, by default, have given our consent to be governed by some complex mechanism. It’s a part of our external reality that we really do need to get a sense of in order to understand our particular version of the human condition. So that is my take on Fukuyama and why he is important. The contribution of the United States to the evolution of governance is what Fukuyama calls ‘clientelism.’ His sense of the word clientelism is technically different from the way it is normally used, but it’s what we are seeing, for example, in the Trump campaign right now. That form of clientelism was pioneered by Andrew Jackson in the middle of the 19th century, and it has very peculiar characteristics. Unlike previous models of patronage, where elected, otherwise powerful, leaders used to guarantee their own support by handing out favors almost at an individual level, clientelism is the mechanism by which you hand out favors to large segments of the population that work for you in a democracy. I would say that the intent of so-called ‘big histories’—that’s the phrase being used these days for really ambitious sweeping histories that cover all of humanity—is fundamentally different from what professional historians do. It’s anything that takes a broad sweep. Sapiens is another popular one that is doing the rounds right now, and there’s also David Graeber’s Debt , which is about the history of the financial system, viewed from the perspective of debt. The intent is to surface a particularly important mechanism that seems to have been operating through history and what its consequences are. Some are a lot more partisan and narrow in their interest, and what, I think, sets Fukuyama apart is that he doesn’t have a particular narrow interest. If you read Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years , it’s pretty clear that he is a strongly left-leaning thinker and writer who has strong sympathies with the condition of the oppressed through the ages. He comes up with a lens that sheds light on that in certain ways, like how the evolution of the financial system reflects patterns of how the oppressed have been oppressed over time. Fukuyama is conservative-leaning and there are clear biases in his work. He prefers a strong state to a weak one and he likes a strong centralized authority. He seems to have a bit of a fetish for traditional Chinese modes of governance. But beyond all that, it is fundamentally a very broad and sweeping—and yet fairly detailed and nuanced—look at all of history. “For non-professional historians these big histories are, in fact, the most useful thing to read” More specialized studies are fundamentally about careful scholarship. Professional historians are scrutinizing events in a very narrow slice of time and space and even aspect: like the political situation leading up to World War II in Belgium. It’s about getting the story right, about getting all the evidence as carefully arranged as possible and interpreting it in as careful a way as possible. It is important that we do them right, especially around critical periods of history. But the purpose of these big histories is somewhat different. They’re fundamentally about ethical truth-seeking and fleshing out the picture from different angles like economics, politics, culture. It’s fundamentally more ideological, because it’s about how you read a meaning into history. Professional history isn’t really about meaning; it is about facts. Big history is about meaning and you need a certain minimum scale of considering history in order to read meaning into it. Yes, you can look at tiny slices of history and look for meaning there, but big history works better, in my opinion. For non-professional historians these big histories are, in fact, the most useful thing to read."