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

by Francis Fukuyama

We should not underestimate the importance of sex and access to women as a driver of political organization, particularly in segmentary societies that routinely use women as a medium of exchange.

The loose, decentralized system of organization is a source of both strength and weakness for tribal societies. Their networked organization can at times generate enormous striking power.

century. But their lack of permanent leadership, the looseness of the ties binding segments, and the absence of clear rules of succession doomed tribal societies to long-run weakness and decline.

Virtually all conquering tribal societies—at least, the ones that did not quickly evolve into state-level societies—ended up disintegrating within a generation or two, as brothers, cousins, and grandsons vied for the founding leader’s patrimony.

When tribal-level societies were succeeded by state-level societies, tribalism did not simply disappear. In China, India, the Middle East, and pre-Columbian America, state institutions were merely layered on top of tribal institutions and existed in an uneasy balance with them for long periods of time.

The only part of the world where tribalism was fully superseded by more voluntary and individualistic forms of social relationship was Europe, where Christianity played a decisive role in undermining kinship as a basis for social cohesion.

FROM TRIBALISM TO PATRONS, CLIENTS, AND POLITICAL MACHINES

If we define tribe more broadly to include not just kin claiming common descent but also patrons and clients linked through reciprocity and personal ties, then tribalism remains one of the great constants of political development.

Tribalism in this expanded sense remains a fact of life.

the underlying social relationship between the politician and his or her supporters is the same as in a kinship group: it is based on a reciprocal exchange of favors between leader and followers, where leadership is won rather than inherited, based on the leader’s ability to advance the interests of the group.

State-level societies differ from tribal ones in several important respects.

First, they possess a centralized source of authority, whether in the form of a king, president, or prime minister. This source of authority deputizes a hierarchy of subordinates who are capable, at least in principle, of enforcing rules on the whole of the society. The source of authority trumps all others within its territory, which means that it is sovereign. All administrative levels, such as lesser chiefs, prefects, or administrators, derive their decision-making authority from their formal association with the sovereign.

Second, that source of authority is backed by a monopoly of the legitimate means of coercion, in the form of an army and/or police. The power of the state is sufficient to prevent segments, tribes, or re...

Third, the authority of the state is territorial rath...

Since membership in a state does not depend on kinship, it can grow much larger than a tribe.

Fourth, states are far more stratified and unequal than tribal societies, with the ruler and his administrative staff often separating themselves off from the rest of the society.

Finally, states are legitimated by much more elaborate forms of religious belief, with a separate priestly class as its guardian.

Once states come into being, kinship becomes an obstacle to political development, since it threatens to return political relationships to the small-scale, personal ties of tribal societies. It is therefore not enough merely to develop a state; the state must avoid retribalization or what I label repatrimonialization.

THEORIES OF STATE FORMATION

Anthropologists and archaeologists distinguish between what they call “pristine” and “competitive” state formation. Pristine state formation is the initial emergence of a state (or chiefdom) out of a tribal-level society. Competitive formation occurs only after the first state gets going. States are usually so much better organized and powerful than the surrounding tribal-level societies that they either conquer and absorb them, or else are emulated by tribal neighbors who wish not to be conquered.

The State as a Voluntary Social Contract

Social contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were not in the first instance trying to give empirical accounts of how the state arose. They were attempting, rather, to understand a government’s basis of legitimacy.

Thomas Hobbes lays out the basic “deal” underlying the state: in return for giving up the right to do whatever one pleases, the state (or Leviathan) through its monopoly of force guarantees each citizen basic security. The state can provide other kinds of public goods as well, like property rights, roads, currency, uniform weights and measures, and external defense, which citizens cannot obtain on their own. In return, citizens give the state the right to tax, conscript, and otherwise demand things of them.

The State as a Hydraulic-Engineering Project

Karl Wittfogel’s “hydraulic” theory of the state.

argued that the rise of the state in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mexico was driven by the need for large-scale irrigation, which could be managed only by a centralized bureaucratic state.

