Francis Fukuyama: "The Origins of the State: China and India"

I've got a cover in this lecture approximately 10,000 years of human history so we've got a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to lose any time on this just to remind you where we were in this series the lecture last time set out some general parameters of this project of mine and really did human prehistory before there was any recorded evidence of how political societies evolved and we left off at the stage of development of tribal societies are those based on on dissent groups and if you recall the tribal form of organization is not the most primitive you have band and family level organization before you get to these large tribal units but approximately ten thousand years ago with the development of agriculture you you began to organize societies by segments Airi lineages alright so that was that was the last bit so today we're actually going to cover the origins of the state which is the first of these three big categories of political institutions that I'm dealing with and we're going to talk about where States came from and then in in specific cases of China in India what we historically know about the formation of states they're actually in this section I've also got several chapters on the Middle East and on Europe the basic problem is how do you exit out of a kinship based society into something involving genuine hierarchical impersonal political institutions so you know I'm just going to start and I'll see how far I can get in the time I've got allotted I suspect I'm not going to make it all the way through all four of these different civilizations but I certainly want to do the India the China India parts alright so let's just begin with a kind of abstract summary of what a state is compared to a tribal society I think there is a there's at least five characteristics States unlike tribes possess a centralized hierarchical source of authority that is at least in theory capable of enforcing rules second that authority is backed by a monopoly of power a legitimate power which means that the state can actually coerce you into obeying its rules and the legitimacy part is important so there are no militias and there's a general social consensus that the right of the state has the right to exert that power the third characteristic its states are territorial Clovis called himself the king of the Franks but he did not rule over a state whereas louis xiv was the king of france not of a group of people but of an actual territory and one was a tribal society and the other was was a state fourth characteristic states are much more stratified and hierarchical and in fact there's a certain tragedy in human history as you pass from a tribal society that is relatively egalitarian that chooses its leaders on the basis of a certain kind of consensus and participation when you move into the era of States you have the development of things like slavery of you know absolute powerlessness in the face of these centralized institutions and you get the first emergence of genuine social classes and then final characteristic although you have ancestor worship and other fairly primitive forms of religion in tribal societies it becomes much more institutionalized once you move to a state level so even if you stick with ancestor worship you usually have a specialized class priestly class that is the custodian of religious belief now you may have noticed those of you that have taken comparative national systems or other courses from me may have noticed that the definition that I just gave you very much corresponds to Max Weber 's famous definition of the state I like using it simply because it's useful it distinguishes state level organizations from corporations NGOs political parties other kinds of forms of social organization it's important to realize that not every society around the world actually generated on its own a state-level form of organization the societies in Melanesia that I mentioned in the first lecture were stateless prior to the arrival of European colonialists in Africa prior to the big surge of European colonialism in the late 19th century approximately half of Africa was organized into a cephalus societies or stateless societies and so one of the things we want to try to understand today is why is it that you get the early evolution of this state structure in certain parts of the world and not in others anthropologists distinguish between pristine and competitive state formation pristine state formation is the first time a state ever appeared out of a tribal society whereas competitive state formation is what we're used to seeing all over the place which is that somebody else invents the state and all of a sudden you've got to get a state to because the state is such a powerful form of organization that if you don't organize yourself as a state you're simply going to get killed by the you know the troops that the your arrival state deploys now there's one problem with pristine state formation which is that no one's ever seen this happen because it all happened in human prehistory and there are no actual records of a state the first state ever emerging out of a tribal society but that has not stopped anthropologists and archaeologists from speculating like crazy about where States came from and so I'm going to go over some of the theories and then see how those correspond to the actual experience in China and India one point I would like to make however is that it is I think a general truth about development as a whole that no earlier form of social organization ever gets truly abandoned or eliminated and it always survives into the succeeding higher level of organization so in India and China for example lineage organization exists to this day it was never it was never abolished and in a certain sense if you understand patrimonial government to be recruitment into the public sector that is based on kinship or on personal ties rather than some more impersonal kind of criteria than patrimonial ism and and the desire to appropriate public office for yourself and very particularly for your family for your family's benefit remains an absolutely central human drive if you recall I mentioned last week William Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness that posits that that altruism is in proportion to the number of shared genes and I think one of the truths about politics is that human beings are not actually individually selfish they are selfish on behalf of families and one of the constants in human politics has been the drive to reap at ramonja lies state institutions and appropriate them for your family as we'll see in the final lecture on Europe in 17th century France this emerged as the actual sale of public offices and the conversion of public office into actual heritable private property and so this is a you know this natural instinct to protect your family has been pretty