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Thank you, it’s really a great honor to be here and to have this
wonderful (1)___ and I’m very grateful that you’re all here for politics in
prose. One of the really nice things
about being able to speak about a new book is to go to real brick and mortar (2)____
and to realize that there are still people that really like real books and
come out for events like this because of the intellectual (3)____ and
interest. So thank you all for coming.
So I’m going to get straight into it. I wrote this book for a number
of reasons. Samuel Huntington, a political (4)___, was my teacher when I was
a graduate student at Harvard. He
wrote a very important book in 1968 called “Political (5)___ in Changing
Societies” which I think rereading it now in light of the Arab spring
actually is probably one of the best guides to what is going on in the Middle East at the present moment. But it’s a book that
needed to be (6)____, and I thought of a project of, you know, doing a
revision of this book. Among other things that open on the very first page it
says: “The Soviet Union and the United States
are equally developed political orders” and that didn’t seem quite right
after the fall of the Berlin
(7)___. But the other, you know, major issue is the one that was just
referred to, I’ve been thinking about
nation building, failed states, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, here are all of
these (8)____ challenges that we’ve faced and we have this illusion which I
would call ‘the problem of getting to ‘Denmark’ and “Denmark” is in quotation
marks ‘cause Denmark is actually not a real country, it’s this mythical place
that has low (9)___, democracy, stable government, good services delivered
very efficiently, and so forth. We have this vision of ‘Denmark’ in the back of our heads, and then we
go to a place like Afghanistan
and we say: “Well, how we’re going to get Afghanistan
to look like Denmark?”
And it doesn’t work very well. And part of the reason I began to realize was
that we don’t (10)____ how Denmark
got to be Denmark.
I actually have had a Visiting Professorship in Aarhus
University in Denmark, so I’ve been going to Denmark
for the last few years. And I’ll tell you that most Danes actually have no
idea how Denmark got to be
Denmark.
And so it struck me as a political scientist that there ought to be a basic
book you can go to say where political (11)___ come from. I didn’t see one,
and so I decided to write and so that’s why we get this book that I’ve
produced. So I also did not want to write a book on the (12)____ of politics
that holds this traditional Eurocentric or Anglocentric story not because I
am opposed to England
or the West, but I think it’s a distortion. And it’s one that’s been, you
know, it’s taught still in a lot of the discourse that really begins with
Karl Marx that sees England
as the model for modernization. “England’s present is everybody’s
future”, - this is something actually that Karl Marx said. And what do you
realize, when you actually learn something about the history of England,
is that it is a very peculiar country in a number of ways that I will explain
to you. And to expect other countries to replicate the England’s (13)____ path, I think,
is highly unrealistic. And in fact, in my view, it was China, not that China,
it did not establish the first state, that happened in a lot of places: in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in the valley of Mexico. But in my view the Chinese (14)____
the first modern state, modern meaning, not based on hiring your cousins and
your friends to (15)____ the government, but based on (16)___ examinations, a
rational (17)____, centralized administration. And they did this in the third
century BC. And it’s a historical (18)____ that I think a lot of people have
not adequately recognized. And so
instead of starting with England or, you know, Greece and Rome and then going
for the Magna Carta and the rise of democracy in England it seemed to me it
made more sense to start with China. China
created the first modern state, why are other societies different from China? So
that’s the basic background.
