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

     I'm reading another Fukuyama book, this one about the development of the state in human history. Throughout the book, I have not been able to stop thinking about how Fukuyama's beliefs contrast so heavily with those of Wengrow and Graeber in The Dawn of Everything. While the authors of Dawn reject the hypothesis that the powerful state is a better way to govern humanity, Fukuyama embraces it. Right in the beginning of the book, Fukuyama writes that:

"The kinds of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left or Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian's paradise. The region as a whole is a low-tax utopia, with governments often unable to collect more than 10 percent of GDP in taxes, compared to more than 30 percent in the United States and 50% in parts of Europe. Rather than unleashing entrepreneurship, this low rate of taxation means that basic public services like health, education, and pothole filling are starved of funding."

I also couldn't stop thinking about how Fukuyama contrasts with Karl Popper. Whereas Popper completely rejected "historicism," the idea that history has a path that develops into some more-or-less inevitable end, Fukuyama writes that "The obvious reality is that human societies evolve over time." And that "Even if we scrupulously avoid value judgments about later civilizations being 'higher' than earlier ones, they clearly become more complex, richer, and more powerful." Of course, I think that Wengrow and Graeber's obvious response would be: who is more powerful? Is it everyone in society, or just an elite few?

    In that comparison to other books, I felt like Fukuyama was lacking compared to Wengrow and Graeber in the early portions of anthropological analysis. In Dawn, the authors were much more critical and, by nature of having an entire book dedicated to the topic rather than Fukuyama's single part, went into much greater detail. Fukuyama's comparative strengths include his Hegelian analysis of recognition and honor; Fukuyama clearly likes Hegel a lot more than Popper did. Once Fukuyama gets into more recent history, like the part on China, his writing gets much better.

    Fukuyama touches on the value of land, which has come up a lot in my readings. Interestingly, he writes that for Greeks and Romans, land was not just valued for its productive potential, but because it was also "where dead ancestors and the family's immovable hearth resided." Since land rights in those times were "usufructuary," it was not easy for individuals to sell or alienate their land. There was nothing like the modern housing market. Property was connected to kinship and a sense that no one individual owned it, but an entire family of ancestors, living, and those not yet born. Similarly, in China, "the lineage as a whole owned the property," meaning men through the agnatic (male) line, and land was difficult to alienate from the lineage.

    Fukuyama makes a distinction between state-level societies and tribal societies and another distinction between patrimonial societies and contract/individualized societies. States are distinguished by Fukuyama from tribes due to their (1) centralized source of power, like a king, (2) that the source of authority is backed by a monopoly of the legitimate means of coercion, (3) that the authority of the state is territorial rather than kin-based, (4) that states are more stratified and unequal than tribes, and (5) that states are legitimated by more elaborate forms of religious believe with a separate priestly class to guard it. "Patrimonial" refers to kin-based networks, whereas "feudal" refers to contract networks. Whereas in ancient China people were tied together and governed (allegedly) through kin networks on the basis of a sort of personal jurisdiction, medieval Europeans were governed through contracts between vassals and lords through a territorial jurisdiction.

    Fukuyama, however, describes some Chinese attempts at creating a feudal system that differed from Europe's. Whereas tribal institutions were destroyed at the beginning of Europe's feudal period, Chinese feudalism under the Zhou dynasty retained more patrimonialism. Whereas European feudalism was a way to bring unrelated lords to be bound to their unrelated vassals, Chinese feudalism was based on lords and their kinship groups. European feudalism vested power in the lord, but Chinese feudalism vested it in his clan as well. Chinese fiefdoms granted land to the clan itself, which distributed it as it saw fit within the family. The result of this is that China did not develop the local aristocracy that became a common feature across Europe. This meant that while Chinese nobility was diffused across geography and protected by their kin relationships, European aristocratic families were bound to one smaller area, and governed by legal, contractual relationships with their king. The type of Chinese feudalism that occurred during the Zhao dynasty, in which local families gained local power bases, popped up every now and then throughout Chinese history, but was always followed by a period in which the central government regained its footing and reasserted control over the area. This meant that territorial lords never became strong enough to force a constitutional compromise on the monarch, and so there was no "Chinese Magna Carta." Because the contractual relationship between the lords and their kings provided the basis for the common law and rule of law in Europe, that became the basis of the legal systems of the western world in which states were constrained by obligations to those they ruled. Such a development did not occur in Chinese history.

