*** Welcome to piglix ***

The Origins of Political Order


The Origins of Political Order is a 2011 book by political economist Francis Fukuyama about what makes a state stable. It uses a comparative political history to develop a theory of the stability of a political system. According to Fukuyama, a stable state needs to be modern and strong, to obey the rule of law governing the state and be accountable.

The book is the first of two books on the development of political order. This book goes from its origins to the French Revolution. The next book Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day, published in September 2014, starts with the French Revolution and carries the analysis to the present day.

The book is an attempt to understand why modern statebuilding and the building of institutions in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone and Liberia have failed to live up to expectations.

In the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US administration seemed genuinely surprised when the Iraqi state itself collapsed in an orgy of looting and civil conflict.

The book is about "getting to Denmark," in other words creating stable, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and honest societies. Fukuyama points out that at the time of writing ninety contemporary 'primitive' societies had been engaged in war, suggesting that political order is preferable to primitive social structures if stability is to be achieved. The author describes how attempts at shaping countries outside the western world into western type democracies failed, and that this book was an attempt to find out why, by trying to find the true origins of political order, by tracing the histories of China, India, Europe and some Muslim countries from the point of view of three components.

Since the aim of the book is to understand how institutions and states develop in different countries, it is also a book on comparative historical research.

It is an extension of Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies and similar in scope to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.


...
Wikipedia

...