The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Francis Fukuyama “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, 483 pp.

Some months ago I read the second volume of this work, I have now got around to reading the first of this two-volume work.  In volume one, the author examines why it is that some societies have traveled the democratic route to stability while others have remained stuck with autocracy.  To answer this question, the author goes all the way back to early-man and the tribal organizations of that time and the organizational kinship groups.

The creation of states, in most modern world states, replaced societies revolving around kinship.  States are one of the three pillars Fukuyama identifies as providing the basis for political order in what we consider a modern state.  However powerful states aren’t enough on their own to solve the problem of kinship and the passing out of benefits to relatives.  The rule of states needs to be supplemented by the rule of law--a rule of law that all, including the rulers, are subject to.  And finally, accountable government is needed as the third pillar.  Democratically elected governments have usually provided the best accountability mechanism.  These three pillars need to be simultaneously present to effectively create political order. 

My Notes:

Pg. 229…238: In three regions of the world (China, India, and the Middle East), early social organization was agnatic (related on the father’s side) and strongly based on tribal kinship ties.  Nevertheless, in none of these three did the top-down state-building effort succeed in abolishing kinship as a basis for local social organization.  Indeed, much of the history of institutional development in all of these societies revolved around the effort of kin groups to reinsert themselves into politics.  To this day, family and kinship remain far stronger as sources of social organization and identity in these three regions than they do in Europe or North America.

The importance of kinship in Europe assumed a different shape.  Men and women tended to marry later, and there was a higher overall degree of individuals who never married.  There were also more young women in the labor force and more equality within households, due to the fact that women, by virtue of their late marriages had more opportunities to acquire property.  Europeans exited from strong links of kinship shortly after the Germanic tribes overran the Roman Empire and were converted to Christianity, the agent of this exit from kinship was the Catholic Church.

One important measure of the decay of complex kinship structures in Europe is the legal right of women to hold and dispose of property.  In agnatic societies, women achieve legal personhood only by virtue of their marriage to and mothering of a male in the lineage.  Yet Englishwomen had the right to hold and dispose of property freely and to sell it to individuals outside the family shortly after the Norman Conquest in 1066.  The shift was driven by the Catholic Church, which took a strong stand against four practices: marriages between close kin, marriages to the widows of dead relatives (the so-called levirate), the adoption of children, and divorce.  These prohibitions are not firmly anchored in the Scriptures, or in Christian doctrine.  It appears the church took this stand more for material interests than with theology.  These strictures are against strategies of heirship whereby kinship groups are able to keep property under the group’s control from one generation to another.  Average life expectancy in Europe at the time was less than thirty-five.  The probability of a couple’s producing a male heir who survived was quite low.  So the church systematically cut off all available avenues that families had for passing down property to descendants (concubines, divorce, marrying within the family, etc.).  At the same time, it strongly promoted voluntary donations of land and property to the church.  In the centuries following these changes, by the end of the seventh century, one-third of the productive land in France was in ecclesiastical hands; between the eighth and ninth centuries, church holdings in northern France the German lands, and Italy doubled. 

The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church’s self-interest.  The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby recover her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself.  A woman’s right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows and spinsters.  And the woman’s right to own property spelled the death knell for agnatic lineages, by undermining the principle of unilineal descent. (p. 238)

Pg. 231:  The Catholic Church was the driving force of the European exit from kinship organization and was exceptional insofar as the transition out of complex kinship occurred first on a social and cultural level rather than on a political one.  By changing marriage and inheritance rules, the church in a sense acted politically and for economic motives.  As a result, an emerging capitalist economy in Italy England, and the Netherlands in the sixteenth century did not have to overcome the resistance of large corporately organized kinship groups with substantial property to protect, as in India and China. 

Pg. 262:  Before our more secular modern age, the most obvious source of just laws outside the political order was religion.  But religiously based laws constrained rulers only if religious authority was constituted independently of political authority.  Of the twenty-five popes who held office immediately before 1059, twenty-one were appointed by emperors and five dismissed by them.  The Catholic Church’s declaration of independence from political authority came in the late eleventh century (1077) led by Pope Gregory VII. 

Pg. 264:  Pope Gregory VII believed the church could not become independent of political authority unless it restricted the ability of priests and bishops to marry and have children, he ended the common practice of selling church offices and turning them into heritable property.  In a papal manifesto in 1075, Gregory VII withdrew from the king the right of deposing bishops and of lay investiture.  After a long fight over the issue, Gregory prevailed and forced The Holy Roman Emperor King Henry IV, in 1077, to come to Gregory’s residence at Canossa and beg for the pope’s absolution.

Pg. 289:  In Europe, the rule of law survived, even as the basis of its legitimacy changed during the transition to modernity.  This was the result of an internal organic process, as the Reformation undermined the authority of the church and the secular ideas of the Enlightenment eroded belief in religion. New theories of sovereignty, based on the authority of king, nation or people, began to replace the sovereignty of God as the basis for legal legitimacy.  Even though the rule of law predated modern western democracy by many centuries, by the late nineteenth century, the democratic idea had gained legitimacy, and law increasingly came to be seen as the positive enactment of a democratic community. 

Pg. 324:  The Protestant Reformation, combined with the invention of the printing press, empowered individuals to read the Bible and find their way to faith without the interposition of intermediaries like the church.  Modern natural science—the ability to abstract general rules out of a mass of empirical data and to test casual theories through controlled experiments—created a new form of authority that was soon institutionalized in universities. 

Pg. 416:  One problematic characteristic of the contemporary world is that corrupt governments often do not have to go to their own citizens for revenue, the revenue from natural resources or aid from international donors is sufficient (Read ‘oil’).

Pg. 446:  Political systems evolve in a manner roughly comparable to biological evolution: the principles of variation and selection.  In political evolution, the units of selection are rules and their embodiments as institutions, rather than genes as in biological evolution.  Also, in human societies, variation among institutions can be planned and deliberate as opposed to random.  And, political development is transmitted culturally rather than genetically. 

Pg. 460:  The European path to modernization was not a spasmodic burst of change across all dimensions of development beginning with the Reformation, but rather a series of piecemeal shifts over a period of nearly fifteen hundred years.  In this particular sequence, individualism on a social level could precede capitalism; rule of law could precede the formation of a modern state, and feudalism in the form of strong pockets of local resistance to central authority could be the foundation of modern democracy.  Contrary to the Marxists view that feudalism was a universal stage of development preceding the rise of the bourgeoisie, it was, in fact, an institution that was largely unique to Europe. 

The world changed very dramatically after approximately the year 1800, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.  Economic growth barely kept pace with population growth, leading to the erroneous conclusions of Thomas Malthus--(at least erroneous from his time to now). 

Pg. 463:  Global population has expanded dramatically over the past ten thousand years, from perhaps six million individuals worldwide at the beginning of the Neolithic period to over six billion in 2001 (7 billion by 2016).   The bulk of that population increase took place in the twentieth century.

Pg. 471:  It is not clear that economic growth is dependent on having a stable democracy in place if we simply consider the number of authoritarian countries that have piled up impressive growth records over recent years—South Korea and Taiwan, China, Singapore, Indonesia, and Chile.  Thus, while having a coherent state and reasonably good governance is a condition for growth, it is not clear that democracy plays the same positive role.  It is the balance between a strong state and a strong society that makes democracy work.