The Beginning of History - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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Fukuyama posits a link between Darwinian natural selection and political evolution. Because human nature has universal, evolved characteristics, he writes, "human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures." Biology, he continues, "frames and limits the nature of institutions that are possible."
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He then organizes political development into a four-tier taxonomy: Kin-ship-based bands and tribes were followed by the more complex arrangements of chiefdoms and states, in which authority was exerted on the basis of territory, not ancestry. Tribes became possible after the invention of agriculture, which allowed for higher population densities than could be sustained in hunter-gatherer societies. "Human beings were now in contact with one another on a much broader scale," Fukuyama writes, "and this required a very different form of social organization."
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The transition to states, he writes, constituted a "huge setback for human freedom" because states tend to be less egalitarian. Tribes were therefore most likely compelled by violence to relinquish their autonomy. One tribe conquered another one. Bureaucracies were established to rule over the vanquished tribe, and a standing army and police force were mustered—in short, the building blocks of modern states. The sociologist Charles Tilly put it best: "War made the state, and the state made war."
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