Review of The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011

In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama provides a lucid historical account of the development of political order in human societies, from a strongly synthetic perspective.The bulk of nearly 600 pages represents only a half of his project.A second volume will deal with the period from the nineteenth century, in which, Fukuyama claims, conditions for the formation of human political institutions have undergone fundamental changes.As indicated repeatedly, this book was inspired by Samuel Huntington's 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies, which Fukuyama believes must be supplemented with a historical investigation of how the modern polity developed.(Huntington's analysis of the problems faced by contemporary developing countries in modernizing their political systems, according to Fukuyama, takes for granted the existence and exemplary role of such institutions as the state and political parties.)By this investigation, Fukuyama expects to reveal the historical contingencies of state formation in different societies and to examine in a historical light the causes of diverse failed attempts to build a modern state.At this point Fukuyama's philosophy of political development becomes apparent.He lays particular emphasis on the idea of contingency, mainly to ward off accusations of historical teleology concerning the emergence of, or global convergence toward, the modern Western political establishment.However, he also argues that once the three key institutions-the state, the rule of law, and government accountability-took shape, fortuitously combined together, and stood the test of time, they became imitable and indeed desirable for non-Western nations, although the degree of success in transplanting institutions is, again, historically conditioned.Thus, in this ambitious work, history assumes a strategic character.To wit, resorting to historical circumstances endows the narrative of the development of the political order with complexity.Nonetheless, replacing a linear view of history with a circumstantial, contingent one does not assume historical relativity.Theoretically, Fukuyama regards a well-balanced combination of these three institutional factors to be the key to sustainable political success, as well as a guarantee of both state power and social welfare.Indeed, at the end of this volume, Fukuyama attributes the chronic dysfunction of democracy in the United States, the European Union, Japan, and India to different degrees of mutual alienation among the state, the rule of law, and accountable govern-