Skocpol vs. Fukuyama on the Tea-Party: Political Sociology Grudge Match

Excuse the over-dramatic title, I just thought it was interesting that Fukuyama (to whom this blog seems addicted) and Theda Skocpol (one of the most prominent US political sociologists and one of the foremost theorists of social revolutions) have both weighed into debates over the Tea-Party and its significance. In fairness, Fukuyama makes his contribution to the debate in an interview with a news weekly whereas Skocpol has been engaged in a detailed empirical study of the Tea-Partiers with her colleague Vanessa Williams. Still, the contrasts are interesting.

Fukuyama (p1 p2), for example, identifies the Tea-Partiers as being young, enthusiastic and grass-roots – rejecting the idea that the Koch brothers or whoever are behind the movement. He is puzzled, however, why the Tea-Partiers seem to be organising against their own economic interests by agitating policies which benefit ‘elites they should despise’. His suggestion is that the movement has tapped into a deep strain of scepticism towards government and hostility towards ‘elites’ of any stripe. Like in his recent book, Fukuyama sees political culture as perhaps the most important determining factor in the different paths societies take.

However, as I tried to suggest in a previous post, I think it’s too simple to see the Tea-Partiers as straightforwardly mobilizing against their own interests. If we do so we either have to  draw on ideas of ‘false consciousness’ and assume they are hoodwinked (dismissed in an out of hand fashion by Fukuyama as a conspiracy theory) or we have to hand-wave by saying that culture provides the explanation. But there are different ways actors can understand their own interests, they might attach a strong importance to their relative rather than absolute well-being. This might just be what motivates Tea-Partiers, fear that the distance between them and those beneath them might be eroding due to the actions of Obama and the federal government. Perhaps downward mobility of the middle-class and upward mobility of lower-classes frightens and angers them.

The grey guards

Interestingly, Skocpol actually rejects the idea that Tea-Partiers are organising against their economic interests and suggests that they are fighting for very specific material interests and values (unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to read her book, I’m going on a few reviews and the recent articles she has published to expand on her and Williams’ thesis). Like Fukuyama she sees them as a grass-roots organisation with a strong sense of their political goals and what they want to achieve. However, her research rejects the idea that the organisation is a young movement – rather it is a movement of the middle-aged suburban middle class. They aren’t against all government spending, they’re very pro government programmes which benefit people like them and very anti programmes benefiting undeserving people (the young, migrants, inner-city groups – yes, that’s a euphemism).  In a Washington Post article Skocpol and Williams write:

Tea Party activists are not uniformly opposed to government social programs, however. Our interviewees were very anxious that Social Security and Medicare be maintained. “I’ve been working since I was 16 years old, and I do feel like I should someday reap the benefit. I’m not looking for a handout. I’m looking for a pay out of what I paid into,” one Tea Party member explained.

As Skocpol notes:

After all, tea partyers see themselves as hard-working Americans whose taxes should not fund benefits for “freeloaders.” Along with illegal immigrants, low-income Americans and young people loom large as illegitimate consumers of public benefits and services. In tea party thinking, they are all asking for more than they have earned.

The Skocpol and Williams analysis suggests there is a generational cleavage opening up, a ‘grey vs. brown’ divide between the conservative sub-urban whites and the multi-racial, cosmopolitan younger generation. The latter are symbolised by Obama, who represents everything the Tea Partiers despise about the contemporary US: he’s mixed-race, immigrant, educated, and wants to make Federal programmes universal rather than targeted at sub-urban middle-class insiders. There’s a very strong moral economy at work here, in which the Tea-Party represents the revolt of the hard-working middle class against feckless and immoral freeloaders who aren’t even ‘real Americans’ anyway.

Unlike Fukuyama, Skocpol isn’t shy about emphasising the role of free-market fundamentalist organisations funded by billionaires in the Tea-Party – or more accurately in leverage the Tea-Party to gain influence over the Republican national agenda. Although they don’t have much sway at the grass-roots level (which is genuinely a grass-roots movement), well-funded organisations such as Americans for Prosperity (supported by the Koch brothers) have been busily promoting an agenda that seems compatible but is actually contradictory to the ‘welfare only for us’ platform of the Tea-Party. The Tea-Partiers might be organising in their own interests, but risk being played for fools by the big money agenda. In fairness to Fukuyama, he does note that

Republican politicians are completely bought by Wall Street

but he doesn’t give a very clear view between the hard-right business conservatives, the Republican party and the Tea-Party as does Skocpol. Her analysis suggests we are seeing a significant realignment in US politics. A question raised by Fukuyama is pertinent, however. ‘Where is the uprising from the left?’ Why does Occupy have difficulty in moving beyond its young activist base to become a broad populist left-of centre movement? Why is its ‘blame narrative’ and set of claims about social justice less compelling to many Americans than that of the Tea-Party? It’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s an important one.

Fukuyama Blogging: Part 5 ‘Conclusion’

Intro; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; China/Russia detour; Part 4

Much delayed post on Fukuyama’s conclusion to The Origins of Political Order. I’ve had this post sat on my hard drive for over a month, but I wasn’t feeling the blogging vibe. Let’s have another go!

Having reached the French Revolution and the highest forms of political development through the emergence of the modern state, the rule of law and political accountability vol. 1 of Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order concludes. The entire history of politics from our primate ancestors up to the dawn of the modern world: done and dusted. Time to wrap up and look at what Fukuyama hopes we will take away from the book:

1) Modernisation not a general process, nor is political modernisation. Fukuyama’s goal is, in one sense, to rehabilitate modernisation theory and to make a case for the existence of an evolutionary ladder in political development. But at the same time he wants to reject the idea, promoted by classical social thinkers such as Weber, Durkheim and Marx, that all the components of modernisation are linked as part of a general process. Political modernisation inChina ran ahead even absent technological development. Nor is political modernisation a singular process, it can be decomposed into three aspects as I examined above. Fukuyama makes a strong case here, but as I argued in Part 4 its questionable whether he really succeeds in separating the ideas of accountability and the rule of law. The two seem pretty much intertwined empirically, even if they are conceptually distinct.

