《The Origins of Political Order》是一本由Francis Fukuyama著作，Farrar, Straus and Giroux出版的Hardcover图书，本书定价：USD 35.00，页数：608，特精心从网络上整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。

　　《The Origins of Political Order》精选点评：

　　●这个书找很久了，国内翻译的都看不下去= =糟践福山啊

　　●如果当它是一本历史书，应该打5分，条理思路十分清晰，分类很仔细，抓重点写作的典范。不过作为政治专业研究书，感觉理据不够充分，尤其是英国这个例子，这么重要这么特别，但是就比较简单说是政治传统的问题，契约是社会共识以及国王为限制贵族的手段，感觉还是缺乏说服力。但是作为一本应该是面向大众的政治科普书，真的写得很不错啦。

　　●吾尝终日而思矣，不如须臾之所学也。

　　●将political institutions分析为三个面向：modern state, the rule of law, accountability. 如此有助分析过往和当今政治，而非陷入民主与独裁的简单论述陷阱。

　　●Fukuyama. A brilliant mind.

　　●放弃了历史的终结之说了啊。。。

　　●we always stand on a turtle. So it's important to know what's kind of turtle we stand on and know it's rational "hard" enough.

　　●很好看，推荐。又细致又容易理解（所以稍微有点磨叽）

　　●1 29 30 生物学基础不太能说服我（虽然考虑到他的分析广度，别无选择）看的这几章，分析很功能主义…

　　●人类学光辉普照的下午，一觉回到启蒙运动前

　　《The Origins of Political Order》读后感(一)：中国、印度和伊斯兰国家的有趣比较

　　看了一半了。

　　里面对中国，印度，和伊斯兰社会里面的国家形成过程做了很有趣的比较。要形成现代国家——这里现代国家的意义是拥有一个有效的、能够进行全员动员和对生活各方面进行广泛管理的中央政府的国家——必须要有一个能和以血缘联系起来的家族抗衡的政治力量，在国家形成和发展的过程中间很重要的一部分就是个人化的家族力量和非个人化国家力量斗争的过程。

　　中国很早就形成了这种意义上的现代国家（秦），虽然后面两种力量的斗争不断，但是国家机器总是想保持其非个人性的。而印度出于宗教原因，一只没有任何一个邦国力量足够强大来统一印度，家族力量一只在地方上处于统治地位。印度的文化可以说是没有“统一的基因“，他们历史上的统一多半入侵的外来者一手促成的。现在意义上的统一的印度实际上也是英国殖民的遗产。伊斯兰国家则更为有趣，为了防止家族势力干扰国家政治，他们干脆就不让任何伊斯兰人当兵或者当官，而采用了奴兵制：绑架外族（多半是基督徒）儿童，并在封闭的环境下培育他们成为穆斯林军队和行政的精英，让他们进入特权阶级。但是这些第一代伊斯兰皈依者不能把他们的特权传给后代，一方面是因为伊斯兰教义，任何穆斯林都不能成为奴隶，另一方面是因为他们有了家庭，而家族的纽带会影响他们对国家的忠诚。

　　《The Origins of Political Order》读后感(二)：简评

　　推荐把这本书和《On China》以及《枪炮，钢铁，细菌》一起读颇有意思。这本《Origins》的作者因为在苏联解体后声称“历史的终结”，也就是说西方的“民主自由”作为最终的社会形态已经胜利，历史已经结束了所有的发展，而在西方名声大嘲。作为美国政府智库的重要成员，他的作品总是受到关注。这本书是两卷本的上卷，主要说中国政治次序的形成。我看了一部分，没看完，因为要回国只能把书给退了。就这一部分而言，我的感觉是作者的目标非常远大，但是明显驾驭这样宏大的课题需要更深刻的洞见力。相比较《钢铁，细菌，枪炮》的深刻，这本书就显得很力不从心。虽然如此，本书任然不失为一本非常值得一读的好书。只是如果美国新一代智库都是这样的人的话，倒是挺令人堪忧的。我会翻译一篇《科学》的书评，这个评论基本上把我要说的都说了。翻译请见我的博客。

　　http://blog.sina.com.cn/invokey

　　或者直接点击

　　http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_53ea0db80100u94x.html

　　《The Origins of Political Order》读后感(三)：人治还是法治？

　　福山从史前文明开始梳理，总结出了一个成熟政治秩序必备的三个要件：国家权力、法治、问责制。并举例分析说明，只有这三者能够相互制约并形成平衡，社会的政治秩序才能具有较强的生命力并持续自我完善。作者也对现行的社会制度中是否能够真的做好这个平衡，提出了疑问。

　　在阅读本书期间，也读了《中国历代政治得失》（钱穆）。钱穆先生对中国历代政治分析得非常透彻。不以“封建”社会两字，就把中国自秦建立起来的皇权政治一棒子打死，也没有因为五千年文明延续就沾沾自喜。从钱先生的肺腑之言中可以体会到：历史的价值在于理性分析其中的得失来反省当代问题。中国历史上从汉到明的“士人”政权体制，从政治秩序的角度看，是对皇权为代表的国家权力的一种制衡，因此，我们并不能把中国历史上几千年来的皇权国家制度以封建皇帝的集权统治一言蔽之。

　　当然，从福山总结的三大要件来看。中国的历代政治秩序中，比较缺乏的是法治体系。西方的法治体系，尤其是民法体系，是从宗教教义和商业行规中逐步演进出来的。

　　1929年中华民国政府颁布的《中华民国民法》是中国历史上第一部民法典，但于1949年被废止。新的民法总则于2019年3月15日在中华人民共和国第十二届全国人民代表大会第五次会议上表决通过《中华人民共和国民法总则》。

　　东方文明中，政治秩序主要是以儒家为代表的贤人政治，是建立在“人之初性本善”的基础上，代表国家权力和维护社会秩序的统治者（皇帝及士大夫）必须拥有极高的自我约束能力，才能够维持社会的公平正义。因此，在“人”治的社会中，法治和问责制过度的依赖于贤人的作用。

