PDF Summary:The Origins of Political Order, by Francis Fukuyama

To understand the pressures on democracy in the 21st century, it’s important to understand what modern democracy is and where it came from. In The Origins of Political Order, political economist Francis Fukuyama explores the development of political systems from prehistory to the eve of the American and French revolutions in order to show how and why modern democracies evolved.

Fukuyama argues that a stable democratic society requires three components: a strong state, the rule of law, and accountability. In this guide, we’ll explore each of these components in detail and show, for example, how Chinese bureaucracy created the first modern state and how local English legal disputes eventually led to democracy. Along the way, we’ll build on, update, and sometimes challenge Fukuyama’s claims by referring to other works of political theory such as Sapiens, Humankind, and How Democracies Die.

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(Shortform note: Fukuyama’s distinction between “law” and “legislation” conflicts with the more commonly accepted definition of “legislation” as the procedure by which a lawmaking body creates and implements new laws. However, the basic principles Fukuyama describes line up with typical definitions of “the rule of law” as adherence to a set of publicly known and agreed-upon norms that apply equally to everyone—even the highest leaders in the land. Put simply, the rule of law means that there are rules governing how rulers can rule.)

Fukuyama argues that the rule of law typically comes from a culture’s religion. He asserts that in India and Western Europe, religious law (in the form of Indian Brahmanism and European Catholicism) shaped society before states ever emerged. Similarly, he argues that in the Islamic Middle East, religion and the state arose together, resulting in an Islamic state called a caliphate, in which a religious leader (a caliph) places checks on secular political authority. In all of these cases, leaders were bound by the idea that there was a divine law by which human law had to abide. As a result, leaders in these cultures had at least nominal checks on their power, and their legitimacy depended on their adherence to the rule of law.

(Shortform note: The possible religious basis of the rule of law is reflected in the fact that many national constitutions refer explicitly to God or specific religions. Similarly, even though the European Union’s proposed constitution ultimately rejected any explicit references to faith, it begins with a clause citing the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe” as the basis for the rule of law.)

The Importance of the Rule of Law

Fukuyama points out that a strong rule of law is important because it constrains government power. To say a society is bound by the rule of law is to say that governments and rulers don’t have absolute authority to do whatever they want—instead, their actions and decisions are legitimate only if they abide by the overarching law.

(Shortform note: In this way, the rule of law provides the distinction between monarchy and despotism—two forms of government based on rule by a single person. According to 18th-century political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu, a despotic leader wields absolute power and rules by fear, whereas a monarch is constrained by law and rules by honorable submission to the state.)

Because the rule of law limits governmental powers, it naturally follows that without the rule of law, governments tend toward authoritarianism—a system of government by an unrestrained, often oppressive central leadership that isn’t subject to checks and balances, opposing parties, or legitimate elections. Fukuyama gives China as an example of a culture where this tendency has existed historically and survives today. He says that the Chinese state religion never developed beyond ancestor worship. As a result, there was never a sense of a higher law by which Chinese rulers had to abide. Chinese rulers answered only to themselves—in effect, their policies were the supreme law.

(Shortform note: Though Fukuyama suggests that China’s history of authoritarian rule prevented the state from developing democratic institutions, in the late 20th century, Chinese political theorists debated whether authoritarianism was actually a path to democracy. A school of thought known as neo-authoritarianism took democracy as its end goal, but argued that getting there required a strong central government to dictate economic and social policy until society was stable enough to stand on its own. Scholars note that Chinese head of state Xi Jinping, who took office in 2013, appears to have based his rule on neo-authoritarian ideas.)

Limits of the Rule of Law

Although it places limits on governmental abuses of power, the rule of law alone is not enough to make a state democratic. In fact, Fukuyama points out that authoritarianism is still possible—albeit in a weaker form—in states that respect the rule of law.

For example, in the 16th and 17th centuries, France created a limited authoritarian state by selling off state offices. The state earned money from the sales, and office holders gained political influence, tax exemptions, and ongoing revenue streams. Fukuyama explains that this sale of offices began as a way to fund France’s massive war spending, but it had the side effect of fragmenting groups (such as the nobility, landowners, and wealthy commoners) who otherwise might have united to oppose state power.

Because office holders were interested in their personal gain, they never coalesced as a political unit. Meanwhile, French kings were still bound by the rule of law—unlike Chinese rulers, they weren't free to kill anyone who opposed them—but by essentially buying the loyalty of their opponents, they were left with few checks on their authority. However, Fukuyama says that in practice, this system limited the government’s power because it tied the state to a number of disparate private interests. These practices led to immense social and economic unfairness and left the government unable to reform itself—until the commoners who’d been left out of the system rose up in the French Revolution of 1789.

