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The Origins of Political Order cover

The Origins of Political Order

Politics

Francis Fukuyama

Popular Quotes

30 in total
  • If we are seeking to understand the functioning of contemporary institutions, it is necessary to look at their origins and the often accidental and contingent forces that brought them into being.
  • In many cases, things that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert major influence on the nature of politics.
  • Political decay occurs when political systems fail to adjust to changing circumstances.
  • The mere fact that a country has democratic institutions tells us very little about whether it is well or badly governed.
  • Political institutions are necessary and cannot be taken for granted.
  • A market economy and high levels of wealth don't magically appear when you 'get government out of the way'; they rest on a hidden institutional foundation of property rights, rule of law, and basic political order.
  • If we could understand how these basic institutions came into being, we could then perhaps better understand the distance that separates Afghanistan or Somalia from contemporary Denmark.
  • The historical account presented to most American schoolchildren was highly Euro-, and indeed, Anglocentric.
  • One seldom finds serious comparative analysis of why an institution developed in one society but not in another.
  • While classic modernization theory tended to take European development as the norm and ask why other societies di­ verged from it, I take China as a paradigm of state formation and ask why other civilizations didn't replicate the path it followed.
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