Now there are three important baskets of political (19)___ that we
need to think about. The first is a state itself. The state is all about
power, the state is the ability to concentrate power in a hierarchy and to
use it to (20)___ rules over a particular territory, right. In the developing world, and this again is
why I think we sometimes take politics for granted. We assume that things
will happen like, you know, long time I lived in Fairfax County
for twenty years and the potholes always get filled every spring. Why do
those potholes get filled there but not in Papua New Guinea? Well, it turns
out there’s a hidden social (21)____ that provides these services and it does
it pretty efficiently, at least in a rich county like Fairfax, not in the only district. But, you
know, it’s interesting, you know, why those differences happen and I think
that all of the anti-government activists of which there are many in
especially in our society don’t understand that if you want a country that
doesn’t have a strong (22)____ that is able to enforce rules we are to move
to Somalia or Afghanistan or, you know, any less-developed country that
actually cannot enforce rules on its own territory. In Somalia if you want to own not
just an assault rifle but an RPJ or a shoulder- fired anti-aircraft weapon
you are free to do it. But it’s not a very happy (23)____ because it doesn’t
have institutions. Now that’s the state.
Second is the rule of law. The rule of law is all about
community rules of (24)___ that are regarded as superior to the will of
whoever happens to be running the government whether that is a President, a
Prime Minister, a king, (25)___,
whatever. The executive in the society doesn’t feel that he or she can just
make up the (26)____ on the fly whatever they want, but they actually have to
implement a law that someone else makes, all right. So that’s the second set
of important institutions.
And then the third is institutions of accountability. Today we associate those with (27)___, with
elections, but that’s not the only form of accountability. In any of them
when accountability institutions were first put into place in 17th
century England
the king was accountable to Parliament that only represented ten percent of
the English (28)____, richest ten percent. And so you can have accountability
without having democracy. And I believe as in China you can also have moral
accountability that is to say a government can feel obligated to take the
interest of its citizens into account even in the absence of election. So the
question is: “Where do these come from: the state is all about the
concentration of (29)____, the rule of law and accountability are by all
means limiting power?” And the miracle of modern politics is that you get the
President of the United States, who is the most powerful individual in human
history, who can nuke the rest of the world if he wants to, but he doesn’t
because it’s all (30)____ by law and by accountable political
institutions. It’s a kind of miracle
of modern politics, right.
So I’m going to tell you if you a few stories from
the book in each of these baskets. Let’s begin with the state. The state, in
some sense, in my view, is a big (31)____ against the family. Human nature
tells you a couple of things, there’s a universal (32)____. And there are a
couple of biological principles that govern human sociability. We sometimes
get this incorrect notion from Thomas Hobbes that before the rise of the
state you had just people clubbing each other over the head, you know, in
anomic (33)___ of all against all. But
that was actually never true, human (34)____ never went through that period.
They were always social and they’re social because they’re born with certain
characteristics that allow them to (35)____.
So one of them is a principal called ‘kin selection or inclusive
fitness’ by the biologists which simply means you’re going to be altruistic
to people in proportion to the number of genes you share with them. In other
words nepotism, you’re going to favor relatives. The second principal is
reciprocal altruism: you scratch my
back - I’ll (36)____ yours, on a face- to- face basis. No human child growing up anywhere has to
be taught these (37)____, these are inbuilt forms of sociability. They are
the default ways that we relate to each other, (38)____ and family. And in
the absence of a modern institution that forces you to hire somebody with
qualifications rather than your cousin or your brother-in-law, that’s the way
you’re going to do it, that’s the kind of normal politics that will insert
itself. And so in a sense the, you know, states and roles in the societies
that were organized tribally meaning the people were in large kin groups,
they all believe that their descended from a common (39)____, that they’re
basically third and fourth and fifth cousins.
And how do you get from a state that is based on
kinship as a form of social organization to one that’s based on (40)____, in
which it’s not a matter of who you are related it’s the fact that I am a
citizen of the state of France
or Japan,
or whatever? And so that’s why there’s
a struggle, constant struggle against especially this biological urge to
protect your (41)___. Now how did this happen in China? It unfortunately happened
as a result of century’s long military conflict. There’s a famous political (42)____
Charles Chile who was famous for arguing in the case of Europe that the state
makes war and war makes the state, that it’s really military (43)____ that
drove people out of tribal societies into these more organized hierarchical
units. And if you look at Chinese history, that is exactly the story that
unfolds.
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