The Origins of Political Order Quotes

“Human beings are rule-following animals by nature; they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value. When the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs. Those institutions are supported by legions of entrenched stakeholders who oppose any fundamental change.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Most people living in rich, stable developed countries have no idea how Denmark itself got to be Denmark—something that is true for many Danes as well. The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance.5 In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“ACCOUNTABILITY TODAY As noted in the first chapter, the failure of democracy to consolidate itself in many parts of the world may be due less to the appeal of the idea itself than to the absence of those material and social conditions that make it possible for accountable government to emerge in the first place. That is, successful liberal democracy requires both a state that is strong, unified, and able to enforce laws on its own territory, and a society that is strong and cohesive and able to impose accountability on the state. It is the balance between a strong state and a strong society that makes democracy work, not just in seventeenth-century England but in contemporary developed democracies as well.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“the struggle to replace “tribal” politics with a more impersonal form of political relationships continues in the twenty-first century.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“The story of political development from this point in European history is the story of the interaction between these centralizing states and the social groups resisting them. Absolutist governments arose where the resisting groups were either weak and poorly organized, or else were co-opted by the state to help in extracting resources from other social groups that weren’t co-opted. Weak absolutist governments arose where the resisting groups were so strongly organized that the central government couldn’t dominate them. And accountable government arose when the state and the resisting groups were better balanced. The resisting groups were able to impose on the state the principle of “no taxation without representation”: they would supply it with substantial resources, but only if they had a say in how those resources were used.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“There is no clearer illustration of the importance of ideas to politics than the emergence of an Arab state under the Prophet Muhammad. The Arab tribes played an utterly marginal role in world history until that point; it was only Muhammad’s charismatic authority that allowed them to unify and project their power throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The tribes had no economic base to speak of; they gained economic power through the interaction of religious ideas and military organization, and then were able to take over agricultural societies that did produce surpluses.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“In China, once collective farms were disbanded in 1978 under the leadership of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, agricultural output doubled in the space of just four years. A”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“According to the historian John LeDonne, “The existence of a national network of families and client systems made a mockery of the rigid hierarchy established by legislative texts in a constant search for administrative order and ‘regularity.’ It explained why the Russian government, more than any other, was a government of men and not of laws.”28”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Inflation via loose monetary policy is in effect a tax, but one that does not have to be legislated and that tends to hurt ordinary people more than elites with real rather than monetary assets.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Human beings cooperate to compete, and they compete to cooperate. The birth of the Leviathan did not permanently solve the problem of violence; it simply moved it to a higher level.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“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.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“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. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. 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. Aristotle was more correct than these early modern liberal theorists when he said that human beings were political by nature. So while an individualistic understanding of human motivation may help to explain the activities of commodity traders and libertarian activists in present-day America, it is not the most helpful way to understand the early evolution of human politics. Everything”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“It is interesting to speculate whether commercial capitalism was thereby smothered in its crib in Egypt, just at a moment when it was beginning to take off in other places such as Italy, the Netherlands, and England.24 On”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“The opinion that the survival of Islam itself depended on the use of military slavery was shared by the great Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who lived in North Africa in the fourteenth century, contemporaneously with the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt. In the Muqadimmah, Ibn Khaldun says the following: When the [Abbasid] state was drowned in decadence and luxury and donned the garments of calamity and impotence and was overthrown by the heathen Tatars, who abolished the seat of the Caliphate and obliterated the splendor of the lands and made unbelief prevail in place of belief, because the people of the faith, sunk in self-indulgence, preoccupied with pleasure and abandoned to luxury, had become deficient in energy and reluctant to rally in defense, and had stripped off the skin of courage and the emblem of manhood—then, it was God’s benevolence that He rescued the faith by reviving its dying breath and restoring the unity of the Muslims in the Egyptian realms, preserving the order and defending the walls of Islam. He did this by sending to the Muslims, from this Turkish nation and from among its great and numerous tribes, rulers to defend them and utterly loyal helpers, who were brought from the House of War to the House of Islam under the rule of slavery, which hides in itself a divine blessing. By means of slavery they learn glory and blessing and are exposed to divine providence; cured by slavery, they enter the Muslim religion with the firm resolve of true believers and yet with nomadic virtues unsullied by debased nature, unadulterated with the filth of pleasure, undefiled by the ways of civilized living, and with their ardor unbroken by the profusion of luxury.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“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. We need therefore to better understand where those institutions come from.