　　西方文明中，宗教教义认为人生来就是有原罪的，帝王将相也不例外。因此需要一系列的制度规范来约束人，法制体系就逐渐被确立起来了。随着新教宗教改革和工业革命的推进，普通民众教育水平不断提升，并更多的参与到法制体系建设和问责制的执行中来。从而逐渐产生了以民选政府为基础的自由民主制度。

　　贤人政治延绵数千年，自由民主制度运行不过数百年。孰是孰非？

　　福山在最后一节（what comes next）中谈到：无论自由民主的还是非民主的政治制度如果不能与时俱进，适应时代的要求，都会带来社会危机甚至崩溃和混乱，被时代淘汰出局。

　　集权会损害社会公平甚至引发革命，分权会影响效率让执政者短视。如何解决当前政治秩序中的这些现实问题，让政治秩序拥有强劲生命力的同时又高效合理？福山把思考的结果留到了本书的第二卷。

　　期待第二卷！

　　《The Origins of Political Order》读后感(四)：读Francis Fukuyama《The Origins of Political Order》

　　这本书里对当前世界各国的政治形态的观察很总结挺重要的。其对政治形态的起源的探讨也很系统,至少可为一家之言.

　　This transformation was Samuel Huntington’s third wave of democratization; liberal democracy as the default form of government became part of the accepted political landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century.(如今这一浪潮一方面继续扩散,但另一方面新的保守政府形态在增加)

　　This is true up to the present, where democracy, in Amartya Sen’s words, remains the “default” political condition: “While democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.”16 Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Vladimir Putin’s petronationalism, or Hugo Chávez’s “twenty-first-century socialism,” or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Islamic Republic. No important international institution endorses anything but democracy as the basis for just governance. China’s rapid growth incites envy and interest, but its exact model of authoritarian capitalism is not one that is easily described, much less emulated, by other developing countries. Such is the prestige of modern liberal democracy that today’s would-be authoritarians all have to stage elections and manipulate the media from behind the scenes to legitimate themselves. Not only has totalitarianism virtually disappeared from the world; authoritarians pay a compliment to democracy by pretending to be democrats.(注意,这里面几种,包括日本,韩国,新加坡和新儒家都是中国执政者的学习模板)

　　In time, moreover, social rules were formalized as written laws rather than customs or informal traditions. These formal rules were used to organize the way that power was distributed in the system, regardless of the individuals who exercised power at any given time. Institutions, in other words, replaced individual leaders. Those legal systems were eventually accorded supreme authority over society, an authority that was seen to be superior to that of rulers who temporarily happened to command the state’s armed forces and bureaucracy. This came to be known as the rule of law.(王安石变法对"祖宗之法"的破坏,以及明政治的腐化的影响)

　　The purpose of this book is to fill in some of the gaps of this historical amnesia, by giving an account of where basic political institutions came from in societies that now take them for granted. The three categories of institutions in question are the ones just described:

　　1. the state

　　2. the rule of law

　　3. accountable government

　　A successful modern liberal democracy combines all three sets of institutions in a stable balance. The fact that there are countries capable of achieving this balance constitutes the miracle of modern politics, since it is not obvious that they can be combined. The state, after all, concentrates and uses power, to bring about compliance with its laws on the part of its citizens and to defend itself against other states and threats. The rule of law and accountable government, on the other hand, limit the state’s power, first by forcing it to use its power according to certain public and transparent rules, and then by ensuring that it is subordinate to the will of the people.

　　elf-interest and legitimacy thus form the cornerstones of political order.

　　The fact that one of these three types of institutions exists does not imply that the others do so as well. Afghanistan, for example, has held democratic elections since 2004 but has an extremely weak state and is unable to uphold laws in much of its territory. Russia, by contrast, has a strong state and holds democratic elections, but its rulers do not feel bound by a rule of law. The nation of Singapore has both a strong state and a rule of law bequeathed to it by its former British colonial masters but only an attenuated form of democratic accountability.(也许当前中国最严重的问题,就是对于法律的任意践踏,呼唤社会主义法制!)

　　The great sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset used to say that an observer who knows only one country knows no countries. Without comparison, there is no way of knowing whether a particular practice or behavior is unique to the society in question or common to many. Only through comparative analysis is it possible to link causes, like geography, climate, technology, religion, or conflict, to the range of outcomes existing in the world today. In doing so, we might be able to answer questions like the following:

　　• Why are Afghanistan, the jungle regions of India, the island nations of Melanesia, and parts of the Middle East still tribally organized？

　　• Why is China’s default condition to be ruled by a strong, centralized government, while India has never seen that degree of centralization except for very brief periods over the past three millennia of its history？

　　• Why is it that almost all of the cases of successful authoritarian modernization—countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and China—are clustered in East Asia, rather than in Africa or the Middle East？

　　• Why have democracy and a strong rule of law taken root in Scandinavia, while Russia, subject to similar climactic and geographical conditions, experienced the growth of unconstrained absolutism？

　　• Why have countries in Latin America been subject to high inflation and economic crises repeatedly over the past century, while the United States and Canada have not？

　　The historical data presented in this book are interesting precisely because they shed light on the present and explain how different political orders came to be. But human societies are not trapped by their pasts. If modern states emerged in China or Europe as a result of certain factors like the constant need to prepare for and fight wars, this does not necessarily mean that weak states in Africa today must replicate this experience if they are to modernize. Indeed, I will argue in Volume 2 that the conditions for political development today are very different from what they were in the periods covered by Volume 1. The social deck is being constantly shuffled by economic growth, and international factors impinge to a much greater extent on individual societies than they did in the past. So while the historical material in this book may explain how different societies got to where they are now, their paths to the present do not determine their futures, or serve as models for other societies.

