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

by Francis Fukuyama

In a tradition that starts with Karl Marx, “feudalism” is often taken to refer to an exploitative economic relationship between lord and peasant that existed in medieval Europe, centering around the manor.

A more historically accurate definition of feudalism was laid out by the historian Marc Bloch, focusing on the institutions of the fief and vassalage as they existed in medieval Europe. The fief was a contractual agreement between lord and vassal by which the latter was given protection and a plot of land in return for serving the lord in a military capacity.

The relationship of dependency entailed clear obligations on both sides and needed to be renewed annually.

The vassal could then create subfiefs out of his lands and enter into relationships with his own vassals. The system generated its own complex set of ethical norms concerning honor, loyalty, and courtly love.

From the standpoint of political development, the critical aspect of European feudalism was not the economic relationship between lord and vassal but the decentralization of power it implied. In the words of the historian Joseph Strayer, “Western European feudalism is essentially political—it is a form of government … in which political authority is monopolized by ...

The core of the institution was the grant of the fiefdom, benefice, or appanage, a delineated territory over which the vassal exerted some degree of political control. Despite the theoretical revocability of feudal contracts, European vassals over time turned their fiefdoms into patrimony, that is, property that they could hand down to their descendants.

There were a number of important differences between Chinese feudalism under the Zhou and its European variant.

European feudalism was a mechanism for binding unrelated lords to unrelated vassals, facilitating social cooperation in a society where complex kinship no longer existed. In China, by contrast, the primary political actors were not individual lords but lords and their kinship groups. Within a European lord’s domain, impersonal administration had already begun to take root, in the form of the feudal contract between lord and peasant. Authority was vested in the lord himself and not in the lord’s clan.

In China, on the other hand, fiefdoms were granted to kinship groups, who could then subinfeudate their lands to sublineages or collateral branches of the tribe. The authority of an individual Chinese noble was therefore less hierarchical and weaker than that of a European lord, because he himself was embedded in a larger kinship framework that limited his discretion.

In the clan-based organization of Zhou society, armies were themselves segmented, with no centralized command and control. Each lineage raised its own forces and combined (like Nuer segments) into larger units.

The political scientist Charles Tilly has famously argued that European state building was driven by the need of European monarchs to wage war.1 The correlation between war and state building is not a universal one; this process has not, by and large, played out in Latin America.2 But war was without question the single most important driver of state formation during China’s Eastern Zhou Dynasty.

INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS BROUGHT ON BY CONSTANT WARFARE

Intensive warfare created incentives powerful enough to lead to the destruction of old institutions and the creation of new ones to take their place.

Military Organization

The first consequence of this high level of warfare was, unsurprisingly, an evolution in the military organizations of the warring states.

Physical losses to the ranks of the aristocracy also had the effect of encouraging promotion within the military based on merit. In the early Zhou, positions of military leadership were claimed entirely on the basis of kinship and status within the clan. But as time went on, an increasing number of nonaristocratic leaders were promoted on the basis of their valor in battle. States began to offer explicit incentives of land, titles, and serfs as inducements to soldiers, and it soon became common for obscure commoners to rise to the position of general.9 In a field army at war, meritocracy is not a cultural norm but a condition for survival, and it is very likely that the principle of merit-based promotion began in military hierarchies before it was introduced into the civilian bureaucracy.

The Growth of Bureaucracy

It is safe to say that the Chinese invented modern bureaucracy, that is, a permanent administrative cadre selected on the basis of ability rather than kinship or patrimonial connection. Bureaucracy emerged unplanned from the chaos of Zhou China, in response to the urgent necessity of extracting taxes to pay for war.

Bureaucratization began in the army with the expansion of service from aristocrats to commoners. The army hierarchy needed to conscript, equip, and train large numbers of people, which required record-keeping and logistics services. The need to fund the army then increased demand for a civilian bureaucracy, in order to collect taxes and ensure the continuity in conditions of large-scale mobilization. The military bureaucracy also served as a training ground for civilian bureaucrats and facilitated growth of a command-and-control infrastructure.12 The self-immolation of the Zhou aristocracy in internecine conflicts in the meantime created great opportunities for the upward social mobility of ministerial families.

Hence the principle of promotion by merit rather than birth began to take hold slowly as the ranks of the nobility became depleted.

Civilian Technological Innovation

Both intensive and extensive economic growth took place in China from the fourth to the third century B.C. Intensive growth was fueled by a number of technological innovations, including the shift from bronze tools to iron, and then the development of iron-casting techniques based on doubleaction piston bellows; better techniques for yoking animals to plows; and improved land and water management. Commercial interactions increased between different parts of China, and population began to grow dramatically.

This economic growth was to some extent what economists call “exogenous,” meaning that it occurred as a result of fortuitous technological innovations that were not driven by the internal logic of the economic system. One of the critical external drivers was military insecurity. All states

in the Warring States period felt huge pressures to increase levels of taxation, and therefore levels of agricultural productivity; all of them copied innovations and used them to increase their own relative power positions.

Ideas

It is notable that the extremely violent centuries of the late Spring and Autumn and the Warring States era produced one of the greatest cultural outpourings in China’s history. The extreme social dislocation created by perpetual wars occasioned considerable reflection on political and moral matters, and also created opportunities for talented teachers, writers, and advisers to make their mark. One of the many itinerant teachers attracting students in this period was Confucius, who came out of the gentry but had to make his own way as a scholar and teacher. There were many other writers as well during the so-called Hundred Schools of Thought period of the early Warring States era, including Mozi, Mencius, Sun Tzu, Han Fei, and Xun Zi, each of whom left writings that influenced Chinese politics over succeeding centuries.