The Rule of Law Versus the Norms of Democracy

The sale of offices in pre-revolutionary France points to a fundamental limitation of the rule of law: The rule of law can restrict certain forms of political conduct—for example, it might forbid murdering your political opponents—but by itself, it doesn’t preclude rulers from finding legal ways to exploit their power.

That’s why, in How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that democracy is based not on explicit laws and constitutions, but instead on shared political norms—implicitly agreed-upon standards of conduct. The authors argue that the fundamental democratic norms are mutual toleration and institutional forbearance:

• Mutual toleration means accepting your opponents’ legitimate right to govern as long as they win in free and fair elections.

• Institutional forbearance means not using your political power to marginalize your opponents. For example, institutional forbearance would forbid selling government offices in order to fragment your opponents and hold onto power.

Norms ensure that political officials act in good faith, cooperating for the benefit of the country rather than using their power to subvert democracy. As a counterexample, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that Donald Trump’s presidency shows what happens when democratic norms fail to regulate political behavior. Trump was legally elected and constrained by the checks and balances of US law—and yet, the authors argue that by systematically flouting democratic norms, Trump eroded democracy in favor of authoritarianism.

Part 4: Accountability

The final piece of the puzzle that makes up a modern liberal democracy is accountability—a state’s commitment to the rights and needs of the people it governs. In this section, we’ll examine how accountability evolved in England.

Fukuyama emphasizes that England’s is not the only path to a modern liberal democracy—in fact, he criticizes much of political theory for being overly Anglocentric. But England is the only state to develop strong accountability in the time period this book covers (prehistory through the mid-18th century). In many other states, accountable government was a later development that was influenced by the American and French revolutions, 18th-century ideals of liberty and justice, and the Industrial Revolution.

Accountability Is Separate From Democracy

Fukuyama is specifically interested in democratic accountability—in which even elite officials must answer to the non-elite general public. But it’s worth noting that accountability and democracy don’t necessarily go hand-in–hand. To say that officials are accountable is merely to say that they have to answer for their actions and face repercussions for “wrong” actions (whatever that means in a given society).

A system that makes lower-level officials answerable only to higher-level officials is accountable, but not democratic. In other words, French lords and Chinese bureaucrats were accountable—to their sovereigns. What made England different was that English aristocrats, government officials, and even the monarch eventually had to answer to the English people as a whole.

Feudalism as a Precursor of Accountability

Before we turn to the specifics of English politics, it’s worth looking at the broader social and political context in which the English government evolved. Fukuyama argues that European development in general provided the basis for state accountability in the form of the feudal system—a hierarchical system of land ownership in which lords rented their lands to vassals (tenants who were granted rights to the land in exchange for their military or other service).

Fukuyama suggests that feudal societies created a balance of power between the state and the landed classes. Feudal nobles and gentry (a class of landowners who weren’t part of a state’s traditional hereditary nobility) had their own lands, their own incomes from those lands, and, in the case of nobility, castles and armies of their own. This gave them political leverage that counterbalanced state power and pushed rulers to cooperate with those they governed.

Also, feudalism created a nominal sense of obligation for the upper class toward the lower class. The feudal system was contractual in that lords and vassals were bound to uphold their obligations to each other. In theory, at least, those with higher status were supposed to protect those beneath them.

(Shortform note: “Feudalism” is a disputed concept among medieval historians, with some even arguing that the term is an entirely ahistorical construct with no basis in the textual record—according to this view, medieval society was too fluid and varied to be described in terms of any kind of system. Nonetheless, the historical record does back up Fukuyama’s basic points about social obligation and political power in medieval society. For example, various documents from the Middle Ages demonstrate the basic exchange of loyalty for protection as well as the obligation for lords to respect and defend their vassals’ rights.)

From Obligation to Accountability

Because the feudal balance of power placed them in a relatively strong bargaining position, the land-owning classes eventually sought to solidify and expand their rights and constrain royal power by implementing state constitutions. Fukuyama points out that England, in particular, developed its sense of accountability in part from the Magna Carta, a charter of rights imposed on King John by a group of barons in 1215.

The Magna Carta helped establish the English Parliament as well as the idea that English monarchs had to respect the rights of those they ruled—it promised its protections to “all freemen of our kingdom,” not just to the barons who devised it. In other words, the implicit message of the Magna Carta was that the monarch had to answer to the English people as a whole—not just to one or two elite political classes.

