What I've Been Reading

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

• The Formation of State
• The Rule of Law
• Accountable Government

Thousands of years of human social progress (& 500 pages of this book) boils down to those 3 bullet points. The saddest part is there are still billions who don't have access to all three; leave alone adding more to the list. The atlas is still on road to Denmark. Unlike Fukuyama's that famous book which was all about synthesizing the future; this one is all about synthesizing history. He is probably the first social scientist to chronicle the political history from the vantage point of India and China, shedding that Western centric parochialism. Obviously, its refreshing and personally, I learnt so much about Chinese history. 
Looking forward for the second part which I hope should be out in 2012. It's almost impossible to quote from this brilliant book without being taken out of context...


On State:

If the king was unwilling to enforce the law against the country's elites, or lacked the capacity to do so, the law's legitimacy would be compromised no matter what its source in religion, tradition, or custom. This is the point that Hayek and his libertarian followers fail to see; the Common Law may be the work of dispersed judges, but it would not have come into being in the first place or been enforced, without a strong centralized state. 

On Rule of Law:

In a 1979 article, the biologists Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin used the analogy of the spandrel to explain the unpredictable way that biological innovation works. A spandrel is a curved architectural area formed by intersection of arches holding up a dome. The spandrel was not deliberatelt designed by the srchitect but was an accidental by-product of other components that were deliberately put in place. Nonetheless, spandrels came to be decorated and took their own character and meaning in time went on. Gould and Lewontin argued that many biological feautures of organisms evolve for one reason at a later but then prove to have adaptive benefits for completely different reasons at a later point in time.

We have seen many equivalents of spandrels in political evolution. The idea of the corporation - permanently lived institution with an identity separate from the individuals who made it up - arose initially as a religious organization and not for commerical purposes. The Catholic church up-help the right of women to inherit property not because they wanted female empowerment - something quite anachronistic in the seventh century - but because it had its eye on valuable real estate held by powerful clans and saw this as a way of getting it away from them. It is doubtful that any church leaders at the time could forsee the impact  this would have on kin relationship as a whole. And finally, the whole idea of governments being limited by independent judiciaries was not present in the minds of those engaged in the investiture conflict, which was a moral and political struggle over the independence of the Catholic church. And yet, in the West, the independence won by a religious organization evolved over time into the independence of the judicial branch. The religious grounding of law was replaced by secular sources, and yet the structure of law remainded as it was. Thus the rule of law itself was kind of spandrel.

On India:

One wonders what would have happened to Ashoka's empire had India developed a power doctrine like Chinese Legalism, rather than Brahmanism, Jainism, or Buddhism - but it if had, it wouldn't be India. 

On USA:

The need for such balance ws understood by the American Founding Fathers. Alexander Hamilton, writing on the question of the rights of states versus the federal government in Federalist No. 17, said the following "In those instances in which the monarch finally prevailed over his vassals, his success was chiefly owing to the tyranny of those vassals over their dependents. The barons, or nobles, equally the enemies of the sovereign and the oppressors of the common people, were dreaded and detested by both; till mutual danger  and mutual interest effected a union between them fatal to the power of the aristocracy. Had the nobles, by a conduct of clemency and justice, preserved the fidelity and devotion of their retainers and followers, the contests between them and the prince must almost always have ended in their favor, and in the adridgment or subversion of the royal authority."                                                                                                                                                Hamilton goes on to say that the states within a federal structure are comparable to feudal baronies. The degree to which they can maintain their independence from the central government depends on how they treat their own citizens. A powerful central government is neither intrinsically good nor bad; it's ultimate effect on freedom depends on the complex interplay between it and the subordinate political authorities. This is a truth that played out in the history of United States, much as it did in Hungarian and Polish History. On the other hand, when a strong state sides with a strong oligarchy, freedom faces a particularly severe threat. This was the situation that emerged in Russia with rise of prinicipality of Moscow in the same century that the Hungarian state came to an end.