　　. China had already invented a system of impersonal, merit-based bureaucratic recruitment that was far more systematic than Roman public administration. While the total population of the Chinese empire in 1 A.D. was roughly comparable to that of the Roman empire, the Chinese put a far larger proportion of its people under a uniform set of rules than did the Romans. Rome had other important legacies, particularly in the domain of law (discussed at greater length in chapter 18). But although Greece and Rome were extremely important as precursors of modern accountable government, China was more important in the development of the state.(中国在国家方面的凝聚程度要比希腊和罗马强得多,这也是春秋到秦之后中国诸侯体制的消亡.随着汉之后魏晋逐步重新完善了中央体系,中国的体系逐渐成熟)

　　Many successor states to the former Soviet Union, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, found themselves in this situation. There had been a broad assumption in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that virtually all countries were transitioning to democracy and that failures of democratic practice would be overcome with the simple passage of time. Carothers pointed out that this “transition paradigm” was an unwarranted assumption and that many authoritarian elites had no interest in implementing democratic institutions that would dilute their power.

　　（财务体系的崩溃促使了国家机器的崩溃，这里引用了中国明末的例子）

　　Aristotle differed from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau in one critical respect. He argued that human beings are political by nature, and that their natural capacities incline them to flourish in society. The three early modern philosophers, by contrast, argued that human beings are not naturally social, but that society is a kind of artifice that allows people to achieve what they cannot get on their own.

　　Yet these two theories [of Hobbes and Locke], which long divided the reflecting politicians of England into hostile camps, resemble each other strictly in their fundamental assumption of a non-historic, unverifiable condition of the race. Their authors differed as to the characteristics of the prae-social state, and as to the nature of the abnormal action by which men lifted themselves out of it into that social organization with which alone we are acquainted, but they agreed in thinking that a great chasm separated man in his primitive condition from man in society.(注意当时英国政界受这两种观点的影响)

　　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 thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts. Aristotle was more correct than these early modern liberal theorists when he said that human beings were political by nature. So while an individualistic understanding of human motivation may help to explain the activities of commodity traders and libertarian activists in present-day America, it is not the most helpful way to understand the early evolution of human politics.(要注意美国宪法等对独立宣言中霍布斯影响的逐步修正)

　　Everything that modern biology and anthropology tell us about the state of nature suggests the opposite: there was never a period in human evolution when human beings existed as isolated individuals; the primate precursors of the human species had already developed extensive social, and indeed political, skills; and the human brain is hardwired with faculties that facilitate many forms of social cooperation. The state of nature might be characterized as a state of war, since violence was endemic, but the violence was not perpetrated by individuals so much as by tightly bonded social groups. Human beings do not enter into society and political life as a result of conscious, rational decision. Communal organization comes to them naturally, though the specific ways they cooperate are shaped by environment, ideas, and culture.

　　What else is contained in that 1 percent of DNA that distinguishes human beings from their chimplike forebears？ Our intelligence and cognitive abilities have always been regarded as key to our identity as a species. The label we have given the human species is Homo sapiens, animals of genus Homo who are “knowing.” In the five million years since the Homo line broke off from the human-chimp ancestor, the size of the brain tripled, an extraordinarily fast development in evolutionary terms. The growing size of a woman’s birth canal could barely keep up with the need to accommodate the enormous heads with which human infants are born. Where did this cognitive power come from？

　　(大猩猩的社会习性,这是人类政治行为的根源之一么？Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau 的学说基础确实是有问题的)

　　Within a band-level local group, there is nothing resembling modern economic exchange and, indeed, nothing resembling modern individualism. There was no state to tyrannize over people at this stage of political development; rather, human beings experienced what the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner has labeled the “tyranny of cousins.”18 That is, your social world was limited to the circles of relatives surrounding you, who determined what you did, whom you married, how you worshipped, and just about everything else in life. Both hunting and gathering are done on a group basis by families or groups of families. Hunting in particular leads to sharing, since there is no technology for storing meat, and hunted animals must be consumed immediately. There is considerable speculation on the part of evolutionary psychologists that the almost universal contemporary practice of meal sharing (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Passover) is derived from the millennia-long practice of sharing the proceeds of hunts.19 Many of the moral rules in this type of society are not directed at individuals who steal other people’s property but rather against those who refuse to share food and other necessities. Under conditions of perpetual scarcity, the failure to share can often affect the group’s prospects for survival.

　　书中对大量早期文明的政治形式发展的梳理还是很值得参考的.

　　In Rome, for example, the agnatic descent groups described by Fustel de Coulanges were known as gentes. But already by the time of the early Republic the gentes began to accumulate large numbers of nonkin followers known as clientes. These consisted of freedmen, tenants, household retainers, and in later periods poor plebeians willing to offer their support in return for cash or other favors. From the late Republic through the early Empire, Roman politics revolved around the efforts of powerful leaders like Caesar, Sulla, or Pompey to capture state institutions through the mobilization of their clientes. Networks of clientes were mobilized as private armies by rich patrons. In reviewing Roman politics at the end of the Republic, the historian S. E. Finer caustically notes that “if you strip personalities away … you will find no more sophistication, disinterestedness, or nobility than in a Latin-American banana republic. Call the country the Freedonian Republic; set the time in the mid-nineteenth century; imagine Sulla, Pompey, Caesar as generals Garcia Lopez, Pedro Podrilla, and Jaime Villegas and you will find clientelist factions, personalist armies, and military struggle for the presidency that parallel at every point the collapsing Republic.”