much a constant throughout and it has not disappeared needless to say in modern politics all right so let me go over quickly the different theories of pristine state formation first theory is out of Thomas Hobbes that it's a it's a social contract and that it's the result of a kind of rational process of negotiation I don't know that Hobbes actually believed that this is how the first states came about but it's certainly a model that he puts forward in the Leviathan I think that if you think about this common sensical II it's hard to imagine a state-level organization actually proceeding as a result of a rational negotiation among tribal segments because what you're doing is essentially delegating you're a tribal chief or a member of the tribe you're delegating this terrible authority to essentially control you and your tribe not just in the present moment but all of the descendants of that that leader of the new state will be able to control you and your tribal segments and it is extremely hard to imagine circumstances in which you're simply motivated let's say by economic motives where you would give up the kind of freedom in the in the relatively egalitarian state as the people in tribal societies enjoy and so again we've never seen a contractually organised state form and I suspect that we you know this was probably not the major route by which this happened second theory is a version of this actually that was promoted by Carl bit Fogle this hydraulic theory of state formation vit Fogle was a former communist who then turned into an anti-communist and settled in the United States and and wrote a book called oriental despotism in which he argued that states really formed out of big water projects big irrigation projects because according to him there is a correlation between large-scale in irrigation and the emergence of early States in Mesopotamia in the valley of Mexico in China in the Nile Valley and so forth and again unfortunately although this is one of those things that academics debated at some length there's just no empirical evidence that this was the case there was this correlation but most early irrigation projects were actually very small-scale that could be easily managed by much lower levels of social organization and again you just think about what this negotiation would have been like to form the first state if the motive was irrigation you have all these tribesmen sitting around saying ah well let's delegate to this great water engineer this dictatorial control over us and all of our descendants because although we've never actually seen one of these water projects actually produce anything we trust that he knows what he's doing and will be able to create this big irrigation system and all of us will be rich for for the future and it just doesn't make sense that this happened and I think very few scholars actually believed fit Fogle right now the third general theory is associated with ester boserup and demographers in her in her school which says that you need population density to create a state because that's the condition under which you get a division of labor when you get specialization and in fact you don't really see states emerge until a couple thousand years after the invention of agriculture that then permits population densities to rise especially in alluvial river valleys like Egypt or Mesopotamia or the Yellow River Valley in in China and you know that's all right as a theory but again many tribal tribally organized societies respond to greater density and and to attempts to control them simply by moving away and it's not absolutely clear why simple density in itself should automatically lead to the emergence of a completely new kind of social organization that again no one had ever seen in history so this brings us then to slightly tougher theories that states emerged out of violence and here and again we can appeal back to Hobbes because obviously in Hobbes is theory of the lieth and it's really the war of every man against every man that drives people to give up their freedom and this one i think you can plausibly imagine you get tribal groups let's say like all the militias that are fighting out duking it out with each other in present-day somalia and they go on for a generation or so killing each other and they finally get tired of it and at that point you know they'd be perfectly willing to say okay we're going to delegate authority to this Leviathan to a king or you know leader we will give up our freedom to kill each other because we don't we don't want to die ourselves and so the the Hobbesian bargain is correct if it's a bargain over violence but it's not correct if so it's simply a bargain over economic goods again this is not a sufficient I think explanation those Highland tribes in Papua New Guinea that I described have been fighting each other at a very high level of violence measured in terms of casualty or the number of years they spent in warfare and yet never developed a state-level society so I think you need something more which brings brings us to the fifth theory that is associated with the anthropologist Robert Carr narrow that says that it is a combination both of scale and circumscription that is to say you can't have a state unless you have a fairly large open area in which you can essentially move armies and and coerce people but if that open area is not bounded by physical barriers to movement then people will simply respond to coercion by running away and this is one of the big problems with slavery is that you know if you don't have sufficient ways of keeping slaves penned up in a certain area it is extremely difficult to initiate that form of of exploitation and this is why carnera argues that you had states appear in places like Mesopotamia Yellow River Valley and the Nile especially the Nile River Valley it's not just that these were agriculturally rich but they were also circumscribed and was not simply possible for all of the tribal units to run away from the authority of this newly formed hierarchical organization and actually there there's some evidence coming out of a lot of the Pacific Islands that in in Melanesia you don't have States but in Fiji Tonga Hawaii you actually did get the emergence of chiefdoms and and kingdoms and there is a correlation between scale and and and obviously every island is by definition circumscribes they're all circumscribed but there is a certain correlation between physical characteristics that allow Kings essentially to generate Anne Shiell military force and then their ability to impose their will on the population and the problem with Papua New Guinea or the Solomons is that everybody lives in these extremely rugged cut-up mountain valleys and it was never possible under those circumstances to generate the sufficient kind of military organization necessary to create a state final issue is one that archaeologists don't help us with very much because there's no