He starts with a Western analysis of 'the state of nature'. Fukuyama is thereby seeking to recover some of the lost tradition of 19th-century historical sociology or comparative anthropology.

What Fukuyama is aiming for in The Origins of Political Order is a middle-range theory that avoids the pitfalls of excessive abstraction (the vice of economists) and excessive particularism (the problem of many historians and anthropologists).

But what they are in the present is also shaped by what they were in the past, that is their past grounding, and there is not one single path that links one to the other. Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other. China, for him, had a strong state, but without law and accountability the Middle East had states and law, but in much of the Arab part it lost the latter tradition. But we need to remember, Fukuyama emphasizes, how historically contingent this particular process of emergence was. Once this combination of state, law and accountability appeared, it proved to be a highly powerful and attractive form of government that subsequently spread to all corners of the globe. Individualism on a social scale appeared centuries before the rise of other modern states or capitalism a rule of law existed before political power was concentrated in the hands of centralized governments and institutions of accountability arose because modern, centralized states were unable to completely defeat or eliminate ancient feudal institutions like representative assemblies. The sequencing of political development in Western Europe, as such, was highly unusual, for noted or indeed notorious American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama (2), when compared to other parts of the world. Further to a contemporary political taxonomy, as in the previous chapter, we now turn to historiography.

We now turn from Africa to Europe, as well as Asia and America, not forgetting, though, even pre-human times. man springs from nature, creates a society adequate to his immediate needs out of his reason and will, and then engages in fatal combat with his own creation, to provide the drama of historical change.Īlexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1) INTRODUCTION THE NECESSITY OF POLITICS

Fukuyama political order