Political order and political decay: from the industrial revolution to the globalization of democracy. By Francis Fukuyama

Abstract

For one who, in 1989, famously announced the end of history, Francis Fukuyama has shown a remarkable interest in it, and not just for its own sake, but also for history's relevance to the contemporary world. In 2011, his book The origins of political order (Profile Books) an Olympian survey stretching from pre-human times to the French Revolution, showed convincingly that human beings did not start out as isolated individuals who gradually came to form societies: they were socially organized from the start, just like their primate forebears. He then argued that as human societies developed, three basic categories of institutions emerged: the state, rule of law and mechanisms of accountability. Although states began as largely patrimonial enterprises, many of them came to uphold, at least in principle, the interests of all citizens—largely through achieving a balance between the three types of institution. Meanwhile, some other states had run into trouble because they had failed to build a workable balance between the three.