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“The presumption that a high rate of continuous economic growth is possible puts a premium on investment in the sorts of institutions and conditions that facilitate such growth, like political stability, property rights, technology, and scientific research. On the other hand, if we assume that there are only limited possibilities for productivity improvements, then societies are thrown into a zero-sum world in which predation, or the taking of resources from someone else, is often a far more plausible route to power and wealth.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Most human beings, in other words, would rather fight than starve.19”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“The father of communism, Karl Marx, famously predicted the “withering away of the state” once the proletarian revolution had achieved power and abolished private property. Left-wing revolutionaries from the nineteeth-century anarchists on thought it sufficient to destroy old power structures without giving serious thought to what would take their place. This tradition continues up through the present, with the suggestion by antiglobalization authors like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that economic injustice could be abolished by undermining the sovereignty of states and replacing it with a networked “multitude.”17 Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously. This in turn led a generation of democracy activists in Eastern Europe to envision their own form of statelessness, where a mobilized civil society would take the place of traditional political parties and centralized governments. 18 These activists were subsequently disillusioned by the realization that their societies could not be governed without institutions, and when they encountered the messy compromises required to build them. In the decades since the fall of communism, Eastern Europe is democratic, but it is not thereby necessarily happy with its politics or politicians.19 The fantasy of statelessness”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Political liberty—that is, the ability of societies to rule themselves—does not depend only on the degree to which a society can mobilize opposition to centralized power and impose constitutional constraints on the state. It must also have a state that is strong enough to act when action is required.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Natural human sociability is built around two principles, kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The principle of kin selection or inclusive fitness states that human beings will act altruistically toward genetic relatives (or individuals believed to be genetic relatives) in rough proportion to their shared genes. The principle of reciprocal altruism says that human beings will tend to develop relationships of mutual benefit or mutual harm as they interact with other individuals over time. Reciprocal altruism, unlike kin selection, does not depend on genetic relatedness; it does, however, depend on repeated, direct personal interaction and the trust relationships generated out of such interactions. These forms of social cooperation are the default ways human beings interact in the absence of incentives to adhere to other, more impersonal institutions. When impersonal institutions decay, these are the forms of cooperation that always reemerge because they are natural to human beings. What I have labeled patrimonialism is political recruitment based on either of these two principles. Thus, when bureaucratic offices were filled with the kinsmen of rulers at the end of the Han Dynasty in China, when the Janissaries wanted their sons to enter the corps, or when offices were sold as heritable property in ancien regime France, a natural patrimonial principle was simply reasserting itself.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions. The system’s instability is a reflection of what is ultimately a political failure, that is, the failure to provide sufficient regulatory oversight both at a national and an international level.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Readers of this volume might get the impression that some of the long historical continuities described here mean that societies are trapped by their histories, but in fact we live today under very different and more dynamic conditions.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“On further reflection, however, it seemed to me that it was perhaps a conceit to think that modern societies had progressed so far beyond Melanesia, since Big Men—that is, politicians who distribute resources to their relatives and supporters—are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, including the U.S. Congress. If political development implied movement beyond patrimonial relationships and personalistic politics, one also had to explain why these practices survived in many places and why seemingly modern systems often reverted to them.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“It takes only a couple of hours to fly from Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital, to Cairns or Brisbane in Australia, but in that flight one is in some sense traversing several thousand years of political development. In thinking about Melanesia’s political development challenges, I began to wonder how any society had ever made the transition from a tribal- to a state-level society, how modern property rights had evolved out of customary ones, and how formal legal systems, dependent on a kind of third-party enforcement that does not exist in traditional Melanesia, first made their appearance.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Political Order in Changing Societies took for granted the political world of a fairly late stage in human history, where such institutions as the state, political parties, law, military organizations, and the like all exist. It confronted the problem of developing countries trying to modernize their political systems but didn’t give an account of where those systems came from in the first place in societies where they were long established. Countries are not trapped by their pasts. But in many cases, things that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert major influence on the nature of politics.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Political liberty—that is, the ability of societies to rule themselves—does not depend only on the degree to which a society can mobilize opposition to centralized power and impose constitutional constraints on the state. It must also have a state that is strong enough to act when action is required. Accountability does not run in just one direction, from the state to the society. If the government cannot act cohesively, if there is no broader sense of public purpose, then one will not have laid the basis for true political liberty.”
― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“Figura 12. El poder político, hoy”
― Francis Fukuyama, Los orígenes del orden político: Desde la Prehistoria hasta la Revolución francesa (Deusto)