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e309b00
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For , by contrast, liberal society is a reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognize each other
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georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel
hegel
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Francis Fukuyama |
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41bdca8
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In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars--corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are "masters of the universe." (They will believe this, however, only in bull market..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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4498f78
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The father of communism, Karl Marx, famously predicted the "withering away of the state" once the proletarian revolution had achieved power and abolished private property. Left-wing revolutionaries from the nineteeth-century anarchists on thought it sufficient to destroy old power structures without giving serious thought to what would take their place. This tradition continues up through the present, with the suggestion by antiglobalizatio..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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dfe2db7
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general
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Francis Fukuyama |
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ba6e2d9
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Over the next three years, Pinchot turned the Division of Forestry into a Bureau of Forestry with a much larger budget and staff. Many of his closest associates in government had been fellow students at Yale--indeed, fellow members of Skull and Bones.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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c9be859
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The opinion that the survival of Islam itself depended on the use of military slavery was shared by the great Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who lived in North Africa in the fourteenth century, contemporaneously with the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt. In the Muqadimmah, Ibn Khaldun says the following: When the [Abbasid] state was drowned in decadence and luxury and donned the garments of calamity and impotence and was overthrown by..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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e5c7276
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In Europe, demands for expanded popular participation came on the heels of war; the rise of the British Labour Party in the 1920s, for example, was in some ways a consequence of the sufferings of the working class in the trenches of World War I. In Latin America, by contrast, elites usually pulled back from interstate conflicts precisely to avoid having to turn to the masses for help.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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dcfa8ae
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The local Creole elites came to support independence in Mexico and Peru only because Ferdinand VII back in Spain agreed to accept the liberal constitution of 1812; independence for them was thus meant to prevent liberal reform from spreading to the New World.2 The makers of the American Revolution, by contrast, were liberal and democratic to the core. Independence from Britain served to embed democratic principles in the institutions of the..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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1ef632a
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Interest groups exercise influence way out of proportion to their place in society, distort both taxes and spending, and raise overall deficit levels through their ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They also undermine the quality of public administration as a result of the multiple and often contradictory mandates they induce Congress to support. All of this has led to a crisis of representation, in which ordinary people feel..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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902dc87
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The explosion of opportunities for litigation gave access and therefore power to many formerly excluded groups, beginning with African Americans. For this reason, litigation and the right to sue has been jealously guarded by many on the progressive left. But it also entailed large costs in terms of the quality of public policy.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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68205da
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When used as an instrument of enforcement, the courts have morphed from constraints on government to mechanisms by which the scope of government has enormously expanded.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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13cf110
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Joseph Stalin was said to have contemptuously asked, "How many divisions has the pope?"
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Francis Fukuyama |
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8a8eac0
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The rule of law is critical for economic development; without clear property rights and contract enforcement, it is difficult for businesses to break out of small circles of trust.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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b65ba9c
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Unfortunately, the trading of political influence for money has come back in a big way in American politics, this time in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized bribery is narrowly defined in American law as a transaction in which a politician and a private party explicitly agree upon a specific quid pro quo exchange. What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what an an..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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82288df
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The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church's self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby reconvey her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself. A woman's right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church, since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows ..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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66b8c6d
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In the succeeding two centuries, however, some countries evolved in a very different direction. Prussia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, and other European countries followed France in the development of centralized bureaucracies organized along Weberian lines. The French Revolution had, moreover, unleashed not just demands for popular political participation but also a new form of identity by which a shared language and culture would be..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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33c6553
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Interstate wars in Latin America have been so infrequent and politically unimportant that many major surveys of Latin American history barely cover them. Compared to Europe and ancient China, or indeed North America, war had a marginal effect on state building. Charles Tilly's aphorism "war made the state, and the state made war" remains true, but begs the question of why wars are more prevalent in some regions than in others."
