Book Review: 'Political Order and Political Decay' by Francis Fukuyama

Book Review: 'Political Order and Political Decay' by Francis Fukuyama

Human beings possess biologically rooted imperatives to favor kith and kin. Political order requires checking these impulses.

By David Polansky in the Wall Street Journal

 

If the title were not already taken, "A Brief History of Time" might serve to describe Francis Fukuyama's latest opus, "Political Order and Political Decay," together with its prequel, "The Origins of Political Order" (2011). Between these two volumes, he ranges across a good span of recorded history (and before), mining lessons about "the underlying rules by which societies organize themselves" as he seeks to update his mentor Samuel Huntington's classic 1968 work of political sociology, "Political Order in Changing Societies."

While Mr. Fukuyama's earlier book discussed all of human history up to Napoleon's 1806 victory at Jena, this volume more modestly confines itself to the subsequent period through the present day. This temporal division marks the beginning of the period in which a particular set of political institutions—the modern state, the rule of law and accountable government—developed, with increasing speed, into the dominant model of sociopolitical organization around the world. Mr. Fukuyama pithily sums up this world-historical process as "getting to Denmark."

"Political Order and Political Decay" is divided into four thematic sections: the establishment of the modern state in Western Europe and North America; its expansion, with varying degrees of success, to other regions of the world; the concurrent spread (and waxing and waning) of democracy; and the degeneration of formerly successful democratic state institutions, particularly in the United States (the "political decay" of the title).

Mr. Fukuyama—to his credit—largely avoids pitching a Big Idea That Explains It All. But to the extent that he has an overarching narrative, it is this: Human beings are possessed of certain biologically rooted imperatives to favor kith and kin over others—what he calls patrimonialism. Successful political order entails the establishment of institutions that check and redirect these impulses in productive and publicly beneficial ways. Since the Industrial Revolution and the spread of market capitalism (i.e., globalization), the institutions that most successfully accomplish this feat have been the modern state coupled with the rule of law and some degree of democratic accountability. What we call corruption is really the imperfect realization (or absence) of such institutions. Political decay, to which the final section of this work is devoted, is the condition where public institutions, grown sclerotic over time, prove increasingly unable to manage the natural reassertion of patrimonial impulses.

Rather than attribute these outcomes to any single cause, Mr. Fukuyama prefers to trace in each case the various interacting processes that have produced order and decay. Consequently, much (perhaps too much) of this work is largely given over to synthesizing and reproducing the secondary literature on a dizzying array of topics. The reader cannot but be impressed by the facility with which he introduces and swiftly outlines such matters as the social construction of nationhood, the legitimacy gap afflicting governments in modern-day Mediterranean countries, Montesquieu's account of the relationship between geography and institutions, et very much cetera.

In his last section Mr. Fukuyama aims to make good on the promise implicit in the title of the first chapter of his first volume: "The Necessity of Politics." According to him, the political order that grants us valuable goods like security and wealth requires continuous management to survive. Political order is meanwhile necessary because of our natural, prepolitical state: An innate tendency to revert to conditions of rival kinship groups is both a cause and effect of political decay. As he puts it, "the problem of patrimonialism is never finally solved in any political system."

Thus Mr. Fukuyama presents political order as a (continuing) artificial solution to a natural problem. It comes as some surprise, then, when he concludes with an endorsement of Aristotle's famous definition of human beings as political animals. Aristotle in fact shares with Mr. Fukuyama the view that our strongest inclinations are biological and, like Mr. Fukuyama, contends that practical politics must take these into account. But Aristotle also claims that "the purpose of politics is not to make living together possible, but to make living well possible." For Aristotle, our ability to reason about what living well entails is the outstanding feature of the human animal, and it is what makes politics necessary—whereas Mr. Fukuyama suggests that politics has the more limited role of simply enabling innately disputatious humans to live together at all.

Though Mr. Fukuyama has been both a policy maker and adviser, he eschews explicit policy recommendations here. Instead, he has sought to clarify the fundamental problems of political order. His account rests upon a remarkably broad synthetic definition of human nature, drawing on sociobiology, sociology and political philosophy. The trouble is that these streams do not necessarily converge. They differ regarding the relationship of human nature to political life, and this has important implications for which aspect of political order deserves our most urgent attention. If our natural impulses are prepolitical, then stronger state institutions are required to keep us in check and perhaps our degree of political participation ought to be limited. If, on the other hand, we are indeed political by nature, then the problem may lie more in the quality of our civic participation than in its degree.

Thus, in a work on political order, the reader may be left wondering: Is politics the problem or the solution?

Mr. Polansky is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Toronto.