When I was living in DC--in the summer of 2012--the book that was all the rage in development policy circles was Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail. In fact, I had first encountered it right after it came out, when a classmate was bemoaning that it had only appeared as he was finishing up his thesis on some related topics. Still, I didn't read it at that time. Instead, I read another new book on politics and inclusion, called The Origins of Political Order, Volume 1, by Francis Fukuyama.
Why Nations Fail, the book I would only read later, turned out to have a few interesting historical tidbits. But when I did eventually get to it, it struck me as a pretty banal argument in favor of liberal democracy, repackaged as "inclusive institutions": these (relatively ill-defined) "inclusive institutions" were the key pre-conditions for economic prosperity.
But the book by Fukuyama--whose name has become a byword for the kind of liberal democratic triumphalism embodied by Why Nations Fail--had real substance. In a nutshell: the main challenge throughout history to the durability of political regimes has been the family. The professionalism and efficiency of states or other political structures tends to weaken as the people who wield power and wealth seek to accumulate it and pass it down to their progeny. Eventually efficient empires and bureaucracies "decay" (Fukuyama's word) into tribes and fiefdoms.
The Origins of Political Order is largely a fascinating survey of the mechanisms employed by various regimes to resist political decay: it goes over the Catholic church's rules on lineage and cousin marriage, the Turkish institution of the Janissaries, and ... well, those are the ones I remember. Probably also the Chinese civil service. Underlying that, though, it has a powerful thesis, whose relevance for our time is perhaps debatable but which seems to have a lot more to say about what "inclusive institutions" really are than Acemoglu and Robinson. I never understood why they got all the attention and Fukuyuma got none. The public discourse missed out on a powerful historiographical concept as a result.
This is on my mind today as I listened to an In Our Time episode. This is the BBC's terrific hour-long history podcast that gets three historians from UK universities together on a subject of their expertise and tosses in a well-read host who asks hard questions. The particular episode that had me thinking about political order (and my frustration that Fukuyama hasn't gotten enough credit for the great thinking he's doing now that history is over) was titled "The Eunuch."
There should be a pretty visible straight line from Fukuyama as I've summarized him to "The Eunuch." You want eunuchs running your empire and your empire's army because they aren't going to try to take over a chunk of it and hand it down to their sons. And you will be partly wrong, because they may start adopting children in large numbers and creating the same kinds of problems you had with your intact civil servants. Fukuyama describes a similar process among the Janissaries, who were originally prevented from passing their status to their children (they may have even been prevented from marrying--I can't recall).
Bizarrely, these brilliant historians didn't really seem to talk about it in this way. One was asked, for instance, where the idea of the giving the eunuchs greater authority for managing the state in Assyria in the 8th century BC had come from, and she could say only that it was one of many creative reforms the Assyrians implemented at that time as their best and brightest considered how to strengthen the empire's institutions. Yet to me, there is a very clear logic explaining why a king would endorse something like this.
I like to think I give historical contingency its due. Things happen for plenty of reasons, and if you've ever tried to run a regression on a social science dataset, it's very easy to be skeptical of all-encompassing theories of history. However, when a historical institution re-creates itself again and again, there may be a general principle at work. I think the political decay dynamic is pretty likely to be a real one.