2) Ideas matter.Fukuyama seems quite irritated by perspectives which fail to acknowledge the independent weight of ideas in the evolution of human societies. He insists that it’s ‘a fool’s er­rand’ to attempt to make sense of the specifics of religion in terms of material circumstances, ideas ‘are tur­tles far down the stack that do not nec­es­sar­ily stand on the backs of tur­tles re­lat­ed to the econ­omy or phys­ical en­vi­ron­ment’. As a partisan of the opposite point of view, however, I wasn’t convinced thatFukuyama provides enough support for this thesis. In his account of political development it seems that it’s the way religious institutions  are socially organised that really matters. This in fact fits in with an ‘organizational materialist’ perspective of scholars like Mann and Tilly very well. At other times,Fukuyama’s account acknowledges the direct material interests of religious actors. It’s pretty rare in the book that the actual substantive content of belief systems makes a big difference independently of other factors.

On the subject, I was slightly disappointed how rarely the idea of the ‘struggle for recognition’ comes up in the book.Fukuyamais a well known for his Hegelian view that the search for recognition – reciprocal acknowledgement by one’s peers – is the driving force in human history. Yet the idea only has a walk on part in this book, with the biological drive to favour friends and family doing the heavy lifting.

Move over, bub, you're History.

3) Violence plays a central role in political development. Following the well known arguments of Hintze, Tilly and others in IR such as Spruyt and Ayoob, Fukuyama places a lot of weight on conflict as a driver of the rise of the state and of political accountability (but not the rule of law as far as I can tell). Violence has a Darwinian function in generating selective pressure amongst political units and generating one of the few impetuses to overcome vested interests (see #7).

Okay, sure, fine. This is a well-established thesis that has been the subject of extensive debate. But it’s worth noting that there are other kinds of competition, for migrants, political supporters, allies and for mobile capital (the latter examined by Arrighi and Silver in the context of early modern Europe), many of which probably drove political development as well.

4) Property rights aren’t everything – oh and Mancur Olson was wrong. Fukuyama spends a lot of time criticizing economists and political scientists who think that everything turns on robust property rights and that all strong states are predators who bury commercial activity with onerous taxes. The story is much more complex than the account inspired by political economists such as Olson, he insists.

Pretty much wrong, apparently

Here there’s not much to disagree with, the property rights uber alles brigade are pretty wearying. But it is worth noting that very often the people that Fukuyama bothers to engage with are all from the conservative side of academic debate, making specific mention of the specifics of arguments by neo-liberals and even neo-conservatives. In one sense, these are probably the people who Fukuyama debates with and is addressing in the book. But it’s notable that, although he often criticises Marx, he doesn’t actually engage with modern scholars influenced by Marx such as GA Cohen or Hobsbawm. There’s some irony in this deployment of straw-man Marxism, as contemporary Marxists such as Brenner and the IR theorist Teschke have made arguments which are of a similar format to Fukuyama’s, stressing the specifics of different systems of property rights and the relations between classes in explaining how capitalism originated in England.

What’s more, for all his attempts to distance himself from the Whig view of history, his account of the development is quite rose tinted in certain respects. It stresses the strong property rights of English subjects and established traditions of political accountability, but makes no mention of enclosure and the colossal theft by elites that it constituted. Both within Britainand overseas in its colonies, the establishment of property rights for some was quite closely related to the loss of property on the part of others. Turning to the modern world, things don’t seem to have changed much: witness the land grabs by unscrupulous local officials in China and the resultant images of ‘nail houses’.

5) Extreme levels of path-dependence characterises development. AlthoughFukuyama is resurrecting the idea of political modernisation and evolution, his account makes it clear that societies do not pass through a sequence of similar changes. Rather, their different paths are shaped by very deep social institutions:

New in­sti­tu­tions are more typ­ical­ly lay­ered on top of ex­ist­ing ones, which sur­vive for ex­traor­di­nar­ily long pe­ri­ods of time.

There’s no smooth and automatic progression along a simple evolutionary pathway either:

The ac­tu­al his­tor­ical roots of dif­fer­ent in­sti­tu­tions of­ten seem to be the prod­ucts of a long con­cate­na­tion of his­tor­ical ac­ci­dents that one could nev­er have pre­dict­ed in ad­vance.

Borrowing the idea of spandrels from Gould and Lewontin, he argues that an institution that arose for one purpose might play a totally different purpose further down the line – a notion that Mann referred to as a kind of institutional promiscuity.

This all makes political development seem pretty haphazard. Indeed, if this is true, then it seems that actually existing historical civilisations probably did not exhaust all the various possible ways of organising agrarian societies.

It makes me wonder as well, what of all the paths of socio-political development off the main linesFukuyamaexamines? All the societies he focuses on are patrilineal, but what about matrilineal cultures such as the Israelites or Sumatra’s Minangkabao people. Were these dead ends or did circumstances just prevent them from achieving the prominence of other world civilisations?

6) Political development should be understood in within-nation terms. Fukuyama actually contradicts himself on this issue I think. His focus is on the internal (endogenous if you like) development of political institutions, not looking at the position of societies in wider webs of relationships. Hence, turning to contemporary questions of development he argues that:

In more re­cent so­ci­eties, it is easy to blame so­cial fail­ures on the machi­na­tions of var­ious out­siders, whether Jews or Amer­ican im­pe­ri­al­ism, rather than look­ing to in­dige­nous in­sti­tu­tions for the ex­pla­na­tion.

