Francis Fukuyama
View on Amazon
When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single, coherent theory of remarkable explanitory power. Alas, grand theoretical books like Spirit of the Laws are out of fashion today, not only because the human sciences are gripped by particularism (“more and more about less and less), but also because we don’t train students to think like Montesqueiu any more.
In his excellent The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), Francis Fukuyama bucks the trend. Of course, he’s done it before with elegant and persuasive books about the fall of communism, state-building, trust, and biotechnology among other big topics. Here he takes on the emergence of modern political institutions, or rather three modern political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and accountable government. He begins with human nature, takes us through a massive comparison of the political trajectories of world-historical civilizations (Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, European), and, in so doing, tells us why the world political order looks the way it does today. His answers are surprising, and not directly in line with what might be called the “conventional thinking” about these things.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Has this vile neo-con really done enough penance for all the Iraqis and Afghans done to death in the last decade? Does he really deserve to be rehabilitated like this, just because he’s written another one-size-fits-all book of historical philosophy and BS? A prof from Sophia U. in Tokyo once told me that Japanese politicians were always apologizing for things, but they were not sincere unless they killed themselves.
Mr. or Mrs. “Ness”, your hateful, angry violent rhetoric should have no place here, hopefully the moderator will see it as exactly the type of thing the lead to the assassination attempt on the AZ Congresswomen, we need more civil debate, not hatred and calls for the death of those we disagree with. It certainly doesn’t help or advance your position, though I suspect this is more about your expressing anger over events you have no control, than actually trying to achieve anything of value to the community.