RALEIGH – The noted political scientist Francis Fukuyama got a bit of a bum rap more than two decades ago – but it also made him famous, so perhaps the scales balanced out.
Writing in what was then a new international-affairs journal, The National Interest, Fukuyama proclaimed that the victory of the capitalist West over the Soviet Bloc represented “The End of History.” The article generated so much interest that Fukuyama expanded his thesis into a 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.
The bum rap was that Fukuyama had actually meant that human history was over. He didn’t mean that at all. His argument was that History was over, with a capital H – a reference to the philosophical idea that human societies had been struggling over the centuries to evolve the best-possible system of governance, and that liberal capitalism had proven to be it.
This idea owes a lot to the German philosophers of the 19th century, especially Hegel, who saw human progress as a cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. What Fukuyama was saying, in a sense, is that liberal capitalism – a synthesis of ideas and institutions – had become a thesis without any credible antithesis.
Absolute monarchy had been tried. Aristocracy had been tried. Mercantile imperialism had been tried. Socialism and communism had been tried. They had all been found wanting.
To be sure, Fukuyama wrote, the countries of Europe, North America, and the Pacific that had adopted liberal capitalism would still face challenges. They might even face existential threats from radical Islamists armed with weapons of mass destruction. But no longer was there a credible alternative to the idea of liberal capitalism. The Islamist tyrannies of the Arab world and the kleptocracies of Africa and Latin America held no popular appeal outside their borders – or even within them, in many cases.
I’ve read much of Fukuyama’s work since The End of History. While I haven’t always agreed with his conclusions, I have always found his observations telling, his explanations fascinating, and his questions provocative. I highly recommend that you read his latest book, The Origins of Political Order. It is the first of two volumes – and left me wanting much, much more.
Fukuyama’s thesis is that the comparative history of human civilizations reveals three building blocks of a modern political system: a strong state, a rule of law, and accountability. For special reasons that Fukuyama explores in some detail, Britain and several other Western countries managed to stack all three of these blocks in the right way at the right time, thus explaining their relative economic and social progress during the early modern period.
Most standard treatments of Western history contain similar insights and propositions. What Fukuyama does most effectively in The Origins of Political Order is take the Western-educated reader on journeys to places he may not have visited: the birth of the ancient Chinese state, the effects of Hinduism and Buddhism on Indian political development, the establishment of slave soldiers as a political force in Mamluk Egypt and Ottoman Turkey, and the struggle between rapacious barons and ambitious kings in medieval Hungary and Poland.
By illustrating what makes the history of these societies so very different from that of Britain, France, and the Low Countries, Fukuyama makes a persuasive case about which variables help to explain differences in political and economic success (e.g. a balance of power among competing interests and institutions) and which variables really don’t (e.g. race, ethnicity, or natural resources).
Something else I like about the book is that Fukuyuma employs proper, consistent political terms. He uses Samuel Huntington’s definition of social institutions as “stable, valued, recurring patterns of thought.” And he uses Max Weber’s definition of the state as “an organization deploying a legitimate monopoly of violence over a defined territory.” Good luck getting the modern Left to define their terms as clearly.
The author doesn’t end his first volume with anything like Western triumphalism. Fukuyama wonders whether China, possessing only one of the three building blocks of a modern polity (a strong state), might prove to be a challenge to his thesis. And he wonders whether Western democracies have it in them to solve lingering economic and social problems such as unaffordable entitlements and inadequate infrastructure.
I should also add that when Fukuyama writes in praise of “a strong state,” he’s not arguing for big government or authoritarianism. What he means is a central authority strong enough to check the potential tyrannies of local governments and special interests – a balanced, federal form of government, in other words.
Still, he does write that the failing of modern democracies such as the United States is “state weakness.” He worries that “contemporary democracies become too easily gridlocked and rigid, and thus unable to make difficult decisions to ensure their long-term economic and political survival.”
Hmm. I wonder what Fukuyama would think about the notion of, say, suspending the next congressional elections so that our politicians might “do the right thing.”
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.