political order and political decay review

Written clinically and compellingly, the books come across as the most grandiose effort to refurbish Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as the new avatar of a “strong state, rule of law and democratic accountability”. You may not instantly fall in love with this 600-plus pages magnum opus, the culmination of an earlier volume titled The Origins of Political Order (2011), where Fukuyama traced the history of the political order up to the French Revolution, but you can’t resist the temptation of making it the love of your life if you wish to pursue a career in government, politics and policy making. Yet Fukuyama once again shows why he enjoys an exalted oracle-like status in the comity of political scientists and policy makers around the world. It is this unintentional mid-air collision between utopia and dystopia that drives the intellectual energy and imagination of Fukuyama.įukuyama’s climbdown from the triumphalism of Hegelian The End of History to the more mundane issue of building strong efficient administrative states would, indeed, have gladdened the hearts of liberals and radicals alike. By this, he means “less the actual country Denmark than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure and well-governed, and experiences low level of corruption”. But as a footloose democrat, he also fancies “getting to Denmark”. Will Artificial Intelligence take your job? ChatGPT settles the debateįukuyama is instinctively and temperamentally a strange political theorist a die-hard conservative because he cherishes an ordered society and is willing to be put in the cast of a vigilante Ninja Turtle to stop Foot Clan crimes in New York City. Predictably, this scenario has infected the paranoid American public, especially neo-cons, with the conspiratorial fantasy about Political Order and Political Decay, the title of the magisterial work that Francis Fukuyama has produced to pay a lasting tribute to his mentor and iconic American political scientist Samuel Huntington’s evangelical faith in ‘political order’ as the zeitgeist of modernity! And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. This sounds apocalyptic, raising the spectre of what Thomas Hobbes famously referred to as “continual fear and danger of violent death.

President Barack Obama eventually withdraws troops from Afghanistan, leaving the world at the mercy of evil warlords of the Al-Qaeda, Haqqani faction of the Taliban, guerrillas of ISIS and Boko Haram and in the hands of corrupt and criminal politicians in the ever-increasing geography of failed or fragile states.

Political order and political decay review