“Politics is downstream from culture” and each society will tread its own path. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011) is a sweeping history of how human society functions and why they evolved to operate in the variety of ways around the world. What was missing in the original analysis?įukuyama returned to the topic with a humbler, broader and more satisfying model of reality in two books. The Big Men of Melanesia, that is politicians who distribute resources to their relatives and supporters, abound in the contemporary world. It also seemed fanciful to think that modern societies had progressed beyond traditional tribal social systems.

The failure of the US to “democratise” Iraq and Afghanistan showed the limits of trying to transplant Western-style institutions. Over the next 25 years, Fukuyama’s ideas were tested by real events, and fell seemingly short.

Liberal democratic practices, as they exist in the West, represent the end state of political evolution and global standard for governance. With anti-communist protests sweeping across the former Soviet Union, the essay seemed right.

Political scientist and historian Francis Fukuyama shot to prominence in 1989 for his influential essay The End of History? It announced that the great ideological battles between east and west were over and that western liberal democracy had triumphed.

The origins of political order