As I wend my rather leisurely way through Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, the author's wide-angle view of the social imperatives and pressures that shape governments adds a useful lens to some contemporary struggles. One very broad thesis, which may in fact be a near-consensus view among Fukuyama's sources, is that the history of the state is in large part the history of the sovereign power's struggle to neutralize powerful subjects' (or citizens') biological imperative to pass their advantages on to their children -- that is, to neutralize the force of kinship ties, which are the means of building rival power centers. Hence Chinese emperors periodically decimated the aristocracy and installed merit-based bureaucracy, while the aristocracy in turn would in periods of dynastic weakness find ways to game the system and win back inheritable offices and privileges; the Mamluk and Ottoman empires kidnapped or drafted promising youths from outlying areas and trained them as an elite slave class that either could not marry or could not pass on wealth or position to their offspring; the French and Spanish kings, desperate for cash to fight endless wars, colluded with an entrenched and tax-exempt aristocracy to extract wealth from everyone else .A handful of fortunate lands developed strong central governments willing to be held accountable in exchange for diverse elites' consent to be taxed. In all cases, however, the gravitational pull is toward elites' irrepressible will to to pass their elite status to their children.
The state's oldest rival
The state's oldest rival
The state's oldest rival
As I wend my rather leisurely way through Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, the author's wide-angle view of the social imperatives and pressures that shape governments adds a useful lens to some contemporary struggles. One very broad thesis, which may in fact be a near-consensus view among Fukuyama's sources, is that the history of the state is in large part the history of the sovereign power's struggle to neutralize powerful subjects' (or citizens') biological imperative to pass their advantages on to their children -- that is, to neutralize the force of kinship ties, which are the means of building rival power centers. Hence Chinese emperors periodically decimated the aristocracy and installed merit-based bureaucracy, while the aristocracy in turn would in periods of dynastic weakness find ways to game the system and win back inheritable offices and privileges; the Mamluk and Ottoman empires kidnapped or drafted promising youths from outlying areas and trained them as an elite slave class that either could not marry or could not pass on wealth or position to their offspring; the French and Spanish kings, desperate for cash to fight endless wars, colluded with an entrenched and tax-exempt aristocracy to extract wealth from everyone else .A handful of fortunate lands developed strong central governments willing to be held accountable in exchange for diverse elites' consent to be taxed. In all cases, however, the gravitational pull is toward elites' irrepressible will to to pass their elite status to their children.