The Origins of Political Order summary

About 10,000 years ago, humans began permanently settling and growing crops. This increased population density, which compelled people to form more organized social groups beyond immediate families, called tribes.

Tribes led to the earliest forms of justice and property ownership. Justice was defined by family and ancestral connections, and there wasn’t a higher third party to adjudicate any disputes.

You might imagine that the first modern states were shaped by the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution. Actually, the first states are much older, and the real story is much more complex.

The earliest states were formed in China. By 770 BC there were 23 of them, but they merged into one after a violent unification process.

Today, India is the world’s most populous democratic state, but this is actually a relatively recent development in its history.

In India, social and religious ideas developed before political or economic ideas. Around 900 BC, Brahmanic religion arose in India. It was focused on nature, rather than people’s ancestors.

So what about the Middle East? Two main imperial systems arose: the Mamluks and their successors, the Ottomans. They perfected military slavery, and for a time weakened the strength of family and tribal ties by ensuring that the military power of individuals only lasted one generation.

“Mamluk” originally referred to a kind of soldier-slave used by various Islamic sultanates. Boys with no ties to a sultanate would be captured from places as distant as Armenia or the Sudan and raised as elite soldiers loyal to the sultan. They also were assigned educators who were eunuchs. The soldier-slaves were prevented from having families, so like the powerful eunuchs who had taught them, they passed nothing on to further generations – and were fully devoted to the state.

We’ve seen how family-centric tribalism and despotism can stagnate a society. Why didn’t these tendencies occur to the same extent in Europe?

In Europe, the Catholic Church became a centralized power and broke down tribalism through a series of social norms or laws that changed the nature of families and property ownership. The church banned close kin marriage, marriage to widows of dead relatives, adoption and divorce. Traditionally, these kinds of social arrangements had helped tribal groups keep their property within their group.

How did China remain a unified state, without rule of law or political accountability?

Well, a strong state can persist without rule of law, if society views it as legitimate. In China, the dynasties derived their legitimacy from the Mandate of Heaven – the idea that rulers had complete authority in exchange for maintaining social peace.

Death and taxes are life’s certainties. Well, unless you were wealthy in seventeenth-century France or Spain.

Western European monarchs were constrained by the rule of law in taxation, so some found other ways of raising money for war.

In the 1215 Magna Carta, English nobility forced the monarchy into a constitutional compromise. Seven years later, a similar development occurred in Hungary, but the two country’s paths were very different. Why?

Well, the English state was formed after the king’s protection of non-elites had already been established. The king’s power was already limited.

So what conclusions can we draw from all of this? What lessons does history teach us about whether states will flourish or fail?

Overall, states decay because their institutions are too rigid, too nepotistic, or both. State institutions must keep adapting themselves to changes in their social or physical environment. States that favor family and friends over impersonal meritocracy will inevitably decay.