Political Order and Political Decay (7 page)

Nor should this book's emphasis on the need for effective states be construed as a preference for a larger welfare state, or “big government” as it is understood in American political discourse. I believe that virtually all developed democracies face huge long-term challenges from unsustainable spending commitments made in years past that will only increase as populations age and birth rates decline. Much more important than the size of government is its quality. There is no necessary relationship between big government and poor economic outcomes, as one can see prima facie by comparing the large welfare states of Scandinavia to the minimalist governments of sub-Saharan Africa. There is, however, a very powerful correlation between the quality of government and good economic and social outcomes. Moreover, an expansive state that is nonetheless perceived as effective and legitimate will have a much easier time downsizing and reducing its own scope than one that is excessively constrained, feckless, or unable to exercise real authority.

This volume will not provide any straightforward answers, and certainly not any easy ones, to the question of how to improve the quality of government. That is something I have written about in other contexts. But one cannot begin to understand how bad governments might become good ones unless one understands the historical origins of both.

 

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THE DIMENSIONS OF DEVELOPMENT

How political development fits into the larger picture of development; the economic, social, and ideological dimensions of development; how the world changed after 1800; why Huntington's theory needs to be modified but is still relevant in understanding events like the Arab Spring

Political development—the evolution of the state, rule of law, and democratic accountability—is only one aspect of the broader phenomenon of human socioeconomic development. Changes in political institutions must be understood in the context of economic growth, social mobilization, and the power of ideas concerning justice and legitimacy. The interaction among these different dimensions of development changed dramatically in the period following the French and American Revolutions.

Economic development can be defined simply as sustained increases in output per person over time. There are many arguments among economists and others whether this is an adequate way of measuring human well-being, since per capita GDP looks only at money and not health, opportunity, fairness, distribution, and many other aspects of human flourishing. I want to put these arguments to the side for the time being; per capita GDP has the advantage of being straightforward and relatively well defined, and a lot of effort has been spent trying to measure it.

The second important component of development—social mobilization—concerns the rise of new social groups over time and changes in the nature of the relationships between and among these groups. Social mobilization entails different parts of society becoming conscious of themselves as people with shared interests or identities, and their organization for collective action. In the early nineteenth century, the most economically advanced parts of the world, Europe and China, were still largely agrarian societies in which the vast bulk of the population lived in small villages and raised food for a living. By the end of that century, Europe saw an enormous shift as peasants left the countryside, cities expanded, and an industrial working class was formed.
1
The German social theorist Ferdinand Tönnies described this as the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or what is typically translated in English as “community” and “society.”
2
Other nineteenth-century theorists invented new dichotomies to describe the transition from the one form of society to the other, including Max Weber's distinction between traditional and charismatic to legal/rational authority, Émile Durkheim's opposition of mechanical and organic solidarity, and Henry Maine's move from status to contract.
3

Each of these schema sought to explicate the shift from Gemeinschaft—the close-knit village where everyone knows each other and identities are fixed—to Gesellschaft, the big city with its diversity and anonymity. This transition has taken place in the late-developing countries of East Asia in the second half of the twentieth century and is in the process of occurring in South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa today.

The industrialization process and economic growth constantly create new social groups, such as workers, students, professionals, managers, and the like. In the anonymous city, people become more mobile, live in more diverse and pluralistic societies, and have fluid identities that are no longer determined by the customs of the village, tribe, or family. These novel social relationships give rise, as we will see, to new forms of identity like nationalism, or to new forms of universalistic religious affiliation. It is social mobilization that lays the ground for changes in political institutions.

In addition to economic growth and social mobilization, there is an evolution in ideas concerning legitimacy. Legitimacy represents a broadly shared perception that certain social arrangements are just. Ideas regarding legitimacy evolve over time. This evolution is sometimes a by-product of changes in the economy or society, but there are numerous junctures at which they act as independent drivers of the other dimensions of development.

Thus, when the French regent Marie de Medicis called the Estates-General in 1614 to demand new taxes, it proved a weak and compliant body unable to block the rise of absolutist monarchy. When it was next called in 1789, however, the intellectual conditions in France were hugely different, with the blossoming of the Enlightenment and the spread of the ideas of the Rights of Man. This shift, needless to say, was one reason why the second Estates-General paved the way for the French Revolution. Similarly, there was a critical change in the thinking of English political actors during the seventeenth century: at the start, they spoke about defending the rights of Englishmen, that is, feudal rights inherited from time immemorial; a hundred years later, under the influence of writers like Hobbes and Locke, they demanded their natural rights as human beings. This made a huge difference in the kind of regime that would be created there, and in North America.