    Fukuyama writes that India developed strongly first as a social concept, but not a political concept, and that the empires that ruled India were unable to create strong states like China did because of that. I am just very skeptical of his argumentation on India. It feels like Fukuyama isn't adequately addressing the significant centralization of Indian kingdoms throughout history. The issue I think is Fukuyama's historicism is preventing him from really deeply researching India. He even writes that, "This history is very complex and rather unedifying to study since it is hard to place into a larger narrative of political development." Well there you have it. Fukuyama's theories of development just don't seem to account for India very well.

    The primary driver of state development for Fukuyama is war. He points out that over the 294-year Spring and Autumn period in China, more than 1,211 wars were fought among the Chinese "states," with only 38 years of peace. 110 political units were extinguished, and in the 254 years of the subsequent Warring States period, 458 wars took place with 89 peaceful years. The result was that different political groups hardened over these centuries into true states (and I think this is the point where Wengrow and Graeber would point out that state development certainly wasn't a good thing to all the war dead and their families). But despite all the war, Fukuyama draws out positives. He argues that the political instability caused a sort of "intellectual ferment," in which intellectuals were able to move from one jurisdiction to another to offer their services to different political authorities. This was significant because it created new ideologies, Legalism and Confucianism, and also because it created a national elite culture, wherein the great Chinese classics became truly "Chinese," rather than regional. India, on the other hand, never experienced a centuries-long period of continuous violence like China, Europe, or the Middle East, and so India never faced the same requirements for social mobilization as those regions. 

    The primary killer of state development for Fukuyama is patrimonialism, as in the forces of familial relations driving against state development. So like Plato, Fukuyama believes the family is the enemy of the state. The conflict emerges because a state necessarily governs over many different families, many different lineages, many different ethnicities, and so on. And if people return to an identity-based way of seeing the world and identity-based governance, the state cannot survive. And so tribalism is the default form of political organization, to which we are always degrading if we are not consciously fighting against it. Abolishing kinship as the basis of social and political organization is hard when you are constantly fighting against "repatrimonialization," a process that Fukuyama details in the Ottoman Empire.

    I think that Fukuyama's arguments about war being the basis of state development are strong as well as his arguments about the dangers of patrimonialism and repatrimonialization for the state. However, I think that he is weaker when discussing India and doesn't get to a really satisfying notion of why Europe was exceptional. He contrasts himself from Marxists who see the rise of individualism and the nuclear family driven by economic change and from Weberians who view Protestantism as the main driver by focusing on war and on the legal relationship between kings, lords, and vassals. I think this contract analysis is a good argument for the development of the rule of law, but I am not convinced that this is the primary explanation for European exceptionalism in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Really, I am more of the opinion that there is no exceptionalism at all, and that in the bigger time scale, three centuries of European domination of the world are significant only in their geographic scope, but a blip on the timeline. The age of colonization and imperialism, to me, is better explained by simple geography giving Europe access to a world cleared of people by disease and genocide and a cheap way to steal people from another continent to exploit for free labor in the Americas. Within a century of the end of slavery, Europe was in steep decline relative to the world.

    Fukuyama goes into an interesting discussion of the rule of law in Part Three, defining it as "a social consensus within a society that its laws are just and that they preexist and should constrain the behavior of whoever happens to be the ruler at a given time. The ruler is not sovereign; the law is sovereign, and the ruler gains legitimacy only insofar as he derives his powers from the law." Fukuyama believes that Europe was the first region to develop rule of law due to the existence of the Catholic church introducing a separate religious authority that bound rulers, shepherding in the idea that rulers could be bound by a higher power. Nothing like this ever happened in China, Fukuyama points out, and he reasons that although religion had some binding power in India, there was no Brahmin Pope, and the Muslim caliph had always been a captive of the dominant political establishment. However, he doesn't fully explain why the countries that first developed stable democracies were those that were Protestants. That would seem to contradict the idea that the Catholic church was the force behind the rule of law.

