Political Order and Political Decay (2 page)

THE PROBLEM WITH GOVERNMENT

These three examples may seem like very different cases, where problems are driven by specific policies, personalities, and historical context. But they are in fact linked by a common thread that serves as a background condition for all political life: institutions. Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior” that persist beyond the tenure of individual leaders.
4
They are, in essence, persistent rules that shape, limit, and channel human behavior. Post-Qaddafi Libya's problem is a lack of basic institutions, most notably a state. Until there is a single, central source of authority that exercises a legitimate monopoly of force in that country, there will be no citizen security or the conditions for individuals to flourish.

At the other end of the scale, the United States has long-standing and powerful institutions, but they have been subject to political decay. Government institutions that are supposed to serve public purposes have been captured by powerful private interests, such that democratic majorities have a difficult time asserting their control. The problem is not just one of money and power; it also has to do with rigidities of the rules themselves, and of the ideas supporting them.

Finally, in the case of emerging market countries like Turkey and Brazil, the problem is one of social change outstripping existing institutions. By definition, institutions are persistent patterns of behavior that are created in response to the needs of a particular historical moment. But societies, especially those experiencing rapid economic growth, do not stand still. They create new social classes, educate their citizens, and employ new technologies that shuffle the social deck. Existing institutions often fail to accommodate these new actors and, as a result, come under pressure to change.

The study of “development”—that is, change in human societies over time—is therefore not just an endless catalog of personalities, events, conflicts, and policies. It necessarily centers around the process by which political institutions emerge, evolve, and eventually decay. If we are to understand the fast-changing political and economic developments of our contemporary world, it is important to put them in the context of the long-term story of the underlying institutional structure of societies.

The present book is the companion volume to
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
. This project started out as an effort to rewrite and update Samuel P. Huntington's classic
Political Order in Changing Societies
, first published in 1968. The current volume takes its title from the first chapter of the latter book, which in turn was based on an article originally published in
World Politics
. Huntington's work was critical in making people understand that political development was a separate process from economic and social growth, and that before a polity could be democratic, it had to provide basic order. For all of the differences between Huntington's book and my own in form and substance, I come to the same basic conclusions that he did. The first volume gave an account of the origins of three critical sets of political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and procedures promoting democratic accountability. It explained how these institutions separately or in combination emerged, or failed to emerge, in China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. For those who have not read the first volume, the following sections recap the story presented there.

SOCIAL ANIMALS

The first volume began not with primitive human societies but with mankind's primate ancestors, because political order is rooted in human biology. Contrary to the theories of philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau or modern neoclassical economists, science now shows us that human beings did not start out as isolated individuals who gradually came to form societies over the course of historical time. The behaviorally modern human beings who emerged somewhere in Africa about fifty thousand years ago were socially organized from the start, just like their primate forebears.

Natural human sociability is built around two phenomena: kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The first is a recurring pattern by which sexually reproducing animals behave altruistically toward one another in proportion to the number of genes they share; that is, they practice nepotism and favor genetic relatives. Reciprocal altruism involves an exchange of favors or resources between unrelated individuals of the same species, or sometimes between members of different species. Both behaviors are not learned but genetically coded and emerge spontaneously as individuals interact.

Human beings, in other words, are social animals by nature. But their natural sociability takes the specific form of altruism toward family (genetic relatives) and friends (individuals with whom one has exchanged favors). This default form of human sociability is universal to all cultures and historical periods. Natural sociability can be overridden by the development of new institutions that provide incentives for other types of behavior (for example, favoring a qualified stranger over a genetic relative), but it constitutes a form of social relationship to which humans always revert when such alternative institutions break down.

Human beings by nature are also norm-creating and norm-following creatures. They create rules for themselves that regulate social interactions and make possible the collective action of groups. Although these rules can be rationally designed or negotiated, norm-following behavior is usually grounded not in reason but in emotions like pride, guilt, anger, and shame. Norms are often given an intrinsic value and even worshipped, as in the religious laws of many different societies. Since an institution is nothing more than a rule that persists over time, human beings therefore have a natural tendency to institutionalize their behavior. Due to the intrinsic value with which they are typically endowed, institutions tend to be highly conservative, that is, resistant to change.

For the first forty or so thousand years of the existence of the modern human species, individuals were organized into what anthropologists label band-level societies, consisting of small groups of individuals, almost all of them genetic relatives, who subsisted off of hunting and gathering. The first major institutional transition, which occurred perhaps ten thousand years ago, was the shift from band- to tribal-level societies, which are organized around a belief in the power of dead ancestors and unborn descendants. We typically call these tribes; anthropologists sometimes use the term “segmentary lineages” to describe individuals who trace ancestry to a common progenitor who might be several generations removed. Such tribal societies existed in ancient China, India, Greece, Rome, the Middle East, and pre-Columbian America, and among the Germanic forebears of modern Europeans.

Tribal societies have no central source of authority. As with band-level societies, they tend to be highly egalitarian and have no third-party enforcement of laws. They prevailed over band-level societies largely because they were capable of achieving enormous scale simply by pushing back the dating of common ancestry. Both band- and tribal-level societies are rooted in kinship and hence human biology. But the shift to tribal organization required the emergence of a religious idea, belief in the ability of dead ancestors and unborn descendants to affect health and happiness in one's current life. This is an early example of ideas playing a critical independent role in development.

