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

by Francis Fukuyama

Why didn’t political modernization lead to modernization in the economy and society after the Qin unification? The emergence of a modern state is a necessary condition for intensive economic development, but it is not a sufficient one. Other institutions needed to be in place for capitalism to emerge. The capitalist revolution in the West was preceded by a cognitive revolution in early modern times that created the scientific method, modern universities, technological innovations that produced new wealth from scientific observations, and a system of property rights that incentivized people to innovate in the first place. Qin China was in many ways an intellectually fertile place, but its major scholarly traditions tended to be backward looking and incapable of the abstraction needed by modern natural science.