　　As Paul Vinogradoff points out, justice in a tribal society is a bit like justice between states in contemporary international relations: it is a matter of self-help and negotiation between decentralized units that constitute effectively sovereign decision makers

　　Among the noneconomic sources of cohesion is simple personal loyalty through the reciprocal exchange of favors over time. Tribal societies invest kinship with religious meaning and supernatural sanctions. Militias, moreover, are typically made up of young men without families, land, or assets, but with raging hormones that incline them toward lives of risk and adventure. For them, economic resources are not the only objects of predation. We should not underestimate the importance of sex and access to women as a driver of political organization, particularly in segmentary societies that routinely use women as a medium of exchange. In these relatively small-scale societies, one could often follow the rules of clan exogamy only through external aggression due to the lack of nonrelated women. Genghis Khan, founder of the great Mongol Empire, was reported to have said, “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.”42 He succeeded quite well at satisfying the last of these aspirations. Through DNA testing, it is estimated that 8 percent of the present-day male population of a very large region of Asia are descendants of him or his lineage.43

　　tate-level societies differ from tribal ones in several important respects.1(指出state的特点)

　　First, they possess a centralized source of authority, whether in the form of a king, president, or prime minister. This source of authority deputizes a hierarchy of subordinates who are capable, at least in principle, of enforcing rules on the whole of the society. The source of authority trumps all others within its territory, which means that it is sovereign. All administrative levels, such as lesser chiefs, prefects, or administrators, derive their decision-making authority from their formal association with the sovereign.

　　econd, that source of authority is backed by a monopoly of the legitimate means of coercion, in the form of an army and/or police. The power of the state is sufficient to prevent segments, tribes, or regions from seceding or otherwise separating themselves. (This is what distinguishes a state from a chiefdom.)

　　Third, the authority of the state is territorial rather than kin based. Thus France was not really a state in Merovingian times when it was led by a king of the Franks rather than the king of France. Since membership in a state does not depend on kinship, it can grow much larger than a tribe.

　　Fourth, states are far more stratified and unequal than tribal societies, with the ruler and his administrative staff often separating themselves off from the rest of the society. In some cases they become a hereditary elite. Slavery and serfdom, while not unknown in tribal societies, expand enormously under the aegis of states.(这一点很重要,不平等在state这一状态下的扩大化,尤其是血缘的相关性消失之后.那么印度的种姓制度可否认为是state出现后才明确的？)

　　Finally, states are legitimated by much more elaborate forms of religious belief, with a separate priestly class as its guardian. Sometimes that priestly class takes power directly, in which case the state is a theocracy; sometimes it is controlled by the secular ruler, in which case it is labeled caesaropapist; and sometimes it coexists with secular rule under some form of power sharing.

　　(注意,资产的丰饶是一切组织的重要驱动力,保护和掠夺资产)

　　We seem to be getting closer to a fuller explanation for pristine state formation. We need the confluence of several factors. First, there needs to be a sufficient abundance of resources to permit the creation of surpluses above what is necessary for subsistence. This abundance can be natural: the Pacific Northwest was so full of game and fish that the hunter-gatherer-level societies there were able to generate chiefdoms, if not states. But more often abundance is made possible through technological advances like agriculture. Second, the absolute scale of the society has to be sufficiently large to permit the emergence of a rudimentary division of labor and a ruling elite. Third, that population needs to be physically constrained so that it increases in density when technological opportunities present themselves, and in order to make sure that subjects cannot run away when coerced. And finally, tribal groups have to be motivated to give up their freedom to the authority of a state. This can come about through the threat of physical extinction by other, increasingly well-organized groups. Or it can result from the charismatic authority of a religious leader. Taken together, these appear to be plausible factors leading to the emergence of a state in places like the Nile valley.14

　　Thomas Hobbes argued that the state or Leviathan came about as a result of a rational social contract among individuals who wanted to solve the problem of endemic violence and end the state of war. At the beginning of chapter 2 I suggested that there was a fundamental fallacy in this, and all liberal social contract theories, insofar as it presupposed a presocial state of nature in which human beings lived as isolated individuals. Such a state of primordial individualism never existed; human beings are social by nature and do not have to make a self-interested decision to organize themselves into groups. The particular form that social organization takes is frequently the result of rational deliberation at higher levels of development. But at lower ones, it evolves spontaneously out of the building blocks created by human biology.

　　ut there is a flip side to the Hobbesean fallacy. Just as there was never a clean transition from an anomic state of nature to an orderly civil society, so there was never a complete solution to the problem of human violence. Human beings cooperate to compete, and they compete to cooperate. The birth of the Leviathan did not permanently solve the problem of violence; it simply moved it to a higher level. Instead of tribal segments fighting one another, it was now states that were the primary protagonists in increasingly large-scale wars. The first state to emerge could create a victor’s peace but over time faced rivals as new states borrowing the same political techniques rose to challenge its predominance.

　　(国家上收和使用暴力)

　　The Chinese pattern of political development differs from that of the West insofar as the development of a precociously modern state was not offset by other institutionalized centers of power that could force on it something like a rule of law. But in this respect it also differed dramatically from India. One of Marx’s biggest mistakes was to lump China and India together under a single “Asiatic” paradigm. Unlike China but like Europe, India’s institutionalization of countervailing social actors—an organized priestly class and the metastacization of kinship structures into the caste system—acted as a brake on the accumulation of power by the state. The result was that over the past twenty-two hundred years, China’s default political mode was a unified empire punctuated by periods of civil war, invasion, and breakdown, whereas India’s default mode was a disunited system of petty political units, punctuated by brief periods of unity and empire.

　　There is clear evidence, however, that there was a tremendous reduction in the total number of political units in China, from approximately ten thousand at the beginning of the Xia Dynasty to twelve hundred at the onset of the Western Zhou, to seven at the time of the Warring States.5 Groundwork for the first truly modern state was laid in the western polity of Qin under Duke Xiao and his minister, Shang Yang. The process of state consolidation reached a conclusion when the king of Qin conquered all of his rivals and established a single empire, uniformly imposing institutions first developed in Qin on much of northern China.