Well, yes. But its also easy for those in wealthy nations to blame feckless Mexicans or Africans for the problems of maldevelopment, rather than ask uncomfortable questions about the global division of labour or the architecture of transnational finance. But Fukuyama isn’t so interested in understanding the interlinked global process of development, save for when he examines the second serfdom and can’t avoid acknowledging that the enserfment of those East of the Elbe was causally linked to the economic development of the West.

Suddenly at the end of the book, however, Fukuyamatakes a different perspective on the drivers of political development:

 It is there­fore no longer pos­si­ble to speak sim­ply about “na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment.” In po­lit­ical sci­ence, com­par­ative pol­itics and in­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions have tra­di­tion­al­ly been re­gard­ed as dis­tinct sub­fields, the one deal­ing with things that hap­pen with­in states, the oth­er with re­la­tion­ships among states. In­creas­ing­ly these fields will have to be stud­ied as an in­te­grat­ed whole.

I’d agree, but I’d also say that the international dimension of development is nothing new in human history.

7) Political decay is a general phenomena. Taking up the baton from Huntingdon,Fukuyama wants to provide a sophisticated general account of political decay. Here I think he is quite successful. He sees two main sources of political decay: legacy investments, where previously successful social institutions are imbued with intrinsic value and thus are preserved long after they cease to be adaptive, and repatrimonialisation, which I examined in other posts. Yes, these are both variants of Olson’s idea of vested interests and ‘distributive coalitions’ gradually ossifying societies, butFukuyama develops the ideas with a lot of empirical and theoretical detail. I think there are other sources of political decay in the post-Malthusian world, but I’ll wait to see what Fukuyama says in the sequel.

One of the most interesting consequences of his argument is that decay generates novel social formations, not simply a reversion to previous forms. Sorry Heraclitus, but the way up is not the same as the way down. The Western Roman Empire had to fall before the possibility of feudalism arose. Decay therefore introduces novelty and can actually open up new pathways for political evolution.

That’s my scattershot appraisal of the threads of argument that run through the whole book. This post is already too long, so I’ll write a coda on the implications for the modern world to follow.

Inverted Envy and Populist Anti-egalitarianism

An interesting discussion spun off a Crooked Timber comments thread for John Quiggin’s post on Corey Robin’s book ‘The Reactionary Mind’. The topic was the old What’s the Matter with Kansas? puzzler: why do so many Americans seem (at least as far as progressives can ascertain) to vote against their own economic interests for a party which has trashed their prospects for prosperity? One element of the answer is an elite-based explanation. Neither the Republicans nor, crucially, the Democrats have offered a programme that promotes the economic interests of the vast majority of Americans. The Democrats occupy the space for a genuinely progressive or social democratic party within a two party system, but -with notable exceptions such as Elizabeth Warren -  don’t deign to actually fight for progressive policies.  Hence people ‘vote their values’ by supporting the platform of socially conservative Republicans whom they feel they have a cultural affinity with. It’s in the interest of the Republicans to keep such divisive issues open as it obviates the intensification of a class-based socio-economic cleavage, whilst the Democrats are pushed towards a defence of progressive causes which unfortunately makes them appear as culturally distant from the ‘heartlands’.

That’s the familiar part of the explanation. But how is it that plutocrats such as the Koch brothers seem to have tapped into fairly widespread popular support for totally regressive economic policies? People haven’t just been deflected from their interests, they’ve lined up to form a ‘King and Church’ mob in defence of the rich.

One explanation is that the Tea Party troopers have been systematically misinformed, in line with the ‘propaganda model’ of the media – hard to discount given the ‘Get the Government out of Medicare’ absurdities and the flagrant lies of Fox News. Another related explanation is the good old standby ‘false consciousness’, the idea developed by Marxists but borrowed by feminists, anti-racists, post-colonialists and others that the oppressed can internalise the ideology of their oppressors such that they see social arrangements as natural or even positively desirable.

The problem with this, aside from potentially authoritarian and elitist implications, is that it is analytically dissatisfying to go around assuming that people are clueless about their own interests. It’s probably more compelling to suggest that there are multiple ways which people could conceive of their own interests and that ideology plays a role in determining which interests they prioritise and the means they see as appropriate for achieving them. I’m with Richard Puchalsky some of the way when he suggests on the thread that many in middle America are genuinely socially conservative, but I don’t think that can be a complete explanation for the formation of a rent-a-mob on behalf of the 1%.

So the Tea Party then, what gives? Well on the thread some commentators point towards the very compelling suggestion that for the populist right in theUSabsolute welfare is less important than their relative position. Going only by what I’ve read, the base for the Tea Party seems to be older, white, surburban, middle-manager types. Perhaps these groups are used to what political scientists have called the ‘symbolic wage’, the psychic dividend to less rich whites that comes from the greater respect they are accorded than ethnic minorities. The idea of a black man in the White House does seem to upset them on a visceral level (hence the lunacy of the birther nonsense and the outright denial of the possibility that an African-American could legitimate hold that office), almost as if something vitally important has been stolen from them – which according to the symbollic wage theory it has. It’s hardly controversial to suggest that it’s impossible to disentangle the issues of race and welfare in US politics. Plenty of political scientists have suggested that ethno-racial heterogeneity reduces welfare-state transfers, people are only comfortable with their taxes going to people ‘like themselves’, and in the US the issue seems particularly virulent.