EMERGENCE OF THE STATE

The next important political transition was from a tribal to a state-level society. A state, in contrast to a band or tribe, possesses a monopoly on legitimate coercion and exercises that power over a defined territory. Because they are centralized and hierarchical, states tend to produce higher degrees of social inequality than earlier kinship-based forms of organization.

There are in turn two broad types of state. In those described by the sociologist Max Weber as “patrimonial,” the polity is considered a type of personal property of the ruler, and state administration is essentially an extension of the ruler's household. The natural forms of sociability, reliance on family and friends, are still at work in patrimonial states. A modern state, on the other hand, is impersonal: a citizen's relationship to the ruler does not depend on personal ties but simply on one's status as citizen. State administration does not consist of the ruler's family and friends; rather, recruitment to administrative positions is based on impersonal criteria such as merit, education, or technical knowledge.

There are numerous theories about what is called “pristine” state formation, the formation of the first states out of tribal societies. There were necessarily a number of interacting factors at work, such as the availability of agricultural surpluses and the technology to support them, and a certain level of population density. Physical circumscription—what is called “caging,” the bounding of territories by impassable mountains, deserts, or waterways—allowed rulers to exercise coercive power over populations and prevented enslaved or subordinated individuals from running away. Patrimonial states began to form in many parts of the world around eight thousand years ago, primarily in fertile alluvial valleys in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and the Valley of Mexico.

Development of modern states, however, required specific strategies for shifting political organization away from family- and friends-based organizations to impersonal ones. China was the first world civilization to establish a nonpatrimonial, modern state, which it did some eighteen centuries before similar political units appeared in Europe. State building in China was driven by the same circumstances that necessitated centralized states in early modern Europe: prolonged and pervasive military competition. Military struggle created incentives to tax populations, to create administrative hierarchies to provision armies, and to establish merit and competence rather than personal ties as the basis for recruitment and promotion. In the words of sociologist Charles Tilly, “War made the state and the state made war.”

Modern states have to move beyond friends and family in the way that they recruit officials. China did this by inventing the civil service examination as early as the third century
B.C.
, though it was not routinely used until later dynasties. Both the Arabs and Ottomans came up with a novel approach to the same problem: the institution of slave-soldiers by which non-Muslim boys were captured, taken from their families, and raised to be soldiers and administrators loyal to the ruler and lacking ties to the surrounding society. In Europe, this problem was solved on a social rather than a political level: early in the Middle Ages, the Catholic church changed the rules of inheritance to make it much more difficult for kin groups to pass resources down to their extended families. As a result, extended kinship among the Germanic barbarian tribes dissolved within a generation or two of their conversion to Christianity. Kinship was ultimately replaced by a more modern form of social relationship based on legal contract, known as feudalism.

THE RULE OF LAW

The rule of law, understood as rules that are binding even on the most politically powerful actors in a given society, has its origins in religion. It is only religious authority that was capable of creating rules that warriors needed to respect. Religious institutions in many cultures were essentially legal bodies responsible for interpreting a set of sacred texts and giving them moral sanction over the rest of society. Thus in India, the Brahmin class of priests was understood to be higher in authority than the Kshatriyas, the warriors who held actual political power; a raja or king would have to seek legitimation from a Brahmin before he could rightly rule. In Islam as well, the law (sharia) was presided over by a separate hierarchy of scholars known as the ulama; a network of qadis or judges did the routine work of administering religious law. Though early caliphs united political and religious authority in the same person, in other periods of Islamic history the caliph and sultan were separate individuals, and the former could act as a constraint on the latter.

The rule of law was most deeply institutionalized in Western Europe, due to the role of the Roman Catholic church. Only in the Western tradition did the church emerge as a centralized, hierarchical, and resource-rich political actor whose behavior could dramatically affect the political fortunes of kings and emperors. The central event marking the autonomy of the church was the investiture conflict that began in the eleventh century. This clash pitted the church against the Holy Roman Emperor, over the question of the latter's interference in religious matters. In the end, the church won the right to appoint its own priests and bishops, and emerged as the guardian of a revived Roman law based on the sixth-century Corpus Juris Civilis or Justinian Code. England developed an equally strong but different legal tradition: the Common Law emerged after the Norman Conquest out of the law of the king's court. There it was promoted less by the church than by early monarchs who used their ability to dispense impersonal justice as a means of cementing their legitimacy.

Thus in Western Europe, law was the first of the three major institutions to emerge. China never developed a transcendental religion; perhaps for this reason, it never developed a true rule of law. There, the state emerged first, and up to the present day law has never existed as a fundamental constraint on political power. The sequence was reversed in Europe: law preceded the rise of the modern state. When European monarchs aspired to behave like Chinese emperors from the late sixteenth century on and create modern, centralized absolutist states, they had to do so against the backdrop of an existing legal order that limited their powers. The result was that few European monarchs ever acquired the concentrated powers of the Chinese state, despite aspirations to do so. Only in Russia, where the Eastern Church was always subordinated to the state, did such a regime emerge.