    In Part Four, Fukuyama analyzes accountability, the idea that the rulers believe that the are responsible to the people and put the people's interests first. This, he argues, comes from a balance being achieved between the different ruling factions in a society that results in each limiting the other. Here, I think his analysis is somewhat weak. For example, he talks about medieval Hungary as an alternative to the UK, with the "Golden Bull" being equivalent to the Magna Carta, a document used by the nobility to weaken the king. However, in Hungary, the nobility was too strong, and they made the central power so weak that the kingdom was defeated from the outside... three hundred years later. And that's my biggest problem with Fukuyama's analysis. I think calling a government a failure due to what happened three hundred years later is too far sighted and risks losing the important details in favor of establishing the author's preferred narrative. Moreover, when Fukuyama differentiates between Hungary and England by saying that England was different due to its more mobile social structure and traditions of individual liberty, I think he completely ignores the geographic differences. Hungary is in the middle of Europe, bound by land borders on all sides (except when united with Croatia). It faces more external threats than England, touching only Scotland and Wales, both of which it conquered. My thought is that liberal democracy is a slower, weaker form of government (although it is much more just), and that it struggles in polities surrounded by enemies, which is why so many democracies declare emergencies when at war. I think Fukuyama really underestimates the role of geopolitics in his book.

    That said, I do think Fukuyama has good things to say about how the feudal order in Europe differed from the imperial order in China and promoted a more stable government and society. For example, after Louis XIV defeated insurgent nobles in the Fronde rebellion, he pardoned them. If they had been Chinese aristocrats, they would have probably been executed. The Chinese way of doing things seems like it would eventually promote more instability. And I think that as Fukuyama goes on in Part Five, he does good analysis of why it was England that emerged with a stable liberal democracy, and why Spain, France, Russia, and others failed due to either too much centralized power, too much power in the nobility, selling venal offices, or some combination of those. One example is that through the entrenchment of serfdom in Eastern Europe, lords in the country remained more powerful than burghers in the city, and since cities are needed for the development of capitalism, Eastern Europe failed to leave the old, Malthusian world of shortages, which was necessary for political development. A really interesting point of view is that part of what makes the democratic revolution so effective is that it makes taxation legitimate. The democratic public will actually pay its taxes willingly, since it believes it is paying for a useful service, rather than being extracted by a predatory lord. This is why, says Fukuyama, for the period after the Glorious Revolution but before the French Revolution, England was able to collect more in taxes than France, giving its empire the critical advantage in years to come.

    I think the thesis of this book is summed up when Fukuyama writes that, "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." I think he is right on all accounts, but that he ignores the international perspective. I think democracies also require some level of international security to develop, and that international law, in the absence of favorable geography, is a useful tool for promoting democracy.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Unlike Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who are all people of the book, the Brahmins of early Hinduism strongly resisted writing down their beliefs in the years of early and proto-Hinduism.
• Reading about the Turkish devshirme, in which boys were stolen from their families to be slave soldiers, and I noticed the boys were between 12 and 20 years old. This makes perfect sense in the context of the part of Dawn where it talks about how slavery is meant to steal the years of teaching invested in a young child before they become productive in society.
• I am still shocked by how often I read someone misunderstanding or misusing the "end of history" quote. I just read in "The Reckoning That Wasn't" by Andrew Bacevich in Foreign Affairs that, "The alleged 'end of history' had resulted in a unipolar order over which a sole superpower presided as the world’s 'indispensable nation.'" Am I wrong or is he conflating two different ideas? One is about the power of the United States, but that isn't "the end of history." The end of history refers, I thought, to the idea that once there were (1) strong, capable states that were (2) subordinated to the rule of law and (3) accountable to all citizens, the rest of the world has just been replicating those institutions. If one proposes that we are not at "the end of history," wouldn't the proponent need to show there is another idea normatively contending against liberal democracy? I don't see any evidence of Chinese authoritarianism or Russian oligarch-capitalism seriously doing that.
• In 1954, South Korea's per capita GDP was lower than Nigeria's. Despite, or because of, taking in $300 billion in oil revenues over the following fifty years, Nigeria failed to grow, and actually shrank in per capita GDP between 1975 and 1995. Meanwhile, South Korea grew into the world's twelfth-largest economy by 1997.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