Being badly off isn’t so much of a problem so long as those worse off than them stay that way and suffer even more than they do, especially if the badly off are from an out group perceived as being inferior. Hob put this quite nicely in the comments:

The fact that the reactionary movement promises to roll back many social benefits they now enjoy is offset by the promise of making them kings of their own territory, securely placed above their wives, or their employees, or a racial other. The leaders of the Confederacy saw it that way, or at least wanted to encourage their followers to see it that way: every white man can be an aristocrat regardless of wealth, as long as he can have slaves… The progressive/democratic alternative, in which you just don’t have so many one-sided power relationships, can’t offer that vision of security— of being one of the winners.

Or if you prefer Eastern European folktales, Marcel on the thread gives us the following

A peasant found a lamp with a genie that promised him one wish, with the proviso that whatever the peasant received, his neighbor would receive double. After a moment’s thought, the peasant said, “Take away one of my eyes.”

There really does appear to be a nasty dog-in-the-manger/misery loves company aspect to the Tea Partiers. Indeed, it strikes me that this is all a sort of politics of envy. Lazy right-wingers who have never cracked the spine of a book on political theory like to hurl this insult at those who favour redistribution, ignoring that in the absence of implausible Laffer-curve assumptions about dead-weight losses the beneficiaries of redistributive policies will be straightforwardly better off. Envy is a form of spite, and there’s nothing spiteful about plain old self-interest.

But there is something spiteful about wanting those less-well off than you to stay that way and resenting it when their position improves. Indeed, inverted envy seems to sum up such a nasty bundle of spiteful feelings quite well: envy of what little those less fortunate have and a desire to see them with even less. Hence all the drivel and mock outrage about the fact that many of the poor own refrigerators.

The resentment of the popular right doesn’t just look downwards but sideways towards the unionised public sector and upwards towards liberals in the professional classes, paid up members of the ‘elite’. This can be witnessed in theUKas well in those tedious insults about bruschetta-eating Islington Guardianistas by those who otherwise claim to celebrate and admire success. But its only the rich, job creators don’t you know, who are spared resentment. Perhaps some of the popular right are deluded enough to believe that they are likely to join their number, that as surveys have suggested they believe themselves down on their luck millionaires rather than propertyless proletarians  (a good overview of this and other proposed mechanisms in The Economist).

But I would guess that many conceive of their interests in terms of preserving the petty hierarchies that enable them to see themselves as ‘winners’ and identify with the rich and powerful, snickering as others are pauperised alongside them.

Gray on gray: John Gray and the Owl of Minerva

Just like 2001, 2011 has given lots of people reason to have a pop at Fukuyama’s notion of The End of History (all caps, we’re talking in Hegelian now).  Often this involves some pretty weak criticisms vaguely directed at a straw-man version of Fukuyama’s thesis, which is assumed to be about US unipolarity or globalisation or whatever. John Gray, however, knows what he is talking about and offers a much more insightful dissection of the concept in an article on the BBC website. I think, in the context of the short piece, he does justice to Fukuyama’s ideas whilst vivisecting them to display their flaws:

They were swayed by a myth – a myth of progress in which humanity is converging on a universal set of institutions and values. The process might be slow and faltering and at times go into reverse, but eventually the whole of humankind would live under the same enlightened system of government.

…While constantly urging the necessity for change, believers in gradual progress also assume that fundamental conflicts will wither away. Along with Marx, they imagine a radical alteration in human existence as a consequence of which the recurrent struggles that have shaped human life throughout the ages will be no more.

In different ways utopian thinkers and believers in gradual progress both look forward to an end to history as it has always been.

Here, I think, Gray is on the money. The denial that major human conflicts will at some future point be permanently resolved and that social life will take on the placid tranquillity of a waveless ocean can be thought of as a hallmark of ‘realist’ thought. For thinkers in such a tradition, the idea of a world without politics is absurd. A dangerous absurdity too because it encourages messianic crusades to bring history to a close and discourages an acceptance of plurality and disagreement.

Gray wants to suggest that the book of history never closes, that new surprises await us on every page. Crises don’t just disorientate us, they can leave us without bearings as all the stable features of our lives crumble away. I have to admit, this perspective has some resonance with my own personal situation since the GFC broke. But greater chaos yet could still be unleashed, plenty of history looks likely to be made in 2012.

Fukuyama Blogging: Part 4 ‘Political Accountability’

Intro; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; China/Russia detour

Continuing my efforts to blog my progress through Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order vol. 1, here’s Part the 4^th. This section could be subtitled ‘a brief history of accountable government’, as it deals with how broadly responsive government emerged in the pre-modern era. Again,Fukuyama is engaged in another plate spinning exercise. Accountability can only exist under very specific ‘goldilocks’ conditions under which the central estate and elite actors are roughly in balance.

Fukuyamapresents a typology of three different kinds of regime: Strong absolutism (his conception of which I discussed in my last post on China and Russia), weak absolutism, failed oligarchy and genuine accountable government. The last three are found primarily inWestern Europe, where the lateness of the development of the state made strong absolutism unlikely.

Ironically, although he makes many criticisms of Marx, it is clear that Fukuyama views class struggle as a pretty major determinant of the type of regime a society ends up with. Weak absolutisms occur where elite actors are co-opted by the state but retain their privileges. This produces a systematically corrupt form of government with a dependent elite above the rule of law and an oppressed peasantry. The exemplars Fukuyama provides are France and Spain, where caste-like gradations between different noble office-holders and elite exemptions from taxation produced societies dominated by rent-seeking.

