The Origins of Political Order

In his quest for the origins of political order, he first looks at the social order among chimpanzees, notes that the war-like hunting group, rather than the family, was the primary social group, and claims the same for humans. Humans went further: to survive they formed tribes, whose armies were superior to hunting groups by their sheer size.[10][11][12][13]

He uses recent work in sociobiology and other sources to show that sociability built on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is the original default social state of man and not any isolated, presocial human as suggested by Hobbes and Rousseau.[14][15] He suggests that Hobbes and Locke present a fallacy when they argue humans developed cooperative ability only as a result of the invention of the state. This is because chimps, the genetic ancestors to humans, engage in kin relations based on cooperation,[16] and so Hobbes and Locke must be suggesting humans were once sociable, lost this instinct and then regained it due to the state.[17]

The next step was to escape beyond tribalism and the "tyranny of cousins", to join tribes into larger coalitions[9] towards states, again due to the advantage of larger armies. This was done with the aid of religion.[13] This was because as groups grew in size, maintaining cooperation became more difficult as face-to-face interactions with much of society became difficult. Religion offered a way of providing a combining social force to hold society together .[18] For example, Fukuyama cites Mohammed as an example of what Weber labels a "charismatic leader" because he used the idea of an 'umma' (community of believers) to bind together the territory that he ruled over .[19] This challenge to transcend tribalism partly remains today in many parts of the world that is outside Western civilization, for example in Afghanistan and in Somalia.[13]

Loyalty to the tribe or the family, rather than to the state, leads to corruption and weakening of the state. Various strategies were used to overcome the corruption. One such strategy was restrictions against marriage among the ruling official class to make sure that loyalties would not lie with family or tribe.[20]

Mandarins or Scholar-officials, who were the ruling class of China, were not allowed to pass on the lands given to them by the emperor to their own children and were restricted as to whom they were allowed to marry.[21]

Mamluk slaves, the ruling class of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, were told which slaves to marry while their children could not inherit from them.[22]Jannisarries were originally forced into celibacy and prohibited from having a family.[23][24]

Pope Gregory VII forced Catholic priests in Europe to become celibate and they too were prohibited from having a family.[25]

Spanish administrators in South America were restricted from marrying local women and from establishing family ties in the territories they were sent to.[26]

China is described as having the first modern state,[28] by the definition given, since it established an educated Mandarin bureaucracy, although Hewson objects to this conclusion since the Mandarin bureaucracy was not modern.[10] China used extreme violence on its population (especially during the influence of legalism[29]), but had a weak rule of law and the emperor had no accountability to anyone.[5]

India is contrasted with China. India could not use extreme force on its population due to the traditional power of the brahmin priestly caste, who protested violence against the populace and war against neighboring states, by refusing to perform ancestral rituals for the Raja leaders. The power of the Brahmins weakening the state's power over its people, and effectively forced a strong accountability on its leaders to the population of India via its priestly class.[5][30] An example Fukuyama gives of the influence religion had on early Indian rulers is Ashoka (304–232 BCE) of the Maurya Dynasty, who under the influence of Buddhism (rather than Brahmanism) came to regret his conquests in the Kalinga War. He vowed to end his empire, and eventually the entire political system collapsed.[31]

Certain Muslim states developed the practice of making imported slaves as the ruling class, as with the Mamluks of Egypt and the Janissaries of the Ottoman empire, a process which started around the 8th century. Since these ruling class slaves were neither beholden to family nor to any tribe, but dependent only on the state, it ensured their loyalty towards the state.[9][32] A later example would be the 16th-century Ottoman Empire practice of seeking out intelligent Christian children for high civil service or military positions, who were cut off from their family for their training.[33]

In 11th-century Europe, instead of the state having the upper hand as in China, or the Brahmins having the upper hand as in India, there was a power conflict between state and church, the Investiture Controversy between Pope Gregory VII and Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.[34]

The papal party started to search for sources of law to strengthen its case for the universal jurisdiction of the church. They rediscovered the Justinian Code, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, in a library near Bologna in northern Italy in 1072, leading later to the student body called a "universitas", first in Bologna, and soon after in Paris, Oxford, Heidelberg, Cracow, and Copenhagen studying the code and displacing particularistic Salic law.[35] The laws gave the Gregory the authority to excommunicate Henry IV, who was forced to walk to Canossa from Germany to Italy, stand barefoot[36] in the snow for three days[37] outside Canossa and to ask forgiveness from the pope on his knees.[38] The Concordat of Worms ended the struggle between popes and emperors in 1122. It created balance between royal power and religious tradition not seen anywhere else before.[5]

Catholic leaders became accountable to the clergy and to the pope, who historically frequently objected to violence and wars, just as their counterparts in India had done, but in Europe the clergy did not weaken the states as much as Brahmins had done in India. The papal intercessions against wars between Catholic countries also led to the survival of small states in Europe, similar to India, but in contrast to what had happened in China. The existence of small states who were restricted by the church from recruiting mass armies waging wars costly in casualties, as had been the case in China, combined with the existence of independent university scholars, led to military innovations on land and sea to empower fewer soldiers to wield wars effectively and later gave these relatively small countries a military advantage large enough to conquer colonies in the rest of the world. Western Europe began getting the best of both worlds. In England, the rise of common law also strengthened the rule of law. With the reformation, the Lutheran priest N.F.S. Grundtvig in Denmark advocated general literacy since they believed that every Christian should read the bible and established schools throughout the country, leading to voting rights 1849.[39] In Denmark this led to the state gradually being more accountable to the general population, since they could now vote and read. In England and Denmark a balance was finally struck between the three components of political order.[5][40]