But constitutions alone weren’t enough to produce an accountable government, as demonstrated by Hungary. Fukuyama explains that in 1222, King Andrew II of Hungary was forced to accept the Golden Bull, a document superficially similar to England’s Magna Carta. But whereas the Magna Carta was a response to perceived oversteps by the king, the Golden Bull aimed to ease tensions between the traditional nobility and the newly emerging gentry. As a result, instead of creating political solidarity (as the Magna Carta did), the Golden Bull aligned the gentry with the nobility at the expense of the Hungarian state and its commoners—a move that undermined the government’s power and led to the country’s invasion and collapse.

National Identity Encourages Political Solidarity

One possible reason for England’s unusual political solidarity may have been the early emergence of an English national identity—that is, in order for the English barons to demand protection for all English people, they first had to be able to conceive of “the English people.” Though national identities seem ubiquitous today, in Imagined Communities, historian Benedict Anderson argues that nationalism is a comparatively recent concept—one that requires a shared cultural story that unites strangers from different communities and ethnic groups under a single national identity.

But whereas Anderson argues that national identity only emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, more recent scholars contend that England, in particular, first developed its national self-identity between the 5th and 10th centuries. For example, these scholars point to The Venerable Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (written around 731) as an early example of an English national mythology. In tracing the history of the English Christian church, Bede united a diverse collection of ethnic groups (such as Anglo-Saxons, Picts, and Gaels) under the single national label of “English.”

Over time, this new national identity proved remarkably resilient. For instance, even after the Norman conquest of 1066, Norman rulers referred to themselves as kings of England, thereby legitimizing the idea of “the English” as a coherent people.

By contrast, as Fukuyama notes, Hungary was invaded and colonized multiple times (by the Mongols in 1241 and the Ottomans in 1526) before eventually being absorbed into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867—a history that led to broad ethnic diversity but little sense of national identity. In fact, many scholars suggest that Hungarian national identity only truly emerged in the 20th century in response to Soviet rule and that ongoing attempts to forge such an identity are at the heart of Hungarian politics today.

Factors Leading to English Democracy

Fukuyama points out that England’s political solidarity was unusual for this time period—as in 13th-century Hungary and 18th-century France, it was most common for individual social groups to seek their own gain (for example, via tax exemptions) at the expense of the rest of society. Fukuyama argues that England was different for two reasons: English society’s long-standing organization around local politics and its emphasis on the legal system as the source of political legitimacy.

Factor #1: Shire Politics

Fukuyama says that from the start of the Anglo-Saxon period around AD 450, England was organized around local politics (shires) rather than kin groups. Shires were nominally led by a hereditary local official called an ealdorman, but Fukuyama says that real power lay with a royally appointed sheriff (a word derived from the title “shire reeve”). When the Normans conquered England in 1066, they left this system in place, though they redesignated “shires” as “counties”—which are still the main political division in contemporary England.

Shires were unique in that they were structured from the bottom up (through the ealdorman) and from the top down (through the sheriff), which led to a balance of power between state and local interests and a sense that the state was accountable to the shires just as the shires were to the state. Fukuyama explains that shire politics were open to all free men (later all landowners), which gave commoners a significant political voice. At the same time, as a representative of the crown, the sheriff imposed state authority at the local level.

(Shortform note: This emphasis on local politics eventually worked its way into the national government. From 1264-1265, Simon de Montfort, the 6th Earl of Leicester, ruled England after deposing Henry III in a civil war. During that time, de Montfort called the first Parliament to include ordinary citizens from England’s cities and towns. After de Montfort’s downfall, Henry III’s son, Edward I, made this practice standard, ordering that each Parliament be made up of nobles, clergymen, two knights representing each county, and two elected representatives from each city and town. These early Parliaments became the foundation for the modern division of Parliament into the House of Lords and the House of Commons.)

Factor #2: English Law and Consent of the Governed

According to Fukuyama, England’s local politics most commonly revolved around laws and courts, and as a result, English monarchs originally derived their legitimacy from their roles as legal arbiters. Fukuyama explains that in the 11th century, kings traveled around the country to preside over royal courts of appeals where citizens unhappy with the decisions of local legal officials or lords could seek redress.

Fukuyama says that under this system, the royal courts tended to support the property rights of non-elites seeking protection from noble abuses. By overturning local decisions, kings increased their prestige and demonstrated their authority over the noble courts. At the same time, they reinforced the rule of law and created strong popular support for the legal system.