What’s particularly interesting here is Fukuyama’s examination of how this venal system crossed the Atlantic and was transplanted to the Spanish Americas, giving rise to the legacy of oligarchic and patrimonial politics in Latin America. Indeed,Fukuyamamakes some fascinating comparisons between the travails of weak absolutist regimes and contemporary developing nations, likening Louis XVI’s minister Anne-​Robert-​Jacques Tur­got to technocratic neo-liberals parachuted into finance ministries inLatin America. He also notes that this kind of elite-co-opting state is chronically unable to institute a sensible system of taxation, so it has a strong tendency to default on debts as a surreptitious form of financing its expenditure. The centre cannot truly eliminate well entrenched elites, only chip away at their independence. Networks of patronage take the place of negotiated settlements between organised social groups, the norm in accountable regimes.

Irascible French nobles causing trouble for Edmund Blackadder

Those elites eh? Nothing but trouble. They make a similar nuisance of themselves in ‘failed oligarchies’, the exemplar of which is medieval Hungary. The Hungarian kingdom is not exactly well known as a crucial case-study in the making of the modern state, but it is of pivotal importance to Fukuyama’s argument. Indeed, maybe too much rests on this single case study. Hungary is important because Hungarian elites were able to thoroughly check the powers of their monarch and reduce him to their agent through the Golden Bull of 1222, a kind of super Magna Carta. The church, high nobles and lower gentry were all arrayed against the centre. The result was a weak state that failed to institute the kind of fiscal-military reforms pioneered elsewhere inEuropein the late middle-ages. At the mercy of large noble estates, the peasantry was crushed:

The “free­dom” sought by the Hun­gar­ian no­ble class was the free­dom to ex­ploit their own peas­ants more thor­ough­ly, and the ab­sence of a strong cen­tral state al­lowed them to do just that. Ev­ery­one un­der­stands the Chi­nese form of tyran­ny, one per­pe­trat­ed by a cen­tral­ized dic­ta­tor­ship. But tyran­ny can re­sult from de­cen­tral­ized oli­garchic dom­ina­tion as well

So we hit another dead end.

The Hungarian example is important because it buttresses Fukuyama’s belief that too much of anything (state power, elite independence) is a bad thing. The path to political development is the golden mean between alternatives. Down this path walked England, where a strong state faced a coherent landed elite. Unlike in Russia or China, English elites retained their independence. Unlike in France, they had deep roots on their estates in the country, they did not become office holders clustering round the royal court like flies. Why didn’t England go down the path of Hungary, however? Alternatively, why didn’t Englandend up like France? Why were the tendencies towards weak absolutism in the Stuart period defeated? For Fukuyama the important factors were the established liberties enjoyed by all social groups and the more open and less caste-like nature of social class in England.

Okay, plausible enough. But I wonder if an alternative explanation could be thrashed out by focusing on the terms of the settlement between elites and the state in the late medieval period. Whereas once lords had vied for the crown and acted as kingmakers, under the Tudors the elites were largely disarmed. However, the monarch depended on parliament to raise taxes for the purpose of war-making. So, perhaps by accident, the UK happened to hit on a compact between nobles and the state in which an accountable state secured a monopoly on the use of force. I’m not a historian of this period (yet alone of medieval Hungary for purpose of comparison), but I believe Mann makes the argument that by Elizabeth I the outlines of constitutional government were already in place.

Once again,Fukuyama’s argument might seem rather Whiggish, with its story of the rights of freeborn Englishmen triumphing over the plots of popish Stuarts, but he tries to head off the criticism with an example of how it could all go wrong as it did in Hungary, and how it went right for slightly different reasons in Denmark. In the home the best lager in the world, the monarchy supported literacy amongst the peasantry for religious reasons and attempted to build a peasant-based conscript army to avoid dependence on the nobles. This established traditions of corporate organisation amongst the upwardly mobile peasantry, setting the stage for gradual political mobilisation and the demand for accountable government. So the English Goldilocks had sister.

What Britain and Denmark shared was a synchronicity between state-strength, rule of law and accountability – providing a virtuous circle which created conditions for further political development. These nations were able to deal with the strains of modernisation, whereas (as Fukuyama acknowledges in the conclusion of the book) absolutist regimes such asFrancecould not cope with the demands of newly mobilised social groups during the dawn of the modern era. In any case,

The three com­po­nents of a mod­ern po­lit­ical or­der—a strong and ca­pa­ble state, the state’s sub­or­di­na­tion to a rule of law, and gov­ern­ment ac­count­abil­ity to all cit­izens—had all been es­tab­lished in one or an­oth­er part of the world by the end of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Returning to form as a disciple of Hegel and Kojeve, he notes that history effectively ended in 1806 at the battle of Jena. All that follows is epilogue.

But before the owl of minerva takes flight, lets go back a bit. First, I’m not really sure how separable the rule of law and political accountability in Fukuyama’s narrative. The problem is that England (and sometimes Denmark) is the exemplar of both of these aspects of political development. Both require a balance between state and elite power. Fukuyama suggests that Prussia under Fredrick the Great was an absolutism constrained by the rule of law, a Rechstaat, and it might have been enlightening if it had been used as a case study. But it is difficult to think of a state with political accountability (which we might define as the ability of corporate actors representing both elite and subordinate social classes to constrain the state) in which the rule of law was unknown. It’s hard to think of any likely candidates.

Second, I think that there is still a lot to be said for an alternative perspective that sees Britain as one of a chain of capitalist polities of increasing scale and ‘nation-ness’, from the city state of Genoa to the United Provinces of the Netherlands. This family of polities, which also might include Switzerland and the Hanseatic League, has been of interest to scholars such as Tilly, Arrighi and Deudney. It’s not as if the international aspect of political development is missed by Fukuyama. But whilst the importance of conflict is acknowledged, he pays little attention to the development of worldwide capitalism and how it drove processes such as urbanisation in early modern Europe. War, trade and political development have always been related, however. The maritime orientation of Britain, for example, has been seen as pushing it towards developing a navy and seeking colonies overseas instead of remaining involved in continental European geopolitics. Its decision to become a sea rather than land power may have pushed it down a very different path to Spain, which Tilly suggests it otherwise resembled. Navies are expensive, but they cannot be used as a tool to oppress and extract wealth from domestic actors.

