Francis Fukuyama has got a lot of attention for his new book The Origins of Political Order. He’s still so closely associated with having announced the “end of history” in the early 1990s (a complex idea that’s more often cited than understood) people are struck that he’s decided to go back to the beginning, tracing the evolution of political order in different societies from prehistory to the French Revolution. As I argue in a new review for The National, “this is a remarkably old-fashioned project”:
In tracing the highways and byways of human development, Fukuyama appears far more interested in probing the classics of political philosophy and sociology than current development theory. The majority of books in the bibliography date from before 2000, and the argument includes detailed discussions of Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Friedrich von Hayek. With some authors, this might be dismissed as a tokenistic tour through “Great Books of Political Theory”. But Fukuyama embraces such non-household names as “the great English jurist Sir Edward Coke”. As has been said of another Coke, this is the real thing.
But there are obvious differences between this book and its intellectual forebears:
Marx apparently failed to grasp huge differences between ancient Indian and Chinese societies, lumping them together under the headline of “Oriental despotism”. Weber failed to see just how far ancient Chinese society advanced.
As his dismissals of Marx and Weber suggest, Fukuyama does not treat the histories of the great Asian empires as an adjunct to “the rise of the West”. He notes at the outset that he will downplay Greece and Rome. Socrates and Aristotle make only cameo appearances. By contrast, Fukuyama treats Confucianism and Hindu thought in considerable detail.
Does this mean that Fukuyama, once associated with the Project for a New American Century, is giving up on the West? Not so. As I argue in the review, his strategy is to cast more light on non-Western societies and ideas so to emphasize the enduring strength of Western political models:
India, Fukuyama posits fairly early on, has yet to escape from the norms of its pre-colonial politics. Caste groups and kin ties were so crucial to its development – and continue to play a significant role today – that the country remains difficult to unite.
If that’s bad news for Delhi, what about Beijing? Fukuyama argues on the very last page of The Origins of Political Order that today’s Chinese system bears the hallmarks of its imperial predecessors, with power concentrated in the centre and too little accountability.
“An authoritarian system can periodically run rings around a liberal democratic one under good leadership,” he argues, clearly thinking of today’s Sino-American competition, but at the same time it will always be in peril of slipping into political decay. In spite of Fukuyama’s attention to the histories of today’s Asian powers, his message is clear: if you want to get ahead in today’s global competition, it’s still best to refer to the ideas that shaped the West.
So this is good reading not only in its own right (and it’s a stimulating work of history and ideas) but also intellectual material for those who in the West who still believe that, as Barack Obama said in London, “the time for our leadership is now”…
