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

by Francis Fukuyama

ties to the family compete with loyalty to the city that the guardians protect.

a deep-seated human urge to promote and protect the interests of descendants, friends, and clients against the requirements of an impersonal social system.

the result was that higher attempted tax rates yielded lower actual levels of tax revenues.

none among the reaya could aspire to become a member of the ruling elite, to bear arms, or to serve as a soldier or bureaucrat in the Ottoman administration.

No one outside the Muslim world ever thought that it was legitimate to enslave and then elevate foreigners to high positions in government.

What never occurred to any European or American was to turn their slaves into high government officials.

the Arabs and Ottomans, who literally kidnapped children and raised them in artificial households so they would be loyal to the state and not to their kin.

noted the striking contrast between marriage patterns in Western Europe and virtually every other part of the world.

Hajnal dated this pattern back to a period between 1400 and 1650.

individuals and not their families or kin groups could make important decisions about marriage, property, and other personal issues.

states were formed on top of societies in which individuals already enjoyed substantial freedom

the origins of English individualism shows that the right of individuals to freely alienate their property while still alive and disinherit their children in testamentary wills was already well established in the English Common Law by the early sixteenth century.

“peasant societies” that were characteristic of Eastern Europe and much of the rest of the world, kinship obligations imposed severe entails on the ability of property owners to sell their land.

Englishwomen had the right to hold and dispose of property freely and to sell it to individuals outside the family

Granting such rights in a patrilineal society would have the effect of undermining the lineage’s ability to control property, and would thus undermine the social system as a whole.10

“The boy cut the sack in two, covered his grandfather with half of it, and showed his father the other half, to signify that just as his father had mistreated his grandfather, so the boy when his turn came would mistreat his father in his old age and cover him when he was cold with only half a sack.”

Putting one’s parents out to pasture in a nursing home has very deep historical roots in Western Europe. This suggests that, contrary to Marx, capitalism was the consequence rather than the cause of a change in social relationships and custom.

This shift was driven by the Catholic church, which took a strong stand against four practices: marriages between close kin, marriages to the widows of dead relatives (the so-called levirate), the adoption of children, and divorce.

to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity in the sixth century, notes how Gregory explicitly condemned the tribe’s practices of marriage to close relatives and the levirate.

Later church edicts forbade concubinage, and promoted an indissoluble, monogamous lifetime marriag...

five. The probability of a couple’s producing a male heir who survived into adulthood and who could carry on the ancestral line was quite low. As a result, societies legitimated a wide range of practices that allowed individuals to produce heirs. Concubinage

Cross-cousin marriage ensured that property would remain in the hands of close family members.

the church systematically cut off all available avenues that families had for passing down property to descendants. At the same time, it strongly promoted voluntary donations of land and property to itself.

The church thus stood to benefit materially from an increasing pool of property-owning Christ...

The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church’s self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby reconvey her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself. A woman’s right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church, since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows and spinsters.

result, a far more individualistic European society was already in place during the Middle Ages, before the process of state building began,

change in the family was more likely a facilitative condition for modernization to happen in the first place.

An emerging capitalist economy

did not have to overcome the resistance of large corporately organized kinship groups with substantial property t...

“every peasant revolt in the West was an expression of enraged human dignity at the landlord’s breach of contract, and a demand for the right to ‘freedom.’”

This did not happen in societies where land rights were kin based and customary, or else based on the physical domination of one kin group over another.

European societies made an early exit from tribal-level organization, and did so without the benefit of top-down political power.

their ability to dispense justice.

The law is a body of abstract rules of justice that bind a community together.

Legislation, on the other hand, corresponds to what is now called positive law and is a function of political power, that is, the ability of a king, baron, president, legislature, or warlord to make and enforce new rules based ultimately on some combination of power and authority.

they must legislate according to the rules set by the preexisting law and not according to their own volition.

we have come to understand the law as something created by human beings, but only under a strict set of procedural rules that guarantee that they conform to a broad social consensus over basic values.

The absence of a strong rule of law is indeed one of the principal reasons why poor countries can’t achieve higher rates of growth.

No one will make long-term investments unless he knows that his property rights are secure.

it is perfectly possible to have “good enough” property rights and contract enforcement that permit economic development without the existence of a true rule of law in the sense of the law being the final sovereign.

There is no true rule of law in China today: the Chinese Communist Party does not accept the authority of any other institution in China as superior to it or able to overturn its decisions.

a cultural milieu that encouraged risk and experimentation,

Hayek took aim at what he labeled the “rationalist” or “constructivist” understanding of the origins of law, namely, that it proceeded from the will of a legislator who rationally studied the problems of society and devised a law to establish what he thought was a better social order.

who thought the human mind was sufficient to understand the workings of human society.

The bulk of knowledge in a society was local in character and dispersed throughout the whole society; no individual could master enough information to anticipate the effects of a planned change in the laws or rules.

Nietzsche

the introduction of Christianity was to have profound implications for morality

peaceful saints and...

a doctrine of universa...

ran counter to the hierarchy of an honor-based...