Population Density

The demographer Ester Boserup has argued that population increase and high population densities have been important drivers of technological innovation. The dense populations around river systems in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China spawned intensive systems of agriculture involving large-scale irrigation, new higher-yielding crops, and other tools. Population density promotes state formation by permitting specialization and a division of labor between elites and nonelite groups.

Scarcity of land or access to certain key public resources are much more likely to trigger conflicts, which then might require more centralized forms of political authority to control.

What causes population density to increase in the first place? And what is the mechanism connecting dense populations with states?

The first question might seem to have a simple Malthusian answer: population increase is brought about by technological innovation such as the agricultural revolution, which greatly increases the carrying capacity of a given piece of land, which then leads parents to have more children.

population density may not be a final cause of state formation but rather an intervening variable that is the product of some other as yet unidentified factor.

States as the Product of Violence and Compulsion

The weaknesses and gaps in all of the explanations that are primarily economic in focus point to violence as an obvious source of state formation. That is, the transition from tribe to state involves huge losses in freedom and equality. It is hard to imagine societies giving all this up even for the potentially large gains of irrigation. The stakes have to be much higher...

Hierarchy and the state could have emerged when one tribal segment conquered another one and took control of its territory. The requirements of maintaining political control over the conquered tribe led the conquerors to establish centralized repressive institutions, which evolved into an administrative bureaucracy of a primitive state.

The State as the Product of Charismatic Authority

The Greek word charisma means “touched by God”; a charismatic leader asserts authority not because he is elected by his fellow tribesmen for leadership ability but because he is believed to be a designee of God.

Religious authority and military prowess go hand in hand. Religious authority allows a particular tribal leader to solve the large-scale collective action problem of uniting a group of autonomous tribes. To a much larger degree than economic benefit, religious authority can explain why a free tribal people would be willing to make a permanent delegation of authority to a single individual and that individual’s kin group. The leader can then use that authority to create a centralized military machine that can conquer recalcitrant tribes as well as ensure domestic peace and security, which then reinforces the leader’s religious authority in a positive-feedback loop. The only problem, however, is that you need a new form of religion, one that can overcome the inherent scale limitations of ancestor worship and other kinds of particularistic forms of worship.

We seem to be getting closer to a fuller explanation for pristine state formation. We need the confluence of several factors. First, there needs to be a sufficient abundance of resources to permit the creation of surpluses above what is necessary for subsistence.

But more often abundance is made possible through technological advances like agriculture. Second, the absolute scale of the society has to be sufficiently large to permit the emergence of a rudimentary division of labor and a ruling elite. Third, that population needs to be physically constrained so that it increases in density when technological opportunities present themselves, and in order to make sure that subjects cannot run

away when coerced. And finally, tribal groups have to be motivated to give up their freedom to the authority of a state. This can come about through the threat of physical extinction by other, increasingly well-organized groups. Or it can result from the charismatic authority of a religious leader.

The particular form that social organization takes is frequently the result of rational deliberation at higher levels of development. But at lower ones, it evolves spontaneously out of the building blocks created by human biology.

WHY WEREN’T STATES UNIVERSAL?

Understanding the conditions under which pristine state formation occurred is interesting because it helps to define some of the material conditions under which states emerge. But in the end, there are too many interacting factors to be able to develop one strong, predictive theory of when and how states formed.

the vast majority of states around the world were the products of competitive rather than pristine state formation.

Ancient China refers to the period from earliest prehistory up to the beginning of the Qin Dynasty, which marked the unification of China as a single empire.

The transition from a tribal to a state-level society took place gradually in China, with state institutions being layered on top of kinship-based social structures.

In this early phase of Chinese history, society was organized as lineages, agnatic groups claiming descent from a common ancestor.

One of the great constants in Chinese history is the importance of family and kinship to social organization.

Kinship in Chinese society is strictly patrilineal or agnatic. The lineage has been defined by one anthropologist as “a corporate group which celebrates ritual unity and is based on demonstrated descent from a common ancestor.”