The Origins of Political Order - Francis Fukuyama

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution  by Francis Fukuyama, review here:

"Questions about the genealogy and proper functioning of political entities are easy to ask and notoriously difficult to answer. The political systems and institutions that shape the world in which we live have been in existence for some time and are pervasive in their effects on our lives—so much so that it is quite difficult to see them for what they are: the temporal and contingent results of unpredictable, frequently unstable historical processes. Moreover, basing normative claims on historical data is always risky at best. Knowing what did happen is not enough to establish what would have happened had some factor or other been different—a fact that should inspire a certain minimum level of skepticism with respect to any effort to read philosophical or ideological lessons from historical facts.

Fukuyama is not unaware of these difficulties. His strategy is to begin at the most fundamental starting point, with human nature itself, in order to determine just how human beings went from being organized in terms of tribes to dividing themselves up among organized political states. (He does not, on the other hand, see himself as having to explain how we went from no social organization at all to tribal organization; in his view, human beings are essentially social creatures, and there was thus never a time during which we were not social.)

Fukuyama's approach emphasizes the role of ideas in political development. (In this and many other ways, he follows the lead of his acknowledged predecessor Samuel Huntington.) "It is impossible," he writes, "to develop any meaningful theory of political development without treating ideas as fundamental causes of why societies differ and follow distinct development paths." This will seem like common sense to anyone who is even shallowly acquainted with the history of philosophy, but as Fukuyama notes, it is not uncommon for social scientists to deny the profound causal role ideas have had on human history and to claim, instead, that "their rational utility-maximizing framework is sufficient to understand virtually all forms of social behavior.

And then there is the United States, which has been unable to seriously address long-term fiscal issues related to health, social security, energy, and the like. The United States seems increasingly caught in a dysfunctional political equilibrium, wherein everyone agrees on the necessity of addressing long-term fiscal issues, but powerful interest groups can block the spending cuts or tax increases necessary to close the gap. The design of the country's institutions, with strong checks and balances, makes a solution harder. To this might be added an ideological rigidity that locks Americans into a certain range of solutions to their problems."