     I picked up Ways of Seeing, a very short book, because I saw a passage from it on the male gaze that I found very interesting. I learned it is based on a BBC 4-part series, and that the book is not just about seeing as a sense, but is really a book about art. I definitely missed out on a big part of the book by reading it on my kindle, where the art was copied in a very crude way. I will definitely need to watch the BBC series to get the full effect at some point.

    The quote from Berger that made me want to read the book was the following:

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

I thought this passage was interesting in its reflection on both women's depiction in art and women's reality. In the art, this sentiment is shown in works where women are contorted in inhuman ways to bare their bodies, usually frontal nudity in European art, to the viewer. Their expression is not the authentic expression of how the woman in the painting would react to the scene around her, but is modified to satisfy the male viewer's pleasure, the male gaze. 

    Berger notes that in other artistic traditions from Persia, India, Africa, and the pre-Columbian Americas, when a woman is naked in a work of art, the theme is usually sexual attraction or fertility, and often, the art depicts the act of sexual love, with the woman as active as the man. But in European art, the nude is very frequently a totally passive woman, naked only so she can be looked at by the viewer. He writes that "to be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display."

    There is also a chapter on publicity and art in advertising that takes an anti-capitalist turn that surprises me. Berger isn't exactly proposing new solutions to the problems inherent in the industrial revolution or capitalism, but he makes interesting criticisms. He writes about how publicity is used to make us dissatisfied with our present way of life within the greater society. It encourages us, when faced with what others have and what we don't have, to become dissatisfied not with the world, but with ourselves. I think this is an incredibly prescient observation from the 1970s that has only gained more relevance today as we are shown more ads than ever through our smartphones and are less happier than ever before.

    On "glamour," Berger writes that it is a modern invention that did not exist "in the heyday of oil paintings." He writes that grace, elegance, and authority are all similar, but lack the enviability of glamour. Whereas some qualities like beauty, talent, and event wealth may belong to a person, glamour is in the eye of the beholder, dependent on others wanting to be like someone. Berger gets into some much deeper social commentary:

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. the pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its cases, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.

Whosh John, that was out of left field! But I think he gets at something interesting in the contradiction between a society that guarantees us the pursuit of happiness but not any specific level of material enjoyment. If we live in a stratified, unequal society, many people who work hard and do everything right will end up lucky and many people who don't work and do lots of things wrong will end up lucky and be in the ranks of the rich and powerful. That injustice inspires massive quantities of advertising, that serve to make us less happy by making us hopeful that new purchases will be the answer to our problems even though most of us will never get off the treadmill of working for a wage, paying it all back in housing, food, and other costs, and working to make it up again. This was a surprisingly good book.

Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem, translated by Aliza Shevrin

     I read the stories of Tevye the Dairyman, the protagonist of Fiddler on the Roof with my family as a sort of book of the month and they were a really great connection to old Yiddish storytelling. The stories are mostly funny, but sometimes sad depictions of life in a shtetl in Eastern Europe. The writing style uses dialogue more than most other books I've ever read, and that works with Tevye's character since he is always talking- quoting scripture, making jokes, and complaining. For example, "A little brandy? Ach, who would turn down a little brandy? How does it say in the Talmud: Who giveth life giveth also the fruit of the vine. Rashi interprets it as: God may be God, but brandy is brandy." Or when complaining about his wife and reflecting upon the wealth of the town butcher: "My God! I thought, wishing my children could live like this. What a lucky man this butcher was! Not only was he rich, but his two children were married, and he was a widower into the bargain!" Or after the death of a daughter: "Do you know what, Pani Sholem Aleichem? Let's better speak of something happier. What do you hear about the cholera in Odessa?" All in all, great stories that teach a lot about shtetl culture.