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

by Francis Fukuyama

Liberal democracy is more than majority voting in elections; it is a complex set of institutions that restrain and regularize the exercise of power through law and a system of checks and balances.

POLITICAL DECAY

Political institutions develop, often slowly and painfully, over time, as human societies strive to organize themselves to master their environments. But political decay occurs when political systems fail to adjust to changing circumstances.

Democracy’s failure, then, lies less in concept than in execution: most people around the world would strongly prefer to live in a society in which their government was accountable and effective, where it delivered the sorts of services demanded by citizens in a timely and cost-effective way. But few governments are actually able to do both, because institutions are weak, corrupt, lacking capacity, or in some cases absent altogether. The passion of protesters and democracy advocates around the world, from South Africa to Korea to Romania to Ukraine, might be sufficient to bring about “regime change” from authoritarian to democratic government, but the latter will not succeed without a long, costly, laborious, and difficult process of institution building.

A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous “wisdom of crowds” are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government.

There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that “institutions matter”: poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions.

Putting the theory after the history constitutes what I regard as the correct approach to analysis: theories ought to be inferred from facts, and not the other way around.

Hobbes’s Leviathan begins with an extended catalog of natural human passions and argues that the deepest and most abiding one is the fear of violent death. From this he derives the fundamental right of nature, which is the liberty each man has to preserve his own life.

The state of nature is thus characterized by “Warre … of every man against every man.” To escape from this perilous situation, human beings agree to give up their natural liberty to do as they please in return for other people respecting their right to life. The state, or Leviathan, enforces these reciprocal commitments in the form of a social contract by which human beings protect those rights which they have by nature but are not able to enjoy in the state of nature due to the war of every man against every man. The government, or Leviathan, secures the right to life by securing peace.

John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government, has a softer view of the state of nature than Hobbes; human beings are less occupied fighting one another than mixing their labor with the common things of nature to produce private property. Locke’s fundamental law of nature, in contrast to that of Hobbes, gives human beings the right not just to life, but to “life, health, liberty, or possessions.”2 Unregulated liberty in the state of nature leads to the state of war, necessitating, as for Hobbes, a social contract for the preservation of natural liberty and property. Although the state, in Locke’s view, is necessary, it can itself become the denier of natural rights, and so he posits a right to revolt against unjust authority.

Rousseau argues that Hobbes has not in fact uncovered natural man; the violent creature described in Leviathan is actually the product of the contaminating effects of centuries of social development. Natural human beings for Rousseau are indeed solitary, but they are also timid, fearful, and more likely to flee one another than to fight. Savage man’s “desires never extend beyond his physical wants; he knows no goods but food, a female, and rest”; he fears pain and hunger but not the abstraction of death. Thus the rise of political society does not represent salvation from the “warre of every man against every man” but a bondage to other human beings through ties of mutual dependence.

All three thinkers saw human beings in the state of nature as isolated individuals, for whom society was not natural. According to Hobbes, early human beings relate to one another primarily through fear, envy, and conflict. Rousseau’s primitive human is even more isolated: while sex is natural, the family is not. Mutual human dependence comes about almost accidentally, as a result of technological innovations like agriculture that require greater cooperation. For both, human society emerges only with the passage of historical time, and involves compromises of natural liberty.

We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends.

But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.

Everything that modern biology and anthropology tell us about the state of nature suggests the opposite: there was never a period in human evolution when human beings existed as isolated individuals; the primate precursors of the human species had already developed extensive social, and indeed political, skills; and the human brain is hardwired with faculties that facilitate many forms of social cooperation. The state of nature might be characterized as a state of war, since violence was endemic, but the violence was not perpetrated by individuals so much as by tightly bonded social groups. Human beings do not enter into society and political life as a result of conscious, rational decision. Communal organization comes to them naturally, though the specific ways they cooperate are shaped by environment, ideas, and culture.

Biologists have identified two natural sources of cooperative behavior: kin selection and reciprocal altruism.

With regard to the first, the name of the game in biological evolution is not the survival of a given organism but the survival of that organism’s genes. This produces a regularity that was formulated by the biologist William Hamilton as the principle of inclusive fitness or kin selection, which holds that individuals of any sexually reproducing species will behave altruistically toward kin in proportion to the number of genes they share.5 Parents and children, and full brothers and sisters, share 50 percent of their genes, and so will behave more altruistically toward each other than toward first cousins, who share only 25 percent.

The desire to pass resources on to kin is one of the most enduring constants in human politics.

The ability to cooperate with genetic strangers is referred to by biologists as reciprocal altruism, and in addition to kin selection is the second major biological source of social behavior found in many species of animals.