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Francis Fukuyama |
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2126ca5
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Should we then regret the fact that Latin America has not seen more violence over the past two centuries, either in the form of massive interstate wars or social revolutions? It goes without saying that the social revolutions that occurred in Europe and Asia were purchased at enormous cost: tens of millions of people killed in purges, executions, and military conflict, and hundreds of millions more displaced, incarcerated, starved to death,..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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20af096
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With justice and moderation the people will produce more, tax revenues will increase, and the state will grow rich and powerful. Justice is the foundation of a powerful state.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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380e2f5
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Democracy in the developed world became secure and stable as industrialization produced middle-class societies, that is, societies in which a significant majority of the population thought of themselves as middle class.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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10ec7ef
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Nonetheless, the lower intensity of interstate war in Latin America did lead to some familiar outcomes. There was much less competitive pressure to consolidate strong national bureaucracies along French-Prussian lines prior to the arrival of mass political participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meant that when the franchise was opened up in the early twentieth century, there was no "absolutist coalition" in..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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b142976
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We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thu..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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716e2c4
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China was the first world civilization to create a modern state. But it created a modern state that was not restrained by a rule of law or by institutions of accountability to limit the power of the sovereign.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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576bf49
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The opinion that the survival of Islam itself depended on the use of military slavery was shared by the great Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who lived in North Africa in the fourteenth century, contemporaneously with the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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dd005c8
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the concept of "amoral familism," whose code he describes as "Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise." Cooperation" --
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Francis Fukuyama |
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1228927
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Indeed, the kinds of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian's paradise. The region as a whole is a low-tax utopia, with governments often unable to collect more than about 10 percent of GDP in taxes, compared to more than 30 percent in the United States and 50 percent in par..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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a26915f
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A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous "wisdom of crowds" are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that "institutions matter": poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions. We need therefore to b..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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638668a
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We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thu..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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f279e98
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Economists agree that all taxes potentially detract from the ability of markets to allocate resources efficiently, and the least inefficient types of taxation are those that are simple, uniform, and predictable, which allow businesses to plan and invest around them. The U.S. tax code is exactly the opposite. While nominal corporate tax rates in the United States are much higher than in other developed countries, very few American corporatio..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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375c79f
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The greatest pleasure ... is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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8b7d583
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The concern over the origin of institutions dovetailed with a second preoccupation, which was the real-world problems of weak and failed states.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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e88b842
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In all postconflict reconstruction, the ultimate goal is to create a minimally capable state in four key areas: (1) security; (2) governance and participation; (3) social and economic well-being; and (4) justice and reconciliation.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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62cc56b
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It was only Frederick's enormous skill as a military commander and outright luck (the accession of Peter III to the Russian throne) that saved the state and allowed it to remain a major European player.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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839dea5
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The resulting Rechtsstaat has been described as a liberal autocracy. It provided strong protections of the rights of its citizens in an impersonal manner, even though these citizens did not have the political right to hold their rulers accountable through elections.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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d742a4a
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Germany, in other words, developed both a strong state and rule of law early on, well before it developed accountable government.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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9e3071e
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Unrepresentative interest groups are not simply creatures of corporate America and the Right. Some of the most powerful organizations in democratic countries have been trade unions, followed by environmental groups, women's organizations, advocates of gay rights, the aged, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and virtually every other sector of society.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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7cce34b
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The fact that La Follette had to use machine tactics to beat the machine suggests that machines themselves are in some way intrinsic to politics--that is, all political leaders must assemble coalitions whose members do not always share the same goals, and must often be brought along with bribery, inducements, threats, and argument.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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93c9c5d
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It is only with the development of political institutions like the modern state that humans begin to organize themselves and learn to cooperate in a manner that transcends friends and family. When such institutions break down, we revert to patronage and nepotism as a default form of sociability.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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60494ea
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highly corrupt governments usually have big problems in delivering services, enforcing laws, and representing the public interest.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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9ed28d8
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In societies where most politicians are corrupt, singling one out for punishment is often not a sign of reform but of a power grab.
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Francis Fukuyama |
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8a41676
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Mental models and rules are intimately intertwined, since the models often suggest clear rules for societies to follow. Religions are more than theories; they are prescriptive moral codes that seek to enforce rules on their followers. They, like the rules they enjoin, are invested with considerable emotional meaning and therefore are believed for intrinsic reasons and not simply because they are accurate or useful. While religious beliefs c..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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02af795
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The failure to find adequate funds to finance deficits caused the Spanish Crown to declare bankruptcy in 1557, 1560, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647, 1652, 1660, and 1662.14 These bankruptcies were not full debt repudiations, but more like what today would be called debt reschedulings or workouts. The Crown would declare a moratorium on the payment of interest on short-term and floating debt on the grounds that it was usurious and then enter i..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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73cd77b
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Chinese family businesses instinctively thought of ways of hiding income from the tax collector. The situation is quite different in Japan, where the family is weaker and individuals are pulled in different directions by the various vertical authority structures standing above them. The entire Japanese nation, with the emperor at the top, is, in a sense, the ie of all ies, and calls forth a degree of moral obligation and emotional attachmen..
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Francis Fukuyama |
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0f6c872
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The vast majority of workers had no such representation; in countries where benefits like pensions were tied to regular jobs, they entered the informal sector. Such individuals had few legally defined rights and often did not possess legal title to the land or houses they occupied. Throughout Latin America and many other parts of the developing world, the informal sector constitutes perhaps 60 to 70 percent of the entire labor force. Unlike..
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Francis Fukuyama |