But in Fukuyama’s account, the rise of urban commerce and the burgher class depended more on domestic factors than international relationships. Capitalism arose in Europe because a deadlock between elites and the state prevented it from being strangled in the crib by either.

But enough, onwards towards the final post, where I’ll cover the conclusion as well as sling out some more reflections onFukuyama’s opus.

#Egypt, #OWC and the End of the End of History

Everyone is commenting on how eventful 2011 has turned out to be, with Charlie Brooker comparing it to an untoppable season finale. Given that the past week witnessed the deaths of both Vaclav Havel and Kim Il Jong (seems like the childlike empress of the universe is trying to keep the scores even), it’s anyone’s guess what surprise twist will be sprung in the last two weeks of the year. Alien contact via microwave signals beamed to Nintendo 3DS consoles? Ahmadinejad turns out to be a Saudi sleeper agent? Dolphins petition to join the UN?

'Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.' Heraclitus and NeverEnding Story references in a single post, only here on Chaos and Governance

The ‘Arab Spring’ and the Occupy protests have, of course, been identified as the crucially important events of the year by many. The link between the two was at first seen as spurious by many. But in an article for the Guardian last Friday, Malik, Shenker and Gabbat make a decent case for seeing events of the year as part of an interlinked youth revolt against economic and political hierarchies, taking inspiration from one another and employing the same social media-enabled tactics.

It may have seemed churlish at first to compare the sacrifices of the Egyptian protesters to those of the Occupy movement but, without losing a sense of perspective, the parallels seemed much more relevant once security forces responding to Occupations by pepper-spraying unarmed, unresisting students in the face at point blank range.

In addition, commentators such as Malik, Shenker and Gabbat (as well as Mason) have seen in the various struggles signs of the decentralised ‘multitude’ prophesied by social theorists Negeri and Hardt back in 2000 as the new vanguard of global protest. On this I’m not so sure. Is the Egyptian uprising really all that different in terms of its social composition or organisational strategy from past pro-democracy movements, such as those which brought down the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe?

Malik, Shenkar and Gabbat seem like they are on to something when they suggest that there is an important generational aspect to current protests. There is an undeniable groundswell of frustration from what they describe as ‘most well-educated generation in human history’, a generation which is probably the most under-employed generation in history to boot. High education and dashed expectations are a volatile mixture. As Mason quips in what was probably the most important and perceptive blog post of the year, the French revolution was ‘not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers’.

The Malik et al piece, however, ends with the rather strange suggestion that

the great revenge is this: the generation that grew up being told they were the heirs to Francis Fukuyama’s end of history and victory of a liberal capitalist society, is now working its damnedest to prove how untrue this is

Maybe I just have Fukuyama on the brain this month. But the comment seems strange because it seems to describe the opposite of what is going on in the Middle East, where pro-democracy movements (or at least important elements of them) are trying their damnedest to prove that Fukuyama was right, to prove that that the Arab-Islamic world is not eternally destined to be subject to tyranny and that democracy is a universal aspiration. Even in the advanced industrialised world, where I agree that many making up the Occupy movements seem to yearn for something more than representative liberal democracy, it seems strange to call the protests ‘revenge’. Rather, they seem more like self-defence in the face of the shredding of the social contract and all-out assault by the 1%. Indeed, a return to the model of social market democracy extant before the crisis would no doubt be an appealing proposition for many in Western Europe and the US right now.

In other words, I think many of us in the North wish that history really had ended in 1989.

Fukuyama Blogging: ‘Meanwhile, Back in Imperial China…’

Intro; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3

Okay, here’s a supplementary post on Chapter 20 of Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order vol 1 (previous posts: Intro, Part 1, 2, 3). The Chapter is a bit of a sore thumb in Part 3, which deals with the origins of the rule of law. But Fukuyama does not think thatChinadeveloped the rule of law according to his definition, as laws were schedules of punishments rather than constraints on rulers. So Fukuyama instead analyses the development of the Chinese imperial system without the rule of law and without accountability. In terms of Fukuyama’s schema, this makes China and Russia kindred in terms of their political systems – so I’ll pull out the discussion of the Russian Empire in Chapters 25 and 26 as well.

Russia and China were similar in that they both had to deal with military threats from steppe nomads. Invasions from such groups periodically disrupted China, but by the second millennium AD the tendency to reunification and reconsolidation was already well established. Like IR theorists and would-be psychohistorians Modelski and Thompson, Fukuyama emphasises the high degree of political and economic development enjoyed in China during the Song Dynasty in the C12th – they even had mechanical clocks! But the Song were invaded by the Rurzhen (precursors of the Manchu). At this stage in military history settled peoples had no decisive advantage over nomads, a fact which only changed ‘After Tamerlane’, as John Darwin argues. So Chinese political development kept on being disrupted by both patrimonial corruption from within and invasion from without.

Interacting with nomads may have put Russia and China on distinct paths of political development

Russia, however, was able to gradually turn the tables on Eurasian nomads after it finally overthrew the Mongol yoke. Indeed, in Fukuyama’s account, Russian absolutism is explained as a kind of serf-owning pyramid scheme geared towards constant expansion.Russia expanded for several centuries by pushing beyond its frontiers and establishing new defensive limes – see Darwin again on the details. Like in ancientChina, cities were less commercial hubs and more centers for bureaucratic and military administration. Expanding the frontiers was essential to stabilise border regions, to which serfs had a nasty habit of escaping to – hence the Cossack hosts on Russia’s Southern borders. On Fukuyama’s account the state, the church, the high nobles and the lesser nobles all had a common interest in maintaining this system of unfree labour.

