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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution By Francis Fukuyama New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Pp. xiv, 585. $35.00 cloth.
Francis Fukuyama's newest book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, is the first of two related volumes, the second of which is scheduled for publication in 2012. It is a broadly learned treatise by any measure, and several prepublication reviews have touted it as being poised to become the next standard reference in political theory. As with Fukuyama's first signature book, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), however, it is certain to draw sharp criticism as well.
Fukuyama describes this book as focusing "on the political dimension of [economic and social] development, the evolution of government institutions" (p. 19). The book's historical commentary documents and explains the appearance and political growth of human societies from bands, tribes, and chiefdoms to states (p. 53). Fukuyama describes his largely inductive method as "putting the theory [of political development] after the history," noting that "all too often social science begins with an elegant theory and then searches for facts that will confirm it. This, hopefully, is not the approach I take" (p. 24). He notes that much of the existing literature "falls short of being a real theory of political development . . . and it is not clear whether it will ever be possible to generate such a theory. The problem, to put it in social science terms, is that there are too many variables and not enough cases. . . . The prospects of producing a predictive general theory out of this soup of causal factors and outcomes seem to be very slim indeed" (p. 327). The book accordingly describes instead "several important paths of European political development and the range of causal factors associated with each one. From this range of cases it may be possible to generalize about which factors were most and least important, but in ways that fall short of providing a genuine predictive theory" (p. 327). He concedes in fact that his book's "general framework amounts to something less than a predictive theory of political development" (p. 23). Thus are we...