Human sociability is not a historical or cultural acquisition, but something hardwired into human nature.

SPECIFICALLY HUMAN

Our intelligence and cognitive abilities have always been regarded as key to our identity as a species.

Where did this cognitive power come from?

Many evolutionary biologists have speculated that the human brain grew as rapidly as it did for a different reason: to be able to cooperate and compete with other human beings.

The emergence of language among early human beings opened up huge new opportunities for both improved cooperation and cognitive development in an intimately linked fashion.

The development of language not only permits the short-term coordination of action but also opens up the possibility of abstraction and theory, critical cognitive faculties that are unique to human beings. Words can refer to concrete objects as well as to abstract classes of objects (dogs, trees) and to abstractions that refer to invisible forces (Zeus, gravity). Putting the two together makes possible mental models—that is, general statements about causation (“it gets warm because the sun shines”; “society forces girls into stereotyped gender roles”). All human beings engage in the construction of abstract mental models; our ability to theorize in this fashion gives us huge survival advantages.

human beings are constantly observing correlations between events in the world around them and inferring causation from them.

The ability to create mental models and to attribute causality to invisible abstractions is in turn the basis for the emergence of religion.

Some people today argue that religion is primarily a source of violence, conflict, and social discord.25 Historically, however, religion has played the opposite role: it is a source of social cohesion that permits human beings to cooperate far more widely and securely than they would if they were the simple rational and self-interested agents posited by the economists.

collective action begins to break down as the size of the cooperating group increases. In large groups, it becomes harder and harder to monitor the individual contributions of members; free riding and other forms of opportunistic behavior become much more common.

Religion solves this collective action problem by presenting rewards and punishments that greatly reinforce the gains from cooperation in the here and now.

Religion is not the only way that ideas can reinforce group solidarity—today we have nationalism and secular ideologies like Marxism as well—but in early societies it played a critical role in making possible more complex forms of social organization.

From a cognitive point of view, any given religious belief can be described as a type of mental model of reality, in which causality is attributed to invisible forces that exist in a metaphysical realm beyond the phenomenal world of everyday experience.

THE BEAST WITH RED CHEEKS

The fact that we become attached to certain rules not as means to short-term goals but as ends in themselves greatly enhances the stability of social life. Religion simply reinforces that stability and widens the circle of potential cooperators.

Institutional rules are “sticky” and resistant to change, which is one of the chief sources of political decay.

THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION

Political leadership emerges initially because members of a community admire a particular individual who demonstrates great physical prowess, courage, wisdom, or the ability to adjudicate disputes fairly. If politics is a struggle over leadership, it is also a story about followership and the willingness of the great mass of human beings to accord leaders higher status than themselves and subordinate themselves to them. In a cohesive and therefore successful community, this subordination is voluntary and based on belief in the leader’s right to rule.

As political systems develop, recognition is transferred from individuals to institutions—that is, to rules or patterns of behavior that persist over time,

political order is based on legitimacy and the authority that arises from legitimate domination. Legitimacy means that the people who make up the society recognize the fundamental justice of the system as a whole and are willing to abide by its rules. In contemporary societies, we believe that le...

Political power is ultimately based on social cohesion.

Political power is the product not just of the resources and numbers of citizens that a society can command but also the degree to which the legitimacy of leaders and institutions is recognized.

FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

The tendency to invest mental models and theories with intrinsic worth promotes social stability and allows societies to bulk up enormously in size. But it also means that societies are highly conservative and will fiercely resist challenges to their dominant ideas.

The conservatism of societies with regard to rules is then a source of political decay. Rules or institutions created in response to one set of environmental circumstances become dysfunctional under later conditions, but they cannot be changed due to people’s heavy emotional investments in them. This means that social change is often not linear—that is, a process of constant small adjustments to shifting conditions—but rather follows a pattern of prolonged stasis followed by catastrophic change.

the desire for recognition ensures that politics will never be reducible to simple economic self-interest.

Political power ultimately rests upon recognition—the degree to which a leader or institution is regarded as legitimate and can command the respect of a group of followers.

EVOLUTION AND MIGRATION

Evolutionary anthropologists have designated stages based on the form of social or political organization, which I will use here since this is my subject matter. Elman Service developed a four-level taxonomy involving bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.14 For bands and tribes, social organization is based on kinship, and these societies are relatively egalitarian. Chiefdoms and states, by contrast, are organized hierarchically and exert authority on a territorial rather than a kinship basis.

FAMILY-AND BAND-LEVEL ORGANIZATION