Why have some countries developed stable institutions like public safety, a legal system and national defense while others have not? The author delves into the making of the first stable and effective modern states, notably in Prussia, where Calvinist doctrine infused in leaders a sense of austerity, thrift and intolerance of corruption, and spurred a substantial army and education and taxation systems.
Fukuyama defines institutions, after Huntington, as “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior” around which humans act for the greater good. Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), in which Huntington argued that “before a polity could be democratic, it had to provide basic order”-e.g., the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in France. Fukuyama is commenting on (and updating) his teacher Samuel P. Moving from the French Revolution onward and using myriad examples from Prussia to Nigeria, the author lays out the evolution of three essential political institutions: the state, the rule of law and democratic accountability. I was thus left under the impression that no one, including possibly even the author, has read the book-as a book-from page 1 to page 609, because such copy-and-paste repetitions would have been deleted.In his companion to The Origins of the Political Order, the deeply engaged political scientist offers a compelling historical overview of a useful template for the retooling of institutions in the modern state.įormer neoconservative academic Fukuyama (International Studies/Stanford Univ.) is concerned about the functionality of government, specifically what he sees as the current “vetocracy” in the United States, which signals the beginning of political decay. Moreover, it is only on page 201 that we learn that the original idea about the sequencing of civil service and democracy belongs to Martin Shefter.
One grows a bit tired of this repetition. But then repeats this at least twenty times in the following chapters. He uses, among others, the examples of Germany (democracy after civil service) and Italy and Greece (the reverse) to illustrate his point. Early on Fukuyama makes a very interesting and important point that countries that democratize too early before a strong civil service has been created, almost inevitably develop clientilistic politics. I found these word for word repetitions rather annoying because they seem to be somewhat condescending to the reader. Lots of that unnecessary length is also due to quasi verbatim repetitions of certain points.
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