The English Understanding of Divine Right

Though Fukuyama is right to emphasize the importance of the law in English political thought, early modern English theories of legitimacy appear to have been slightly more nuanced than his account suggests. In particular, Fukuyama’s theory of legal legitimacy stands in contrast to the theory of divine right, which posits that monarchs are anointed by God as his representatives on earth.

Divine right suggests that monarchs derive their legitimacy directly from God, which supersedes any legal conceptions of legitimacy. While the theory of divine right held sway throughout 16th- to 18th-century Europe, it was first explicitly articulated by an English king, James I (who ruled England from 1603-1625)—a fact that seems to contradict Fukuyama’s claim that England based political legitimacy on the law.

On the other hand, whereas rulers like Louis XIV of France used divine right to justify absolutist monarchy—in which the monarch has unlimited, unquestionable power—early modern English political theorists accepted divine right, but still considered the monarch to be contained within the bounds of the English constitution, which they thought guaranteed good rule. For these English theorists, divine right had more to do with securing monarchs against rebellion (since it would be unlawful to overthrow God’s chosen official) than placing them above the law.

Over time, Fukuyama says, the idea of legal legitimacy evolved into the notion that the state’s rule was only legitimate if it had the consent of those it governed. By the 13th century, Parliament essentially co-ruled with the monarch and generally saw their role as protecting all citizens from royal abuses, particularly when it came to taxation. In 1642, years of conflict between Parliament and Charles I erupted into the English Civil War, which ended in 1651 with Parliament’s victory and Charles’s execution.

After several more decades of strife, Fukuyama says, the principle of consent was finally cemented in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which England peacefully deposed James II in favor of William of Orange and Mary II. In essence, the Glorious Revolution established that England’s monarchs didn’t have an absolute right to rule—their authority depended on the approval of Parliament, and by extension, the people.

Social Contract Theory as a Response to English Political Crisis

In the mid-17th century, several English writers advanced a theory of government known as social contract theory—the idea that human society is based on an unspoken contract between the individual and the state. Social contract theory began with English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (published in 1651, the last year of the English Civil War). Leviathan argues that a state is a mutual exchange in which citizens give up all of their rights in order to receive protection by an absolute ruler. Crucially, Hobbes rejected the idea of divine right, insisting instead that rulers are only legitimate if they uphold their end of the contract with their subjects.

Several decades after Hobbes introduced social contract theory, another Englishman, John Locke, refined the theory in his Two Treatises of Government (published in 1689, at the tail end of the Glorious Revolution). Locke argues that a state’s purpose is to protect the public good and preserve citizens’ rights to life, liberty, and property. Unlike Hobbes, Locke rejects absolute government and insists that people retain individual rights under the social contract—including the right to overthrow a government that acts against the interests of its citizens.

Throughout Origins, Fukuyama rejects social contract theory on the grounds that it fundamentally misconstrues human nature by incorrectly claiming that humans are naturally solitary (when, in fact, humans have always lived in groups, starting with kinship bands). But while social contract theory fails as an explanation for the origins of government, in the context of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, we can usefully see it as a philosophical response to the political crises of the era.

The Importance of Accountability

Fukuyama concludes his discussion of accountability by explaining that accountability emerges when state power is counterbalanced by other elements of society such as nobles, gentry, and wealthy commoners. In fact, Fukuyama shows that certain political outcomes can be roughly mapped to different levels of state accountability:

• Authoritarianism arises if there are no meaningful opponents to state power (as in Imperial China) or if the state fragments its opponents into disorganized, self-interested individuals (as in pre-Revolutionary France),
• Political collapse occurs if anti-state forces gain too much power and weaken the state to the point where it can’t sustain or defend itself effectively (as in medieval Hungary).
• Modern democracy emerges when the state shares political power with its people as a whole (as gradually became the case in England as Parliament gained power and grew more representative of all English classes).

A Balance of Power Leads to Open Institutions

It can be tempting to view the evolution of democracy as an ongoing increase in popular political power (at the expense of state power). But one of the interesting conclusions we can infer from Fukuyama’s work is that democracy depends on a delicate balance of power between the state and its people.

To better understand why that is, we can compare Fukuyama’s model of political development to Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s concept of open institutions—their term for free, participatory forms of government. In Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that open institutions share two characteristics:

• Pluralism: Open institutions place limits on their own authority and grant political power to the whole population.

• Consistent enforcement: Open institutions have the capacity to ensure that those in power follow the rules of political conduct and don’t erode the rights or power of others.