　　During the period of the Three Dynasties, ritual behavior within lineages was codified in a series of laws. The rites revolved around worship of the lineages’ common ancestor and took place at the ancestral temple that held the tablets inscribed with the ancestor’s name. There were several sections of these temples, corresponding to the level of lineage or sublineage organization. Lineage leaders reinforced their authority through their control over the rites; failure to correctly observe either the rites or military orders led to severe punishment by the king or higher lineage heads. Correspondingly, if an enemy was to be truly vanquished, it was important to break up its ancestral temple, loot its symbolic treasures, and then kill off the enemy’s male progeny to break the “rope of descent.”7

　　One of the great constants in Chinese history is the importance of family and kinship to social organization. The rulers of Qin tried to suppress kin ties in favor of a more impersonal form of administration, both in their own kingdom and for China more broadly once they had established a unified empire. When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, it too tried to use its dictatorial power to eliminate traditional Chinese familism and bind individuals to the state. Neither of these political projects worked as well as their authors hoped; the Chinese family proved very resilient, and agnatic descent groups still exist in parts of China.12 After the brief Qin Dynasty, impersonal administration was finally established during the Former Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 9). But kinship made a big comeback toward the end of the Later Han, Sui, and Tang dynasties. Impersonal state administration was restored only during the Song and Ming dynasties beginning in the second millennium A.D. Particularly in southern China, lineages and clans remained strong up to the twentieth century. On a local level, they played a quasi-political function and partially displaced the state itself as a source of authority over many matters.

　　In this sense, the Zhou Dynasty China was a feudal society.32 It bore no resemblance to a centralized state. Like many conquest dynasties before and after, the Zhou king found that he did not have the forces or resources under his personal control to rule the territories he had acquired. This was particularly true in the west, where the Zhou were under pressure from steppe nomads, and in the frontier areas to the south that would later become the state of Chu. So he distributed fiefdoms or appanages to his retainers and cowarriors who, given the tribal nature of Zhou society, were his kinsmen. The Zhou king set up seventy-one fiefdoms, of which his kinsmen ruled fifty-three. The others were distributed to defeated Shang lords who pledged loyalty to the new dynasty, or to other Zhou administrators or military commanders. The vassals to whom these lands were granted thereby obtained substantial autonomy to rule them as they pleased.33(楚，吴，越，诸戎融入中原的过程是很值得研究的)

　　There were a number of important differences between Chinese feudalism under the Zhou and its European variant. In Europe, segmentary, tribal institutions were destroyed at the beginning of Europe’s feudal period, usually within a couple of generations after a barbarian tribe’s conversion to Christianity. European feudalism was a mechanism for binding unrelated lords to unrelated vassals, facilitating social cooperation in a society where complex kinship no longer existed. In China, by contrast, the primary political actors were not individual lords but lords and their kinship groups. Within a European lord’s domain, impersonal administration had already begun to take root, in the form of the feudal contract between lord and peasant. Authority was vested in the lord himself and not in the lord’s clan. The fief was a possession of his family but not of a larger corporate descent group.

　　（基本上中国的份量很重，可见福山政治觉悟很高。当然对当前中国也很重要）

　　The political scientist Charles Tilly has famously argued that European state building was driven by the need of European monarchs to wage war.1 The correlation between war and state building is not a universal one; this process has not, by and large, played out in Latin America.2 But war was without question the single most important driver of state formation during China’s Eastern Zhou Dynasty. Between the beginning of the Eastern Zhou in 770 B.C. and the consolidation of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C., China experienced an unremitting series of wars that increased in scale, costliness, and lost human lives. China’s transition from a decentralized feudal state to a unified empire was accomplished entirely through conquest. And virtually every modern state institution established in this period can be linked directly or indirectly to the need to wage war.

　　The western state of Qin was one of the first to reorganize its army and eliminate chariots in favor of a mixture of cavalry and foot soldiers, due partly to terrain and partly to constant pressure from barbarians. The state of Chu was the first to conｓｃｒｉｐｔ the people of another state when it defeated Chen and forced its farmers into military service. These troops were not organized by kinship group but by administrative units arranged in clear hierarchies with fixed numbers of subordinate units.7 The first all-infantry army was deployed in the mid-sixth century B.C. and infantry completely displaced chariot armies over the next two centuries. Mass conｓｃｒｉｐｔion of peasants became common practice by the beginning of the Warring States period.8

　　The mobilization of large conｓｃｒｉｐｔed peasant armies necessitated resources to pay for and equip them. Between 594 and 590 B.C., the state of Lu began to tax agricultural land, not as a possession of a kin group but on the basis of an allotment of land to groups of individual peasant families known as qiu. This occurred due to invasions from the neighboring state of Qi, which required Lu to rapidly increase the size of its conｓｃｒｉｐｔed army. Between 543 and 539, Zi Chan reorganized the fields of the state of Zheng into a regular grid with irrigation channels, restructured rural households into groups of five families, and imposed on them a new tax. In 548, the state of Chu performed a cadastral survey of its lands, registering salt ponds, fishponds, marshes, and forests, as well as population. This survey was done in anticipation of the reorganization of the tax base and also as a means of drafting the rural population as soldiers.（很有意思）

　　The policies implemented by Shang Yang in Qin were justified and turned into a full-blown ideology known as Legalism by later writers like Han Fei. Much of China’s subsequent history up through the Communist victory in 1949 can be understood in terms of the tensions between Legalism and Confucianism, a tension that revolved in part around the appropriate role of the family in politics

　　There are obvious parallels between Legalism and the social engineering attempted by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. Mao, like Shang Yang before him, saw traditional Confucian morality and the Chinese family as obstacles to social progress. His anti-Confucian campaign sought to delegitimize familistic morality; party, state, and commune were the new structures that would henceforth bind Chinese citizens to one another. It is not surprising, therefore, that the legacy of Shang Yang and Legalism was revived during the Maoist period and seen by many Communist scholars as a precedent for modern China.

