Summary
When the first Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, was asked about the effects of the French Revolution, he famously replied that it was too soon to tell. It's tempting to offer the same answer here because Francis Fukuyama's new book, albeit weighing in at nearly 600 pages, is only the first of two planned volumes. However, it is shaped in such a way that Fukuyama's general theory of political development isn't deferred to future publication but quite fully sketched, and it is reassuringly possible to sum up the whole project in a single sentence: 'Political institutions are necessary and cannot be taken for granted'. There's a line that calls out for yellow highlighter. Not good news for libertarians, perhaps, but when the most obvious present example of a country without government is Somalia then it's clear that the libertarian programme stands in need of refurbishment.
Fukuyama came to wider notice 20 years ago with the apocalyptic- sounding The End Of History And The Last Man, a book more often cited in title than thoroughly read, the political science equivalent of A Brief History Of Time. This time, Fukuyama has turned his attention to beginnings rather than terminal points. His aim is to draw a trajectory from pre-human primate societies to the modern state of Denmark, which is routinely taken to reflect an evolutionary paradigm of welfarist liberal democracy as the end- point of political development. Needless to say, Fukuyama doesn't accept that "getting to Denmark" is the only game in town.See the full content of this document
Extract
Political Necessity
His first task is to overturn certain assumptions about how our institutions evolve from the tribal to the modern state, and from the command state to the liberal Shangri-La. For Fukuyama, and r...
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