The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Author:Francis Fukuyama
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2011-04-06T04:00:00+00:00


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ORIENTAL DESPOTISM

How a modern state was reconsolidated in China after the Tang Dynasty; the usurpation of the empress Wu and what it tells us about the Chinese political system; what the Mandate of Heaven was and how political legitimacy was established in dynastic China

With the possible brief exception of the late-twentieth-century Republic of China (since 1949 moved to Taiwan), no Chinese government has accepted a true rule of law. While the People’s Republic of China has a written constitution, it is the Chinese Communist Party that is sovereign over the constitution. Similarly, in dynastic China, no emperor ever acknowledged the primacy of any legal source of authority; law was only the positive law that he himself made. There were, in other words, no judicial checks on the power of the emperor, which allowed enormous scope for tyranny.

All of this raises at least four basic questions about the nature of the Chinese political system. The first concerns the implications of the lack of a rule of law for politics. There is a long tradition in the West of categorizing China as an “Oriental despotism.” Is this line of thinking a matter of ignorance, hubris, and Eurocentrism? Or did Chinese emperors exercise greater powers than their counterparts in Western Europe?

Second, what was the source of legitimacy in the Chinese system? The history of China was characterized by innumerable revolts, usurpations, civil wars, and attempts to establish new dynasties. And yet the Chinese always returned to an equilibrium wherein they delegated huge authority to their sovereign. On what grounds were they willing to do this?

The third question is why, despite the periodic despotism of Chinese emperors, did Chinese rulers often not use their theoretical power to its full extent? In the absence of law, there were practical checks on their authority, and long periods of Chinese history when emperors presided over a stable, rule-bound polity without infringing terribly much on the everyday rights and interests of their subjects. Indeed, there were many times when emperors were weak and clearly failed to enforce rules on a recalcitrant society. What, then, furnished the real limits of state power in traditional China?

And finally, what broader lessons does Chinese history teach us about the nature of good governance? The Chinese invented the modern state, but they could not prevent that state from being repatrimonialized. The subsequent centuries of imperial Chinese history constituted a continual struggle to maintain these institutions against decay, to prevent powerful individuals from patrimonializing power by carving out privileges for themselves and their families. What were the forces promoting political decay, and its reversal?

I will try to answer the first two of these questions in the present chapter, and the second two in the following chapter. But first, a brief overview of Chinese history from the Tang to the Ming dynasties is necessary.



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