Political Order and Political Decay:From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracyby Francis FukuyamaFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014Francis Fukuyama follows up his 2011 book The Origins of Political Order with its even denser and more ambitious sequel, Political Order and Political Decay, in which he continues his extremely comprehensive study of the ways humans govern themselves, specifically concentrating on three concepts: the state, the rule of law, and “mechanisms of accountability.” It's a massive undertaking, and the fact that Fukuyama can make it all so consistently interesting and thought-provoking is simply amazing. Political Order and Political Decay moves so smoothly and confidently from large-scale theorizing to fine-detailed event-analysis that the whole two-volume progression is compulsively readable. This second volume sounds at times very much like a series of college political history classes (almost certainly the origin of a great deal of the raw material here), but there are worse fates that could befall a reader than learning about historical patterns from this author.This hasn't always been the case, of course: Fukuyama's 1992 debut, The End of History and the Last Man, caught the American zeitgeist in a way only such a silly and ill-conceived book could, for instance, and his 2002 book Our Posthuman Future, although equally ridiculous, at least committed its crimes against common sense under the sheltering mantle of bad science fiction. But The Origins of Political Order was scintillating from start to finish, and Political Order and Political Decay is as well, despite operating under a couple of fairly hefty handicaps.The first of these is the sheer scope of the thing. The book is 700 pages, yes, but it covers the various political developments of all of humanity from the Industrial Revolution to Arab Spring – only a fifth of the time-span covered by the preceding volume, but a fifth in which, as Fukuyama points out, the volatile combination of intense nationalism and rapid-fire technological advancement have served to accelerate drastically the pace and variety of political upheaval and evolution.That evolution is his subject, and he traces some common strands of development across all cultures: a move from clan-based rulership to tribal rulership to “patrimonial” variations of monarchy, to more diffuse (and usually capitalistic) states in which bureaucracies are increasingly autonomous and, in his theory anyway, increasingly accountable. One of the most refreshing aspects of the multi-pronged analysis he mounts is that he chases these patterns all over the world, not just in the usual NATO suspects.The more countries he examines, however, the more attention he inadvertently draws to the second handicap of his enterprise. Despite having once been closely linked to America's “neocon” movement, Fukuyama is a long-game historian who's inclined to set aside ideology and go where his research takes him – but time and again in the course of Political Order and Political Decay, a punctilious observance of the very zeitgeist that's tricked him in the past forces him to turn away from some of the most obvious conclusions of his own trend-watching. The result can be maddening: he's written a book that cannot come to its own conclusions.He's uniformly excellent on the psychology of nations (so excellent, in fact, that an entire book on such a subject would be a very welcome thing), pointing out – while thinking about Venice and Portugal? Or the US and the UK? – that “Many peaceful contemporary liberal democracies are in fact the beneficiaries of prolonged violence and authoritarian rule in generations past, which they have conveniently forgotten.” And he displays throughout a sharp appreciation of the volatile effects organized religion can have on pretty much all the forces he's tracking. But the wider import of those forces, at least as he paints them, are kept one notch out of focus – mainly because the political order and decay that he's chosen for his subject seems to manifest an arc, a lifespan, and that perhaps like all lifespanned things, the cycle might have a prime. And what do you do, if you're Francis Fukuyama and your comprehensive research in political history leads you to a conclusion you yourself don't particularly like?What do you do, in other words, if the upshot of your long study is that the form of human governance that works best … is monarchy? Not the monstrous modern compromise of 'constitutional monarchy,' but actual, effective monarchy, where the king and queen rule the country and their chosen ministers run it?Fukuyama points out what hardly needs pointing out, that “people around the world hate the rule-bound, rigid, paperwork-driven nature of bureaucracy,” and, noting examples such as Germany and Japan in the years before the first and second world wars, allows that “bureaucracies can have too much autonomy.” He charts the decay that sets in when societies progress out of “patrimonial” states and into the allegedly greater accountability of bureaucracies, but can decay be progress? Isn't the whole point of the old adage that too many cooks do, in fact, spoil the soup?Patrimonial states can be highly stable, he writes, because they're “constructed using the basic building blocks of human sociability, that is, the biological inclination of people to favor family and friends with whom they have exchanged reciprocal favors,” and as the many historical examples he cites amply demonstrate, this stability can last for decades or even centuries at a stretch – a social benefit, he grants, that “isn't trivial”:
In an age in which populations could drop by half or three-quarters as a result of hunger, disease, and outright butchery brought on by war and invasion, the sovereign's guarantee of peace was a critical public good. This system could be stable over many centuries because the differential in organizational ability between the elites and everyone else was self-reinforcing.
But despite edging up to the conclusions that flow naturally from such analyses, Fukuyama goes only so far and then recoils into passages like this:
It is of course much better to have a fully democratic constitution protecting individual rights than the kind of semi-authoritarian one represented by the Meiji Constitution , or for that matter the Bismarck constitution. Political orders that concentrate too much power in a small set of hands invite abuse in both economics and political affairs. A true rule of law has to be binding on the state itself and the major elites that stand behind the state. Since there is no third party to enforce the constitution, its durability depends much more on the degree to which major interest groups see it in their self-interest to abide by its terms.
Every single one of the flat declarations in that paragraph is undermined by the actual content of Political Order and Political Decay. Nothing in the book actually demonstrates why it is “of course” better to have a fully democratic constitution protecting individual rights – indeed, the list of liberal democracies that have trampled on individual rights is fairly long. And although concentrating too much power in a small set of hands invites abuse, nothing in the book demonstrates that those invitations are always accepted. And what to make of that last line? “Since there is no third party to enforce the constitution, its durability depends much more on the degree to which major interest groups see it in their self-interest to abide by its terms” - but the author himself has repeatedly demonstrated that major interest groups are the third party he declares is missing from the equation.It's an odd spectacle – beguiling in its own way – to watch one of our foremost popular political theorists so reflexively refuse to come to a conclusion merely because that conclusion is unfashionable. The simple fact Fukuyama seems to find unbearable is that the loosening of political order causes political decay, but what author with hopes of seeing the New York Times bestseller list can risk concluding that there's such a thing as too much freedom?As it is, Political Order and Political Decay will make a very popular holiday gift this winter.