These two characteristics roughly overlap with Fukuyama’s three components of democracy. That is, for an institution to be pluralistic, it must follow the rule of law (which defines the limits of its power) and make itself accountable to all its citizens (whose participation gives them political power). At the same time, an open institution needs a strong enough state to prevent power grabs (such as by a politician who refuses to leave office) or general chaos (for example, if there’s no incentive for private citizens or individual political factions to obey the laws).

Shortform Conclusion: Understanding Modern Politics

Although Fukuyama begins by suggesting that understanding the three pillars will help us foster modern democracies, in the end, the book is more of an analytical description of political history than a practical prescription for political action. In fact, given how complex Fukuyama shows political evolution to be, it seems unlikely that we could ever devise a “recipe” for democratic government.

Still, the book offers a few lessons that can add to our understanding of foreign policy and domestic politics—and, hopefully, guide policymakers to the best possible decisions. In this section, we’ll explore these takeaways while counterbalancing Fukuyama’s often optimistic views on political development with the more skeptical opinions of some of his critics.

Takeaway #1: Democracy Is Contingent

One of Fukuyama’s key ideas is that modern democracy is contingent on the existence of specific conditions that allow the three pillars to develop. For Fukuyama, this contingency is good news because it means that the road to modern democracy is always open. He stresses that each of the three pillars has evolved independently in different cultures at different times in history. This implies that there’s no one blueprint for attaining modern democracy and that any culture can get there given the right conditions.

(Shortform note: On the other hand, some reviewers find Fukuyama’s optimism unconvincing, arguing that what the book really proves is that modern democracy requires a lot of lucky breaks that make it next to impossible to deliberately build a democratic system. For example, one reviewer contends that Fukuyama’s analysis is circular in that it claims that English democracy emerged because England already had democratic tendencies. Likewise, another reviewer complains that Fukuyama fails to explain how to actually get from a dysfunctional government to a functional one except by not being dysfunctional in the first place.)

Takeaway #2: The State Must Precede Democracy

For democracy to succeed, Fukuyama says, a country first needs to develop a strong central state that can enforce order, provide vital services (such as infrastructure and education), and forge a coherent sense of national identity. He notes that it’s typically a bad idea to transplant democratic systems into societies that haven’t already evolved a strong state. Doing so creates more problems than it solves: Without a strong state, transplanted democracies tend to result in corruption and clientage (the exchange of political favors for money or goods). This happens because without a strong pre-existing state, elected officials often continue tribal patterns of behavior, which encourage funneling resources to one’s own group.

(Shortform note: It’s unclear what exactly we should do with the observation that a strong state is a necessary precursor to democracy. One lesson we can draw is that tampering in other countries’ politics in an attempt to spread democracy is counterproductive at best. Still, as one reviewer points out, in places where the population wishes to replace a dysfunctional or exploitative government with a democratic system, waiting for a stronger state isn’t necessarily a viable option.)

Takeaway #3: Political Systems Can Decay

Though well-established political systems of all types (democratic or otherwise) often appear stable, Fukuyama notes that there’s always the danger of political decay and collapse. Decay can happen when political institutions fail to keep up with changing social and economic conditions or when familial, tribal, or factional interests gain more power or influence than the state itself. For example, centuries after China created its bureaucratic state (between 770-256 BC), kinship-based organization gradually reasserted itself as individual aristocrats began hoarding political power among their own families. This trend culminated in the collapse of the empire (from AD 220-581) and a return to localized, decentralized rule instead of a state.

How to Reverse Political Decay

While Imperial China’s political collapse was, in effect, a reversion to a previous form of social order, a similar upsurge of factional interests can happen even in societies that lack a strong tribal or kinship tradition. For instance, in Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama explains that until the end of the 19th century, the US lacked strong central authority and was dominated by corrupt local politics based on bribery and clientage. Though the country went through a series of reforms and modernizations in the 20th century, Fukuyama warns that in the 21st century, lobbies, interest groups, and congressional factionalism have gradually eroded the government’s effectiveness—and the public’s faith in their leaders.

Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer to these problems, though experts have offered a wide range of suggestions. As far as US politics, some analysts recommend banning lobbyist fundraising and preventing former politicians from joining lobbies, whereas others suggest funding more diverse interest groups in order to balance out the primarily corporate interests that currently dominate politics. Meanwhile, observers have sought to end congressional gridlock with solutions ranging from ending the filibuster to changing the way elections work.

Improving any political system will likely remain a process of trial and error. But if Fukuyama is right about political decay—and a 2021 study showing that democracy is under greater threat than ever before suggests he is—it seems certain that countries wishing to preserve their democracies need to do something.