Political Order and Political Decay Read Online Free PDF Page A

unconstrained by either law or democratic accountability.
    LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS
    The American Revolution institutionalized democracy and the principle of political equality. The French Revolution laid the basis for an impersonal modern state, much as the Qin unification had done in China. Both fortified and expanded the rule of law in its two sister versions, the Common Law and the Civil Code.
    The first volume of this book concluded just at the historical moment when the foundations for the three sets of institutions had been put in place, but before any of them was fully developed into its modern form. In Europe and other parts of the world, law was the most developed institution. But as in the case of the Code Napoléon, a great deal of work had to be done to formalize, codify, reconcile, and update laws to make them truly neutral with respect to persons. The idea of a modern state had been germinating in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century, but no administration, including the new bureaucracy in Paris, was fully merit based. The vast majority of state administrations across the Continent remained patrimonial. And even though the idea of democracy had been implanted in England and particularly in its North American colonies, there was no society on earth in which a majority of the adult population could vote or participate in the political system.
    Two monumental developments were unfolding at this moment of political upheaval. The first was the Industrial Revolution, in which per-person output moved to a much higher sustained level than in any previous period of human history. This had enormous consequences because economic growth began to change the underlying nature of societies.
    The second great development was a second wave of colonialism, which was setting Europe on a collision course with the rest of the world. The first wave had begun with the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the New World, followed a century later by British and French settlement of North America. The first colonial surge had exhausted itself by the late eighteenth century, and the British and Spanish empires were forced to retreat as a result of independence movements on the part of their New World colonies. But beginning with the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824, a new phase began that was to see virtually the entire rest of the world swallowed up into the colonial empires of the Western powers by the end of the century.
    The present volume thus picks up the story from where the first one left off, giving an account of how state, law, and democracy developed over the last two centuries; how they interacted with one another and with the other economic and social dimensions of development; and, finally, how they have shown signs of decay in the United States and in other developed democracies.

 
    PART ONE
    The State

 
    1
    WHAT IS POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT?
    Political development and its three components: the state, rule of law, and accountability; why all societies are subject to political decay; the plan for the book; why it is good to have a balanced political system
    Political development is change over time in political institutions. This is different from shifts in politics or policies: prime ministers, presidents, and legislators may come and go, laws may be modified, but it is the underlying rules by which societies organize themselves that define a political order.
    In the first volume of this book, I argued that there were three basic categories of institutions that constituted a political order: the state, rule of law, and mechanisms of accountability. The state is a hierarchical, centralized organization that holds a monopoly on legitimate force over a defined territory. In addition to characteristics like complexity and adaptability, states can be more or less impersonal: early states were indistinguishable from the ruler’s household and were described as “patrimonial” because they favored and worked