　　（汉逐步完成秦的国家改造）

　　Environmental conditions also intervened. There were epidemics in 173, 179, and 182; famines in 176, 177, 182, and 183; and floods in 175.Misery on a popular level led to the growth of Daoism, a religion that found numerous adherents among the peasantry and other common people.Confucianism, an ethic rather than a transcendental religion, was always the code of the elite, and Daoism, which had evolved out of ancient folk beliefs, served as a kind of protest religion for nonelites. Daoism became the animating principle behind the great Yellow Turban peasant rebellion (they wore yellow scarves on their heads) that broke out in 184. The rebellion was inflamed by all of the accumulated hardships endured by the peasantry in the preceding decade. Although it was suppressed after twenty years with great bloodshed (five hundred thousand people reportedly died), it succeeded in destroying a good deal of the empire’s state infrastructure and productive capacity.2 The cumulative effect of these disasters was a reported drop in China’s population of an astonishing forty million people, or two-thirds of the total, between 157 and 280.3

　　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. The only accountability in the Chinese system was moral. A strong state without rule of law or accountability amounts to dictatorship, and the more modern and institutionalized that state is, the more effective its dictatorship will be. The Qin state that unified China embarked on an ambitious effort to reorder Chinese society that amounted to a form of protototalitarianism. This project ultimately failed because the state did not have the tools or the technology to carry out its ambitions. It had no broadly motivating ideology to justify itself, nor did it organize a party to carry out its wishes. The communications technology of the time did not permit it to reach very far into Chinese society. Where it was able to exercise power, its dictatorship was so harsh that it provoked a rebellion that led to its quick demise.

　　（印度严格的等级制度影响了社会的流转）

　　ut in the period beginning in the second millennium B.C. when the Vedas were composed, it evolved into a much more sophisticated metaphysical system that explained all aspects of the phenomenal world in terms of an invisible transcendent one. The new Brahmanic religion shifted the emphasis from one’s genetic ancestors and descendants to a cosmological system encompassing the whole of nature. Access to this transcendent world was guarded by the class of Brahmins, whose authority was important to safeguard not only the lineage of the king but also the

　　welfare of the lowliest peasant in a future life.

　　（中国的moral来统一国家的力量）

　　（印度教对于知识的控制，阻止了印度的发展）

　　This echoes the view of Sunil Khilnani, that the “idea of India” as a political, as opposed to a social, entity did not exist before the British Raj.23（印度的民族想象源于英国入侵）

　　This is a very superficial view of contemporary Indian politics. It is not that democracy in its modern institutional manifestations is deeply rooted in

　　ancient Indian practices, as observers like Amartya Sen have suggested.26 Rather, the course of Indian political development demonstrates that

　　there was never the social basis for the development of a tyrannical state that could concentrate power so effectively that it could aspire to reach

　　deeply into society and change its fundamental social institutions. The type of despotic government that arose in China or in Russia, a system that

　　divested the whole society, beginning with its elites, of property and personal rights, has never existed on Indian soil—not under an indigenous

　　Hindu government, not under the Moghuls, and not under the British.27 This led to the paradoxical situation that protests against social injustice, of

　　which there were a huge number, were typically never aimed against India’s ruling political authorities, as was the case in Europe and in China.

　　Rather, they were aimed at the social order dominated by the Brahmin class, and often expressed themselves as dissident religious movements

　　like Jainism or Buddhism that rejected the metaphysical foundations of the worldly order. The political authorities were simply regarded as too distant and too irrelevant to daily life to matter.

　　The strong, precociously developed Chinese state has always been able to carry out tasks that India could not, from building a Great Wall to keep out nomadic invaders, to mounting huge hydroelectric projects in the twenty-first century. Whether this has made the Chinese people better off in the long run is a different story. For the strong Chinese state has never been constrained by a rule of law that limited the whims of its rulers. Its visible accomplishments, from the Great Wall to the Three Gorges Dam, have come at the expense of the lives of ordinary Chinese who were (and are) largely powerless to resist the state and its plans to draft them into its service.

　　The experiences of China and India suggest then that a better form of freedom emerges when there is a strong state and a strong society, two centers of power that are able to balance and offset each other over time.(这是一个核心观点)

　　These boys were not destined for lives of degradation and humiliation. Just the contrary: the top 10 percent served in the palaces of Istanbul and Edirne, where they received the finest training available in the Islamic world and were prepared for lives as senior administrators within the empire.The rest were raised as Turkish-speaking Muslims and were recruited into the famous Janissary corps, an elite infantry that fought by the sultan’s side in his constant military campaigns in Europe and Asia.（奥斯曼帝国的总督和精锐部队）

　　forbade them from mixing with any local people, thus creating a military caste sharply separated from its surrounding society.25

　　The idea that there is a tension between loyalty to the family and a just political order goes back a long way in Western political philosophy.Plato’s Republic is a discussion between the philosopher Socrates and a group of young men about the nature of a “just city” that they are attempting to create “in speech.” Socrates leads them to agree that the just city would need a class of guardians who are particularly spirited or proud in their defense of the city. The guardians are warriors whose first principle is to do good to friends and harm to enemies; they must be

　　carefully trained to be public-spirited through the proper use of music and gymnastics.

　　ook V of the Republic contains the famous discussion of the communism of women and children of the guardians. Socrates points out that sexual desire and the desire for children are natural, but that ties to the family compete with loyalty to the city that the guardians protect. It is for that reason, he argues, that they must be told the “noble lie” that they are children of the earth, and not of biological parents. He argues that they must live in common, and that they not be allowed to marry individual women but rather have sex with different partners and raise their children in

　　common. The natural family is the enemy of the public good: So, as I am saying, doesn’t what was said before and what’s being said now form them into true guardians, still more and cause them not to draw the city apart by not all giving the name “my own” to the same thing, but different men giving it to different things—one man dragging off to his own house whatever he can get his hands on apart from the others, another being separate in his own house with separate women and children, introducing private pleasures and griefs of things that are private？

　　Curiously, the devshirme and the system of military slavery was one of the most modern features of the Ottoman system. Functionally, it served the same purpose as the Chinese examination procedure for entry into the bureaucracy: it was a source of impersonal recruitment into the state system that would ensure a supply of candidates loyal to the state and free of ties to family and kin, and it ruthlessly selected only the most fit for promotion to high levels of leadership. It was less rational than the Chinese system insofar as it restricted entrants to foreigners. On the other hand,

　　the motive for this restriction was to prevent patrimonialization of the system by negating the need for reliance on local elites who would have strong ties to family or locality.

