The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution Review

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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution ReviewSince publishing his essay "The End of History?" in The National in 1989, Fukuyama has cemented himself as an important public intellectual and historical anthropologist. A former neo-conservative, Fukuyama, 58, now serves as the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
In this book, Fukuyama attempts to understand how humans moved from tribal and familial connections to organized institutions of states and governments. He writes, "In the developed world, we take the existence of government so much for granted that we sometimes forget how difficult it was to create."
Fukuyama artfully navigates the transition of humans from hunter-gather bands to tribalized communities to states and organized forms of government. Fukuyama emphasizes China because the Qin Dynasty was the first "state" to gain victory over tribalism. He contrasts this with Europe, which did not overcome tribalism until 1000 years later, and had to progress through feudalism before creating citizens loyal to the state.
Fukuyama's approach to historical anthropology stands in stark contrast to the "single cause" approach of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (2005). Fukuyama points to familial connections, human behavior, organized religion, and the human propensity for war as variable causes to the evolution of societies. Fukuyama engages disciplines outside of his usual realm including anthropology, economics, and biology. He notes, "It does seem to me that there is a virtue in looking across time and space in a comparative fashion."
Many readers have already labeled this as Fukuyama's "magnum opus" including Arthur Melzer (political scientist at Michigan State University), George Sorensen (political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark), and Teru Kuwayama (Newsweek). Fukuyama himself referred to this book as "the primer I wished I had had when I started in political science" (in an interview at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies).
The Origins of Political Order is a broad, sweeping analysis of human development from pre-human times to the French Revolution. The book ends with the 18th century; a second volume will bring the story to the present day. Indeed, Fukuyama notes in the Preface, "It is extremely important to read this volume in anticipation of what is to come in the second. As I make clear in the final chapter of this book, political development in the modern world occurs under substantially different conditions from those in the period up until the late eighteenth century."
In spite of Fukuyama's readable style and engaging content, this book is academic and dense. Yet it serves as a helpful entry point into Fukuyama's current thought and research. It will no doubt become required reading in institutions across the globe in the following months and years and eventually revered as a classic.
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