The political significance of this intellectual ferment was twofold. First, it created something like an ideology, that is, a received set of ideas for the proper ordering of government by which later generations of Chinese could judge the performance of their political leaders.

Second, the mobility of intellectuals across China encouraged the growth of something that

looked increasingly like a national culture. The great Chinese classics composed in this period became the basis of elite education and the foundation of subsequent Chinese culture. National identity came to be anchored in knowledge of the classics; their prestige was such that they penetrated into the remotest parts of the empire and indeed well beyond the empire’s borders.

Modern state institutions were gradually implemented all over China in the later years of the Zhou Dynasty, but nowhere more so than in the western state of Qin. In most cases the adoption of new institutions came haphazardly, as the result of trial and error and dire necessity on the part of different governments. Qin, by contrast, formulated an ideology of state building that explicitly laid out the logic of the new centralized state. The Qin state builders saw clearly that the kinship networks of earlier ages were impediments to the accumulation of power, so they implemented policies deliberately intended to replace them with a system that tied individuals directly to the state. This doctrine was called Legalism.

Shang Yang began his career as a minister in the state of Wei before moving to what was then the relatively backward state of Qin and becoming the chief adviser to its leader, Duke Xiao. Upon his arrival, he struggled with the existing patrimonial administration. He attacked their inherited privileges and eventually succeeded in replacing hereditary office with a system of twenty ranks that were to be awarded on the basis of merit—meaning, in the case of this frontier state, military merit. Land, retainers, women slaves, and clothing were all to be allocated by the state on the basis of performance.16 Conversely, failure to obey the state’s laws would be met with a series of draconian punishments.

One of Shang Yang’s most important reforms was abolition of the so-called well-field system and redistribution of land to individual families under the direct tutelage of the state.

Shang Yang’s massive effort at social engineering replaced the traditional kinship-based system of authority and landownership with a far more impersonal form of rule centering on the state. It obviously generated tremendous opposition on the part of the patrimonial aristocracy within the state of Qin itself.

Confucianism did not envisage any institutional checks on the power of the emperor; rather, it sought to educate the prince, to moderate his passions and make him feel accountable to his people. Good government achieved through princely education is not unknown in the Western tradition; this is in effect the system outlined by Socrates in his description of a just city in Plato’s Republic.

We should not be fooled by the Legalists’ emphasis on law into thinking that their doctrine had anything to do with rule of law in the sense I use that term in this book. In the West, in India, and in the Muslim world, there was a body of preexisting law, sanctified by religion and safeguarded by a hierarchy of priests and clerics, that was prior to and independent of the state. This law was seen as being older, higher, and more legitimate than the current ruler and therefore binding on him. That is the meaning of the rule of law: even the king or emperor is bound by law and not free simply to do as he pleases.

Rule of law in this sense never existed in China, and least of all for the Legalists. For them, law was simply the codification of whatever the king or ruler dictated,

WHY CHINA’S DEVELOPMENT PATH DIFFERED FROM EUROPE’S

One of the great metahistorical questions addressed by scholars such as Victoria Hui is why the

multipolar Chinese state system of the third century B.C. ultimately consolidated into a single large empire...

There are a number of possible explanations for this. First on the list is geography. Europe is cut up into multiple regions by broad rivers, forests, seas, and high mountain ranges:

The first Chinese empire, by contrast, emerged in only a portion of present-day China, along a northerly west-east axis from the Wei River valley to the Shandong peninsula. This entire region was easily traversed by the armies of the day, particularly following the construction of numerous roads and canals in the Warring States period. Only after this core region consolidated as a single, powerful state did it expand to the south, north, and southwest.

A second factor is related to culture. There were ethnic differences between the Shang and Zhou tribes, but the states that emerged during the Zhou Dynasty were not clearly differentiated by ethnicity and language to the extent that Romans, Germans, Celts, Franks, Vikings, Slavs, and Huns were.

But the final reason has to do directly with the different paths that political development took in China and in Europe. Europe never saw the emergence of a powerful absolutist state like Qin except for the Duchy of Muscovy,

Those states like France and Spain in the late seventeenth century that are commonly spoken of as “absolutist” were, as we will see, considerably weaker in their power to tax and mobilize their societies than was the state of Qin in the third century B.C. When would-be absolutist monarchs began their state-building projects, they were checked by other well-organized social groups: an entrenched hereditary aristocracy, the Catholic church, a sometimes well-organized peasantry, and independent, self-governing cities, all of which could operate flexibly across dynastic boundaries.

Things were very different in China. Because it was based on an extended kinship system, the Chinese feudal aristocracy never established the same kind of local authority that European lords did. The Chinese nobles’ power base in a lineage was geographically diffused and intertwined with other kin groups, in contrast to the strong hierarchical local political sovereignties that developed under European feudalism.

China during the Zhou Dynasty thus never developed a powerful, hereditary landed aristocracy comparable to the one that would develop in Europe. The three-way struggle among monarch, aristocracy, and Third Estate that was so important to the development of modern European political institutions never happened in China. Instead, there was a precociously modern centralized state that defeated all of its potential rivals early on.

MANY MODERNIZATIONS

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.

In addition, no independent commercial bourgeoisie had developed in Warring States China. Cities were political and administrative hubs, not c...

independence and self-government. There was no social prestige attached to being a merchant or craftsman; status was associated with landownership.33 Property rights existed, but they were not configu...