　　It is clear that all of the component peoples whose descendants constitute modern Europeans were once organized tribally. Their forms of kinship,laws, customs, and religious practices were documented, to the extent that records were available, by the great historical anthropologists of the nineteenth century, such as Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Henry Maine,2 Frederick Pollock and Frederic Maitland,3 and Paul Vinogradoff. All of these men were comparativists with a wide range of knowledge of different cultures, and all were struck by the similarities in agnatic kinship organization in societies as widely separated as the Hindus, Greeks, and Germans.

　　(福山想把资本主义的起源从马克思的经济发展和韦伯的清教精神推向更早)

　　ut we still have not arrived at the proper date for the European transition out of kinship, nor an adequate causal mechanism.18 The most convincing explanation for the shift has been given by the social anthropologist Jack Goody, who pushes the date for the beginnings of the transition all the way back to the sixth century, and attributes responsibility to Christianity itself—or, more specifically, to the institutional interests of the Catholic church.

　　The reason that the church took this stand, in Goody’s view, had much more to do with the material interests of the church than with theology.Cross-cousin marriage (or any other form of marriage between close relatives), the levirate, concubinage, adoption, and divorce are all what he labels “strategies of heirship” whereby kinship groups are able to keep property under the group’s control as it is passed down from one generation to another. Life expectancy in Europe and the Mediterranean world at the time was less than thirty-five. The probability of a couple’s producing a male heir who survived into adulthood and who could carry on the ancestral line was quite low. As a result, societies legitimated a wide range of

　　ractices that allowed individuals to produce heirs. Concubinage has already been discussed in this regard in the discussion of China; divorce can be seen as a form of serial concubinage in monogamous societies. The levirate was practiced when a brother died before he produced children; his wife’s marriage to a younger brother ensured that his property would remain consolidated with that of his siblings. Cross-cousin marriage ensured that property would remain in the hands of close family members. Whatever the case, the church systematically cut off all available avenues

　　that families had for passing down property to descendants. At the same time, it strongly promoted voluntary donations of land and property to itself. The church thus stood to benefit materially from an increasing pool of property-owning Christians who died without heirs.

　　（教廷对于产权的分割很重要，打破了血缘团体）

　　Whether one regards the Catholic church’s motives as primarily religious or economic, it came to be institutionalized as an independent political actor to a far greater degree than the religious authorities in any of the other societies under consideration. China never developed an indigenous religion more sophisticated than ancestor or spirit worship. India and the Muslim world, by contrast, were shaped from the beginning by religious innovation. Religion in both cases served as an important check on political power. But in the world of Sunni Islam, and in the Indian subcontinent, religious authority never coalesced into a single, centralized bureaucratic institution outside the state. How this happened in Europe is intimately

　　ound up with the development of the modern European state, and with the emergence of what we today call the rule of law.

　　This process cannot be understood without appreciating the role of early European kings. Kings in the eleventh century were not territorial rulers but still something more like first among equals in a decentralized feudal order. Monarchs like William I or Henry I spent most of their lives on the road, moving from one part of their realm to the other, since this was the only way they could assert their authority and maintain communications in a world that had retreated into an isolated village- and manor-level society. One of the major services the king could provide was to act as a court of

　　appeals in cases where subjects were not satisfied with the justice provided by the local seigneurial or manor courts. The king for his part had an interest in expanding the jurisdiction of his courts, since he was paid fees for their services. But appeal to royal courts also increased the prestige of the king, who could undermine the authority of a local lord by overturning one of his judicial opinions.（国王作为最高法院的存在）

　　ut a fair normative order also requires power. If the king was unwilling to enforce the law against the country’s elites, or lacked the capacity to do so, the law’s legitimacy would be compromised no matter what its source in religion, tradition, or custom. This is a point that Hayek and his libertarian followers fail to see: the Common Law may be the work of dispersed judges, but it would not have come into being in the first place, or been enforced, without a strong centralized state.

　　England made an early and impressive transition from a customary to a modern legal system, which constituted the basis for the legitimacy of the English state itself. Other European countries made a similar transition in the thirteenth century but based on a completely different legal system, the civil law derived from the Justinian Code. The key to this transition on the Continent was the behavior of the Catholic church. That story, and how the church differed from religious institutions in India and the Muslim world, are the subject of the following chapter.（这样来看，当前政治是否类似于宗教改革？）

　　The matter was finally settled in 1122 by the Concordat of Worms, in which the emperor largely gave up the right of investiture, while the church recognized the emperor’s authority in a range of temporal matters.

　　One of the consequences of this search was the rediscovery of the Justinian Code, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, in a library in northern Italy at the end of the eleventh century.10 To this day, the Justinian Code remains the basis for the civil law tradition that is practiced throughout continental Europe and in other countries colonized by or influenced by countries there, from Argentina to Japan. Many basic legal concepts, like the distinction between civil and criminal law, and between public and private law, have their origins in it.

　　The Justinian Code was a highly sophisticated compilation of Roman law produced in Constantinople under the emperor Justinian at the beginning of the sixth century.11 The newly recovered text consisted of four parts: the Digest, the Institutes, the Code, and the Novella, of which the Digest was by far the most important, covering issues like personal status, torts, unjust enrichment, contracts, and remedies. The Digest was a compilation of what Justinian’s jurists believed were the most valuable legacies of the whole earlier body of Roman law (now lost) and became the subject of study for the new generation of European jurists who emerged in the twelfth century(教皇试图从神圣法律而非军队那里获取了权力)

　　The separation of powers between an executive and a judiciary is only metaphorical. The executive has real coercive powers and can call up armies and police to enforce his (or her) will. The power of a judicial branch, or of religious authorities who are the

　　custodians of the law, lies only in the legitimacy that they can confer on rulers and in the popular support they receive as protectors of a broad social consensus.

