Research On Fukuyama’s Thought Of Political Order

The issue of political order is an ancient topic of political science research.Building a good political order is the primary goal of every country,and it is also the tireless exploration of political scholars for thousand years.Political order is not spontaneous,how people arrange the political order will affect the development of the regime and the quality of life to its members.Francis Fukuyama,a famous Japanese-American political scientist and currently a senior fellow in Stanford University’s the Freeman Spogi Institute for International Studies,has been concerned about the political order and political development in the real world,and he has published several books.In Fukuyama’s recent books The Origins of political order and Political order and political decay,Fukuyama observes the origins and evolution of political order in different regions and different time over a long historical period.He put forward some issues such as the building of good political order,the state-building,rule of law,democratic accountability and political decay,and it has aroused the concern of political and social field on the issue of political order.This article tries to sort out a more clear frame from Fukuyama’s grand narrative,and makes a systematic study of Fukuyama’s political order from different aspects.The basic ideas of this paper are as follows: The first is to sort out the existing research related to this article.The second is to comb the origin and core concepts of Fukuyama’s political order thought,including to explore the background of Fukuyama’s political order thought,the theory source and the evolution process of Fukuyama’s political order thought,and to make clear Fukuyama’s definition of political order concepts.The third is to explore the origins of political order in China,India,the Middle East and Western Europe from Fukuyama’s presupposition of human nature,and to comb Fukuyama’s origin of modern countries,the rule of law and democratic accountability.The fourth is to discuss the views of Fukuyama on what the good political order is and how to build it.The fifth is to explore Fukuyama’s understanding of the variation of political order,that is political decay,to sort out the manifestations,causes and solutions of political decay,and to clarify the evaluation criteria of Fukuyama on the realization of the good political order.Finally,evaluate Fukuyama’s thought of political order from two aspects of contribution and limitation based on all previous studies.Fukuyama thinks that the first step of building political order and realizing good political order is to build an effective country.Fukuyama put forward that state building includes two aspects: the national capacity and the autonomy of the bureaucracy.The national capacity is embodied in both the legal monopoly of violence and the ability of the state to infiltrate the society.The autonomy of bureaucracy is reflected in the isolation between the government and society,and the ability of the government to break away the influence exerted by classes,factions,interest groups and families in decision-making.The second step is to establish a good system of rule of law.Law is the consensus of the society,just and existing.The rulers should be bound by the law,and their legitimate power comes from the law.Fukuyama thinks that the protection of the rule of law requires independent judicial institutions,other institutions and procedures.Finally,it is the realization of democratic accountability,the main form is free and fair periodic multi-party election.A good political order is to maintain a balance among them after the building of effective state,the realization of the rule of law and the establishment of democratic accountability.Fukuyama believes that because of the nature of human relatives’ choice and reciprocal altruism,and the stability of the system,any society may experience political decay,including institutional rigidity and the repatrimonialization.The solution to decay still needs to be found in the building of a good political order.To a certain extent,Fukuyama ’s thought of political order is the return of Huntington and back to state,but Fukuyama also has some development and transcendence,and has made theoretical contribution.Fukuyama’s research on China also has some reference to the current political development of our country.The historical narration of Fukuyama adopts the comparative historical research method,which provides us with a new research frame,but inevitably,there are a lot of problems in demonstrating the grand historical process with a simple frame,which affect the explanatory power of the theory.