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Book: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Quotes of Book: The Origins of Political
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  1. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    Property came to be owned not by groups of kinfolk but by individuals, who increasingly won the right to buy and sell it at will. Their rights to that property were enforced not by kin but by courts and legal systems that had the power to settle disputes and compensate wrongs. In time, moreover, social rules were formalized as written laws rather than customs or informal traditions. These formal rules were used to organize the way that power was distributed in the system, regardless of the individuals who exercised power at any given time. Institutions, in other words, replaced individual leaders. Those legal systems were eventually accorded supreme authority over society, an authority that was seen to be superior to that of rulers who temporarily happened to command the state's armed forces and bureaucracy. This came to be known as the rule of law.
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  2. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    Human beings cooperate to compete and compete to cooperate.
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  3. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other.
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  4. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    Many people today inside and outside the region are aware that many regimes, particularly in the Arab world, are cruel dictatorships unconstrained by any sense of higher law or justice.6 Westerners often think that the fusion of church and state is intrinsic to Islam while being foreign to Christian Europe, and that the kind of theocratic regime set up in Iran after the 1979 revolution somehow constitutes a reversion to a traditional form of Muslim rule. None of this is accurate. The emergence of modern Muslim dictatorships is a result of the accidents of the region's confrontation with the West and subsequent transition to modernity. Political and religious authority were frequently united in Christian Europe. In the Muslim world, they were effectively separated through long historical periods. Law played the same function in Muslim lands that it did in Christian ones: acting as a check-albeit weaker-on the power of political rulers to do as they pleased. Rule of law is basic to Muslim civilization, and in fact defines that civilization in many respects.
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  5. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    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 organizations are those that legitimate themselves on the basis of a broader idea."
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  6. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    Modern organizations have other characteristics as well. Samuel Huntington lists four criteria for measuring the degree of development of the institutions that make up the state: adaptability-rigidity, complexitysimplicity, autonomy-subordination, and coherence-disunity.16 That is, the more adaptable, complex, autonomous, and coherent an institution is, the more developed it will be. An adaptable organization can evaluate a changing external environment and modify its own internal procedures in response. Adaptable institutions are the ones that survive, since environments always change. The English system of Common Law, in which law is constantly being reinterpreted and extended by judges in response to new circumstances, is one prototype of an adaptable institution. Developed institutions are more complex because they are subject to a greater division of labor and specialization. In a chiefdom or early state, the ruler may be simultaneously military general, chief priest, tax collector, and supreme court justice. In a highly developed state, all of these functions are performed by separate organizations with specific missions and a high degree of technical capacity to undertake them. During the Han Dynasty, the Chinese bureaucracy ramified into countless specialized agencies and departments at national, prefectural, and local levels. While much less complex than a modern government, it nonetheless represented an enormous shift away from earlier governments that were run as simple extensions of the imperial household. The two final measures of institutionalization,
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  7. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    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.
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  8. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    The idea that democracy was the most, or indeed the only, legitimate form of government spread to every corner of the world. Democratic constitutions were rewritten, or written for the first time, in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the former Communist world. But stable liberal democracy was consolidated only in a subset of those countries undergoing democratic transitions, because the material balance of power in each society did not force the different actors to accept constitutional compromise. One or another actor-usually the one that had inherited executive authority-emerged as much more powerful than the others and expanded its domain at the expense of the others. The Enlightenment ideas that underpinned modern democracy were broadly disseminated across Europe, all the way to Russia. Their reception, however, differed markedly from country to country depending on how different political actors saw those ideas impinging on their own interests. Understanding the emergence of accountable government requires, then, understanding the particular political forces that existed in the different parts of Europe and why some constellations of power promoted accountability while others proved no bar to the growth of absolutism.
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  9. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    THE RISE OF POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY What political accountability is; how the lateness of European state building was the source of subsequent liberty; what is wrong with "Whig history" and how political development cannot be understood except by comparing countries; five different European outcomes Accountable government means that the rulers believe that they are responsible to the people they govern and put the people's interests above their own. Accountability can be achieved in a number of ways. It can arise from moral education, which is the form it took in China and countries influenced by Chinese Confucianism. Princes were educated to feel a sense of responsibility to their society and were counseled by a sophisticated bureaucracy in the art of good statecraft. Today people in the West tend to look down on political systems whose rulers profess concern for their people but whose power is unchecked by any procedural constraints like rule of law or elections. But moral accountability still has a real meaning in the way that authoritarian societies are governed, exemplified by the contrast between the Hashemite Jordan and Ba'athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Neither country was a democracy, but the latter imposed a cruel and invasive dictatorship that served primarily the interests of the small clique of Saddam's friends and relatives. Jordanian kings, by contrast, are not formally accountable to their people except through a parliament with very limited powers; nonetheless, they have been careful to attend to the demands of the various groups that make"
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  10. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    A lot of historical writing has been characterized as ODTAA-"one damn thing after another"-without an effort to extract general rules or causal theories that can be applied in other circumstances.
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  11. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    FREE CITIES AND THE BOURGEOISIE Contemporary conventional wisdom has it that democracy will not emerge without the existence of a strong middle class, that is, a group of people who own some property and are neither elites nor the rural poor. This notion finds its origins in English political development, which to a greater degree than any other European country {with the possible exception of Holland} saw the early emergence of cities and an urban-based bourgeoisie. The urban middle class played a key role in Parliament and gained substantial economic and political power well prior to the Civil War and Glorious Revolution. It was a powerful counterweight to the great lords and the king in their three-way contest for power. The rise of an urban bourgeoisie was part of a broader Western European shift that encompassed the Low Countries, northern Italy, and the Hanseatic port cities of northern Germany as well. This important phenomenon has been described at length by authors from Karl Marx to Max Weber to Henri Pirenne.15 Marx made the "rise of the bourgeoisie" the centerpiece of his entire theory of modernization, a necessary and inevitable stage in the developmental process of all societies. The existence of free cities explains, as we
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  12. Francis Fukuyama _ The Origins of Political

    in some sense, it was the tyranny of cousins that allowed Indians to resist the tyranny of tyrants.
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