　　(印度在英国统治下的传统断裂)

　　The 1979 constitution, however, grants the supreme leader not just judicial powers but substantial executive ones as well. He has control over the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the paramilitary Basij; he is able to intervene actively to disqualify candidates running for elective office and, evidently, to manipulate elections to produce favorable outcomes.23 Like the Bismarck constitution, or the constitution of

　　Meiji Japan that was modeled on it, the Iranian constitution carves out a reserved sphere of executive powers, given not to an emperor but to the clerical hierarchy. As in Japan and Germany, these executive powers are corrupting and have led to increasing control of the clerisy by the armed forces rather than the reverse relationship specified in the constitution.（伊朗案例说明了拥有执行权的裁判者的可怕）

　　(王安石变法抛弃了祖宗之法，其后果是权力脱离法的控制？或许当时的法的萌芽就这样死去了)

　　China was different from all of these other civilizations insofar as the Mandate of Heaven involved neither election nor religious legitimation. There was no Chinese institutional equivalent of the Estates-General by which the elites of Chinese society could meet to formally ratify the selection of a new dynastic founder. Nor was there religious legitimation awarded by a religious hierarchy. There was no transcendental God in the Chinese system. The “heaven” in the Mandate of Heaven was not conceived of as a deity in the sense of the monotheistic religions Judaism,Christianity, and Islam, which laid down a clear set of written rules. Rather, it was more like Nature or the “grand order of things” that could be upset and required a return to equilibrium. Furthermore, there was no religious institution that could award the mandate on behalf of heaven, the way that a Christian pope or Muslim caliph could legitimate a king or sultan（关于武则天寻求天命的合法性的洞察很有意思）

　　(bandit体系，由于官员的任期和缺乏监管引发的短期利益最大化？)

　　Theories of state sovereignty emerged from the pens of writers such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, who argued that it was not God but the king who was truly sovereign.

　　Feudal Europe in the year 1100 resembled China during the Zhou Dynasty in many ways. There was a nominal monarch or ruling dynasty, but de facto power was split among a highly decentralized number of feudal lords who maintained their own military forces, kept order, administered justice, and were largely self-sufficient economically. As in China, certain dynastic houses distinguished themselves through greater organizational ability, ruthlessness, or luck, and began to consolidate territorial states over ever wider domains.

　　Accountable government. Finally, England and Denmark were able to develop both strong rule of law and accountable government, while at the same time building strong centralized states capable of national mobilization and defense.

　　In any event, the Mongol invasion exerted considerable influence over subsequent Russian political development in a number of mostly negative ways.6 First, it cut Russia off from trade and intellectual contact with Byzantium and the Middle East, which had been the source of Russian religion and culture. It hindered contact with Europe as well, which meant that Russia did not participate in developments like the Renaissance and Reformation to the extent of lands farther to the west.

　　econd, the Mongol occupation greatly delayed Russian political development, which essentially had to start over again after the destruction of Kievan Rus, the area around contemporary Kiev in Ukraine that was the original Russian area of settlement. The Russian state had started to break up well before the Mongols’ arrival, but the conquest confirmed the dispersion of political authority into a myriad of small appanages ruled by petty princes. Russia’s center of gravity shifted from pontic Europe north of the Black Sea to the northeast, where the Grand Duchy of Moscow emerged as the central political player. Unlike European feudalism, which evolved over an eight-hundred-year period, appanage Russia existed for little

　　more than two centuries—from the onset of the Tatar yoke in 1240 to the mid-1500s when Ivan III came to power—before the princes had to face the growing power of a centralizing monarchy.

　　Finally, the Mongols undermined any legal traditions inherited from Byzantium and made political life far harsher and more cruel. In sharp contrast to the Christian princes of Europe, Mongol rulers saw themselves as pure predators whose avowed purpose was to extract resources from the populations they dominated. They were a tribal-level people who had no developed political institutions or theories of justice to transmit to the populations they conquered. They made no pretense that lordship existed for the sake of the ruled; unlike rulers of traditional agrarian states, they

　　had short time horizons and were willing to extract resources at unsustainable levels. They punished resistance harshly and were perfectly willing to execute the inhabitants of entire towns simply to make a point. They recruited Russian princes, including the Muscovite prince who would go on to create the Russian state, to act as their tax collectors. The Mongols thus trained several generations of Russian leaders in their own predatory tactics. Indeed, through intermarriage they merged genetically with the Russian population.

　　(其实是在写一部政治和社会史，花的功夫很大啊)

　　Alexandre Kojève, the great Russian-French interpreter of Hegel, argued that history as such had ended in the year 1806 with the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt, when Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy and brought the principles of liberty and equality to Hegel’s part of Europe.

　　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

　　A farmer-based political movement inspired by the priest and educator N.F.S. Grundtvig took shape at first in the guise of a religious revival movement that broke away from the official Lutheran church and established schools throughout the country.12 After a constitutional monarchy took power in 1848, the farmers’ movement and the national liberals representing the bourgeoisie began pushing for direct political participation, which led to the granting of voting rights the following year. The emergence of the Danish welfare state in the twentieth century is

　　eyond the scope of this volume. But when it finally arrived, it was based not solely on an emerging working class but also on the farmer class,whose mobilization was facilitated at key junctures not by economic growth but by religion

　　(政治形态的进化)

　　econd, in human societies, variation among institutions can be planned and deliberate, as opposed to random. Hayek argues strongly against the idea that human societies self-consciously design institutions, something he traces to the hubris of post-Cartesian rationalism.9 He argues that most information in societies is local in nature and therefore cannot be comprehended by centralized human agents.10 The weakness of Hayek’s argument is that human beings successfully design institutions all the time, at all levels of society. He does not like top-down, centralized social engineering on the part of states, but he is willing to accept bottom-up, decentralized institutional innovation that is no less subject to human design.

　　While large-scale design may work less frequently than smaller-scale projects, it still does periodically work. Human beings can rarely plan for unintended consequences and missing information, but the fact that they can plan means that the variance in institutional forms they create is more likely to produce adaptive solutions than simple randomness. Hayek is correct, however, that institutional evolution is not dependent on the ability of human beings to design successful institutions; random variation and the principle of selection by themselves can produce an adaptive evolutionary

　　outcome（人们构建institution的努力并不一定正确，但却是整个选择过程的必须推动力）

　　（福山写这本书就是要取代亨廷顿的Political Order in Changing Societies）