The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

By: Francis Fukuyama

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis

Length: 22 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions that included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or unable to function in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.

Francis Fukuyama, author of the best-selling The End of History and The Last Man, and one of our most important political thinkers, provides a sweeping account of how today’s basic political institutions developed.

The first of a major two-volume work, The Origins of Political Order begins with politics among our primate ancestors and follows the story through the emergence of tribal societies, the growth of the first modern state in China, the beginning of the rule of law in India and the Middle East, and the development of political accountability in Europe up until the eve of the French Revolution.

Drawing on a vast body of knowledge—history, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and economics—Fukuyama has produced a brilliant, provocative work that offers fresh insights on the origins of democratic societies and raises essential questions about the nature of politics and its discontents.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2011 Francis Fukuyama (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Fukuyama writes a crystalline prose that balances engaging erudition with incisive analysis. As germane to the turmoil in Afghanistan as it is to today's congressional battles, this is that rare work of history with up-to-the-minute relevance." ( Publishers Weekly)

“Political theorist Francis Fukuyama’s new book is a major accomplishment, likely to find its place among the works of seminal thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, and modern moral philosophers and economists such as John Rawls and Amartya Sen . . .It is a perspective and a voice that can supply a thinker’s tonic for our current political maladies.” (Earl Pike, The Cleveland Plain Dealer)

“Ambitious and highly readable.” ( The New Yorker)

Informative and pretty good

The first half of the book was excellent. The second half of the book was informative but tended towards the more boring side. Halfway through the book the subject matter starts to jump around the place without adequate interlockers to be received in quite the way the author intended. This is the first of two books and the author clearly states at the end of the book that he has been setting up the second book in the last couple parts so this could be unfair of me to judge the second portion as I have, due to his intentionally crafting it as a setup, but I would have preferred that he just kept the setup portion separate since it just didn't connect right for me. I must reiterate, the subject matter is fantastic and is really exciting in the first half of the book. Still, I'm on the fence as to whether or not I would read the second book just based on how boring the setup was.

Provoked some interesting thoughts

An interesting overview of the development of governance in the ancient world and the middle ages. Panoramic view across cultures and the globe which provided some "oh that's how and why that developed here, but not here." Not being a specialist, it helped me understand the differences between tribal kinship systems in China and the feudal systems in Europe.

It was interesting to speculate about the role of the Catholic Church in the development of an independent judiciary, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. The importance of religions in setting the groundwork for the development of the rule of law which was a missing ingredient in China which offers an explanation of their continuing struggle in developing rule of law.

I would recommend that you download the PDFs because the maps and tables help provide some insight into the different areas in their historical context.

Good information but odd narration

Perhaps like many Americans these days, I’m trying to better understand what is happening in this country by looking back at history. I’m finding this accounting interesting as it is filling in some gaps in my education. I do find the narration a bit odd. It’s as though the text is being read from a screen that only brings up one line at a time with pauses and breaks not at the end of a sentence or phase but at the end of whatever line is displayed. The narrator’s nice voice makes this tolerable but it is sometimes disconcerting and hard to follow. Otherwise, I recommend this for anyone who wants to better understand the history of state building in various human cultures. It does explain a lot. I’m looking forward to diving into the next volume.

An Important Historical Perspective

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolutionby Francis Fukuyama is the best book that I have read on political history. The author reaches into the pre-historical times to show how relationships among humans were shaped by economics, family, religion, and charisma. His juxtaposing of the Magna Carta in England with the similar document, Golden Bull of Poland illustrates how constitutional solutions are not all effective. I heartily recommend this look at how man has tried to live together.

biased but informative

clearly biased from the white male you perspective however still very informative and well put together

Very relevant to current questions despite title

Well researched and with uniquely global view, this is an eye opener, especially for someone like me who has been fed mostly European / Near Eastern history.

Wow

I think a great challenge to this work is that it covers such a large historical period and such large geography that it will hard to access the accuracy of the work. In particular, whether any errors are substantive enough to impact his overall thesis. That said, I enjoyed looking at the development of so many different political systems through time. I certainly see the applicability of his analysis on to modern cultures. I found his overall reasoning to be quite persuasive, and I can hardly wait to start book 2. I don't think his argument will be found wanting, regardless of your own political perspective. There are so many big ideas that it would be hard to do them justice in a small, free book review. I appreciate his look to current neuroscience research to ground his overall viewpoint. It would be pointless if this were yet another rational but ungrounded walk through human history to try and build a theory on top of. I agree with his criticisms of many of the political philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Hobbes, who lacked an empirical grounding. It was interesting to see the impact of the Catholic Church, and Pope Gregory, in particular, had on the development of the State in the West versus the rest of the World. A few concepts are sticking with me, concern the importance of the Rule of Law in good governance. It was also interesting to see his analysis of the reasoning and development of the English Common Law. I'm excited to see him give a talk a Kepler's Books, very soon.

Excellent!

Offers a sweeping overview of the drivers and characteristics of human social organization across a selection of discrete societies and an even great expanse of time... reminds me at times of Guns, Germs and Steel but focused on government and politics.

Sweeping survey of institutions of statehood

The reader's intonation was odd. I often had to pause to re-parse what he was saying. Phrases of sentences never seemed to fit together. Maybe he kept hitting pause and restart, leading to a jerky feel to the narration.

Content was interesting and sounded authoritative..

A case against political fatalism

In this book Fukuyama lays out three essential elements of modern polity. That is, for a modern country to survive and prosper, it needs a strong state that protects and governs, whose power is balanced and regulated by the rule of law and political accountability. These points are convincingly presented with historical evidence in the book. They should not be surprising to any student of politics in modern times. What interesting, however, is the observation that the political circumstances in which all these three conditions came together in a single country (England) in history were the consequences of random historical events, which explains why liberal democracy didn't come to exist in most countries in history.

The second interesting point is the argument that, following Samuel Huntington's narratives, the political development has its own logic which evolves rather independently from socioeconomic conditions. This point explains why the expectation that economic growth in China since the late 1970s would lead to equally impressive political development may not necessarily be true. However, these two points were drawn based on the pre-modern historical evidence covered in the book (pre-modern history to 1800), which to a very large extent differs from the political reality since then.

Finally, another interesting point is that why China, with a strong state but the limited rule of law and democratic accountability, is subject to the problem of "the bad emperor"---the idea that the power falls into the hand of an authoritarian (or totalitarian) ruler of incompetence or corruption and people are all stuck with him. Now, I am reading this book on the eve of the 2020 US presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and I have to wonder if the US would be stuck with its "bad emperor" for other 4 years? Democracy or not, the human history has been flooded with bad political actors and downright predators sometimes. The system created to constrain them simply broke down.