Here lies another similarity between China and Russia: the state was free to terrorize elites to a much greater extent than elsewhere. From Ivan the Terrible’s efforts to liquidate the boyars onwards, the Russian state was able to sequentially rob elites of their independence and reduce them to mere office-holders in a agrarian military bureaucracy. Similarly, the more ruthless Chinese rulers like Empress Wu of the late 7^th century, could have whole lineages of Chinese elites executed. There were few checks on Chinese imperial absolutism, which was moderated only by the Confucian tradition of meritocracy and the notion of the ‘mandate of heaven’. Although the notion of the ‘mandate’ was usually applied post-hoc and was without any firm criteria, the literati could still exercise some indirect influence over the emperor by shaping norms about proper imperial conduct.

But although it could moderate despotism, the bureaucracy was itself the source of problems. Bureaucrats are supposed to act impartially on behalf of the executive. But how can the political centre ensure that bureaucrats don’t misuse their powers or conceal information? The attempted solution in both Russia and China was to create networks of spies that served the centre directly. In China, certain emperors created cadres of eunuchs who served the same purpose. But this solution was an attempt to control the bureaucracy by creating a second bureaucracy to monitor it, a dead end.

Eunuchs make the best imperial spies

So on Fukuyama’s account both Russian Chinese systems reached their limits. Chinese imperial dynasties were unable to implement an efficient system of taxation and the centre was unable to formulate successful policy due to the archaic relationship between the bureaucracy and the emperor. When the centre fell in both China and Russia chaos reigned, perhaps because intermediate forms of social organisation had been gutted so thoroughly.

But interestingly enough, Fukuyama does not blame Chinese institutions for the fact that it was overtaken by the West in terms of technological development. ‘Good enough’ property rights were present, the centre did not and could not crush the economy through taxes, and bureaucratic administration was of a comparatively high quality. The reason, he thinks, must lie in more general attitudes to science and technology.

So, back to the story of political development in the West and the emergence of accountability!

Why Aren’t we all Singularitarians?

That’s the question being asked over at hnet. Why does belief in the singularity, the imminent exponential acceleration of the development of technology resulting in a post-scarcity age of limitless possibility, remain confined to dedicated enthusiasts?

The answer provided is that the public remain uninterested, unaware and/or sceptical of such notions because 1) the benefits promised by new waves of technology (such as the technology for space travel) proved to be a mirage 2) political, regulatory and cultural factors are inhibiting the development of many promising avenues towards Singularity City.

Call me a know-nothing sceptic, but the fact that space travel, robotics, genetics and – yes – even computers failed to live up to their promise should make us all a bit wary of the idea of an accelerating upward curve of technological development. As brilliantly expressed in Gibson’s short story The Gernsback Continuum, we already live in a world filled with echoes of the shiny utopian visions of yesterday. It’s somewhat ironic that the article expresses a hope that a film of Neuromancer might help shift cultural attitudes, as cyberpunk was an expression of total incredulity towards the optimism invested in the Jetsons-esque imagined futures of the ‘golden age’ of welfare capitalism.

2011 did not look much like this

One reason why many of those who have engaged with singularitarian ideas remain sceptical might be that over the past few decades there have been few technologically induced improvements in the quality of life for the majority of people in the advanced industrialised world. Much heralded discoveries, such as the human genome project, represent major scientific milestones but have produced fewer tangible benefits than expected (in the case of the HGP partially due to the unanticipated complexity of the epigenetic systems that control the expression of genes). 2011 was once envisaged as a time in which the promise of the early developments in cybernetics and biotech would be realised (just as the early C21st was envisaged as an era of space colonisation in the imaginary of the previous era), yet it still looks very much like the past.

This fact is made clear by the lacklustre rate of economic growth experienced in the industrialised world over the last thirty years. Computers and communications technology represent a partial exception. But this wave of technologies have not resulted in the generalised productivity growth associated with electrification or steam-power. They haven’t made transport easier or more rapid, they haven’t yet solved the problem of Baumol’s cost disease (teachers can still only teach effectively approximately the same number of students as they could in the C19th). Of course, robotics, space travel (through communications satellites) and computers are all now essential parts of the way the world economy operates. But all were oversold and none have had the dramatic, positive effects that previous technological shifts had. Indeed, through processes such as outsourcing, many of these technologies have been implicated in shifts which have left those in the industrialised world more insecure and precariously located than they once were.

I’m not actually a complete sceptic when it comes to specific singularitarian ideas. Cybernetics, narrow AI, advanced materials, gene-therapy and gerontological medicine (life extension) are probably going to arrive eventually . These technologies will likely reshape human societies, although in periods measured by ‘historical time’ rather than ‘event time’. But at present, there is as much evidence to suggest that we live in an era of technological stagnation (even whilst we witness dramatic leaps in scientific knowledge) as we do the pre-takeoff phase of a singularity. 

Fukuyama Blogging: Chapter 3 ‘The Rule of Law’

Intro

Part 1

Part 2

Part the third of Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order vol 1 deals with the second element of the triad of political development: the rule of law. Fukuyama picks up where he left off, examining the unique social fabric of Western Europe. It looks at first like Fukuyama is defending a familiar Whig view of the origins of the modern world according to which the ‘rights of freeborn Englishmen’ provided the foundation for the development of private property, prosperity and political liberty.