A historian of a Marxist bent might say that the adoption of these new ideas about universal rights reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie in both France and England, and that they constituted a superstructure masking economic interest. Karl Marx himself famously said that religion was the “opiate of the people.” But the bourgeoisie could have made a case for itself on the basis of the special privileges of the old feudal order, rather than a doctrine that opened the door to universal human equality. The fact that it chose to justify itself in these terms hearkened back to yet other ideas of, alternatively, Christian universalism and the evolving doctrines of modern natural science. One wonders, moreover, what the history of the twentieth century would have looked like without Marx. There were of course many Socialist thinkers before and after him, reflecting the interests of the emerging working class. But none were able to analyze the conditions of early industrialization so brilliantly, link them to a larger Hegelian theory of history, and explain in self-professed “scientific” terms the necessity of the ultimate victory of the proletariat. From the pen of Marx emerged a new secular ideology that became, in the hands of leaders like Lenin and Mao, a substitute for religion that succeeded in mobilizing millions of people and materially changing the course of history.

We can bring the three components of political development together with economic growth, social mobilization, and ideas/legitimacy in
Figure 1
.

While each of the six dimensions of development can change independently, they are also all linked to one another in a multitude of ways. A model of political development would consist of a theory that explained these causal linkages. We can trace some of the more important linkages by outlining the sequence of events that took place in the wake of the industrialization of England, the United States, and other early modernizers.

FIGURE 1

HOW THE WORLD CHANGED AFTER 1800

The rate of economic growth accelerated dramatically around the year 1800 with the takeoff of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that moment, which corresponds to the historical period covered in the first volume of this book, much of the world lived under the conditions described by the English writer Thomas Malthus, whose 1798
Essay on the Principle of Population
painted a gloomy picture in which population growth would outstrip economic resources in the long run.
Figure 2
shows an estimate of per capita income over an eight-hundred-year period in England, where the Industrial Revolution started. The hockey-stick shape of the curve, and the sudden transition to a much higher rate of growth, reflects the fact that the later period saw continual year-on-year increases in productivity that vastly outstripped the rate of population growth. While we might speculate that this blessed interval of rapid growth may someday still be overwhelmed by population increase and by absolute limits to available resources, we are nonetheless fortunately still living in a post-Malthusian world.

What caused this sudden burst of economic growth? The Industrial Revolution had been preceded by a commercial revolution starting in the sixteenth century that vastly expanded the volume of trade both within Europe and across the Atlantic. This expansion, in turn, was driven by a host of political and institutional factors: the establishment of secure property rights, the rise of modern states, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and the modern corporation, and new technologies of communications and transportation. The Industrial Revolution in turn rested on the systematic application of the scientific method and its incorporation into an institutional structure of universities and research organizations, which could then be translated into technological innovations.
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FIGURE 2.
Real Income per Person in England, 1200–2000

SOURCE
: Gregory Clark,
A Farewell to Alms

The sudden shift to a higher level of growth had a huge effect on societies via an expanding division of labor. The third chapter of Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations
is titled “The Division of Labor is Limited by the Extent of the Market.” Smith began the book with his famous description of a pin factory. Instead of a single craftsman pulling, cutting, and sharpening individual pins, each task is given to a specialized worker, which vastly increases the factory's productivity. But there would be no incentive to increase productivity in this fashion, Smith asserts, if a sufficiently large market did not exist. Smith thus argues that the expanding division of labor is stimulated in turn by improvements in transportation and communication that increase the size of markets. The commercial revolution of Smith's day seeded the Industrial Revolution that would soon unfold.

The expanding division of labor then becomes a central focus for subsequent thinkers, beginning with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who in
The Communist Manifesto
talk about formerly proud craftsmen being reduced to robotic cogs in a huge industrial machine. Unlike Smith, they see specialization and the division of labor as an evil that alienates workers from their true beings. One gets a sense of how different this modern world was from the agrarian one that preceded it from the following passage written in 1848 just as the Industrial Revolution was shifting into high gear in England:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.