Everything I know about British history I learned from Blackadder

But Fukuyama’s argument in this part of the book is very specific and in quite sharp disagreement with lots of other scholars. For example, he picks a fight with those contemporary Whigs – neo-classical economists and like-minded historians – who equate the rule of law with secure property rights and, furthermore, hold that the latter are sufficient to ensure economic growth. According to Fukuyama this is incorrect, as ‘good enough’ property rights are sufficient for growth in the right conditions but property rights on their own will not produce sustained growth in pre-modern Malthusian conditions where technological change is only sporadic.

Fukuyama’s primary interlocutors are other conservative liberals, but he’s pretty critical of them at the same time. For example, his argument draws heavily on Hayek’s prioritisation of customary law over legislation as the most important element of the rule of law. Law must reflect:

a so­cial con­sen­sus with­in a so­ci­ety that its laws are just and that they pre­ex­ist and should con­strain the be­hav­ior of who­ev­er hap­pens to be the ruler at a giv­en time

Customary law, exemplified by Anglo-Saxon common law built up through countless legal judgments within individual courts, provides the basis for rule by laws and not by men – providing an escape hatch from both the ‘tyranny of cousins’ and the tyranny of tyrants. But Fukuyama disagrees with Hayek as he sees the early English state as playing an important role in fostering common law by providing ‘the King’s justice’ through travelling royal courts as an alternative to elite-dominated local courts. Like many other scholars, Fukuyama sees the English monarchic state as being unique because of it was simultaneously strong and limited – in contrast with the brittle but arbitrary character of many tyrannies.

But less important than the English state, forFukuyama, is the historic role of the Church in undergirding the rule of law inWestern Europe. Fukuyama regards religion as essential in fostering the rule of law because of its ability to imbue rules with intrinsic meaning.

Re­li­gion was es­sen­tial to the es­tab­lish­ment of a nor­ma­tive le­gal or­der that was ac­cept­ed by kings as well as by or­di­nary peo­ple…The ex­is­tence of a sep­arate re­li­gious au­thor­ity ac­cus­tomed rulers to the idea that they were not the ul­ti­mate source of the law… In this re­spect Chris­tian princes were like In­di­an ra­jas and Ksha­triyas, and Arab and Turk­ish sul­tans, who would agree that they were be­low the law.

Because the state was already very developed in Chinabefore any world religion could take root, the rule of law was underdeveloped compared to other civilisations. The rule of law was developed most fully in Europe because of specific way in which ‘re­li­gious au­thor­ity [was] or­ga­nized and in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized’. The key was the distinct corporate existence of the Church. Fukuyama credits Pope Gregory VII as ‘declaring independence’ from the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor in the late C11^th and securing the Church’s autonomy by enforcing celibacy on the priesthood – preventing its decay into a patrimonial institution. Again, we have an actor pursuing material interests to pursue spiritual interests to pursue… and down the turtles go.

In any case, by laying the grounds for the Edict of Worms in 1122 and the separation of church and state, Gregory headed off caesaropapism – the subordination of organised religion to the state. An independent Church became the nexus for the revival of Roman law, which make a vital contribution to the development of the rule of law in Europe (especially continental Europe).

What about the rule of law in other civilisational areas? The Christian orthadox world remained strongly caesaropapist and so the development of law was stunted as it was in China. In India Fukuyama argues that the rule of law existed in the form of an oral tradition guarded by the Brahmins. But maybe it mattered little in the context of the ‘tyranny of society’ – I don’t know, this is well beyond my area of competence. The Sunni Islamic world presents a bit of a hard case for Fukuyama, as a conception of the rule of law with authority preceding that of particular rulers was certainly present in the Ottoman empire. Indeed, the Ottoman empire seems to have been governed broadly in accordance with a conception of law – it was no predatory state. But whilst Fukuyama acknowledges that the Muslim ulama (legal scholars) did help sustain the rule of law in the Middle East, they lacked the corporate independence necessary for true autonomy and resilience:

No one, that is, ev­er es­tab­lished a sin­gle Mus­lim “church” com­pa­ra­ble to the Catholic church that emerged af­ter the Gre­go­ri­an re­form. Like the Catholic church be­fore the in­vesti­ture con­flict, the Mus­lim clerisy was a dis­tribut­ed net­work of priests, judges, and schol­ar­ly in­ter­preters who read and ap­plied Mus­lim case law. With­in the Sun­ni tra­di­tion, there were four ma­jor com­pet­ing schools of Muslim law that were philo­soph­ical­ly het­ero­ge­neous and whose rise and fall were de­pen­dent on po­lit­ical fa­vor. Be­cause the ula­ma nev­er in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized it­self around a hi­er­ar­chy, it was not pos­si­ble to gen­er­ate a sin­gle le­gal tra­di­tion.

Hmm… I’m not sure that Fukuyama provides a fully convincing account of the origins of the rule of law in Europe here, as there is no real knock-down explanation of why its development was more limited in theMiddle East. But in any case it’s a bold and original argument that examines a set of considerations that most political comparativists and development scholars will be unfamiliar with – I know I’m out of my depth on the empirical substance in this section.

Part 3 ends with a Chapter on state-craft without the rule of law in China, which I will discuss separately as it is a bit of a tangent from the preceding argument. Then on to Part 4 and political accountability, the final element of political development.

Blast from the past

Jamie at Blood and Treasure (best damn blog on the web and no mistake) has dredged up some comment I made waaay back in 2007 where I threw monkey shit at the shiny-happy embrace of the EU by wide-eyed Blairites infatuated by Giddens’ notion of the ‘runaway world’ and the wonderful logic of global economic integration transporting us to a happy land free of politics. That vision isn’t looking so zeitgeisty any more.