archaeological or very uncertain archaeological record which is religion or charismatic Authority Weber said the charismatic Authority means being touched by God virtually every state level leader in history has claimed some kind of transcendental divine authority I think the clearest example of this is the rise of the Prophet Muhammad in the early 7th century if you look at the Arab tribes in the Arabian Peninsula they had been around for you know at least a millennium before the rise of the Prophet Muhammad they were an utterly peripheral social group sandwiched between the standish between Europe and the Byzantine Empire and other state level formations like Persia that existed at the time and all of a sudden with the rise of the Prophet Muhammad and and this new religion of Islam you had this enormous mobilization of tribesmen that was able to overcome the in the intrinsic divisions of a tribal society the Arab tribes had never been able to work collectively for a common purpose until Islam gave them a different kind of identity and if you look at the doctrine of Islam and you read a lot of the early words of the Prophet Muhammad it's clearly aimed at tribalism that the Ummah of believers is not based on genealogy and in fact there's a constant struggle against tribal identity in an early era societies and without that religious ideology that justified non kinsmen working together you never would have had this explosion of political power bursting out of the arabian desert and then going on within a single generation to conquer the Persian Empire to threaten Byzantium to conquer the entire Maghreb all the way up through up through Spain now as we'll see the tribalism in Arab society never disappeared and and the problems still remain despite the ability to unify those tribes for the purposes of conquest and it turned out that tribal societies were not terribly good at actually ruling and governing over an extended period of time and it required another institution in order to create durable societies in the Muslim in the Muslim world so what we conclude about pristine state formation the actual conditions are probably some combination of all of those above factors unfortunately this doesn't lead you to a very elegant theory and it begins to look a little bit more like a just-so story but it does seem to me that the the conditions under which States form are sufficiently complex that it's it's probably hard to have a very elegant theory Jeffery Herbst has a very nice account of why there are so few states in sub-saharan Africa that builds on a lot of the elements that I mentioned which is to say low population density lack of circumscription physical circumscription again apart from the nile valley which is where you actually did get a state in in africa very difficult communications through the wooded and jungle parts of africa which make it very hard to project political power and and the like one issue that I want to return to is again what I call the Hobbesian fallacy which is the idea that any particular form of political organization solves the problem of violence and I think you see with state formation it solves the problem of inter tribal violence by creating a single source of authority why being out competing militias or other armed groups and imposing the will of the state but it does not solve the human problem of violence because it simply moves it up to a different scale so now instead of tribal segments fighting each other now you get States fighting each other okay so that's the speculative part that comes out of from the anthropologists and archeologists so now we need to move on to what we know about historical state formation and we're going to begin not with Mesopotamia Egypt I mean you know I just couldn't cover everything but I do think that there's a justification for beginning with China because temporarily States formed in China at a very early period but I would argue that modern states formed in China China was really the first Society in the world to create a genuinely modern state and they actually did this already by the 3rd century BC which puts them about eighteen hundred years ahead of any European Society and the level of sophistication of the Chinese state in the 3rd century BC was at that time much more sophisticated than anything that any of the Greek city-states were able to produce or the Roman Republic which was also getting its start at that time now just to give you a little bit of a preview the Chinese were precocious in creating a modern state but they did not create the other two legs of a what I regard is a modern political system which is to say rule of law or accountable government and so to say that the Chinese achieve the modern state in a certain sense is to say that what they figured out is how to create a more perfect dictatorship at a very early period in history because state building concentrates power and allows States to use that power against individuals the rule of law and accountable government are restrictions on the power of states that limit their ability to use them and if you have a modern you know a modern well-organized bureaucratic state is capable of a far greater degree of tyranny were its subjects then is a poorly organized corrupt weak one and I think that in a sense has been the dilemma in in Chinese politics right from the beginning and as we will see the Indian path of development could not be more different because I believe that India really had something that resembled the rule of law it didn't really have political accountability but it had institutions that prevented centralized states from from deploying their their power so this will be the kind of larger framework in which we're talking about these two societies now if you look at the actual historical record you know there's a famous thesis by Charles Tilly about European state building where I mean to summarize it he says the state made war and war made the state that is to say that the fundamental driver of European state formation particularly in the early modern period was the need to mobilize for military conflict the need to mobilize created the need for resources which created a need to tax the need to tax created a need for a bureaucracy to to extract those taxes and the bureaucracy the need to create the bureaucracy then led to the you know the the rational organization of the government as a whole to employ those resources rationally and this is exactly exactly the historical pattern that you see unfold in China except that it unfolds in China at a much much earlier historical period there are other alternative approaches to the Chinese one and some of them are not necessarily driven by war but again this is one of those sad facts I think of this larger scale human history which is that the good things development political development and modernization are driven by the bad things namely the need to compete up and the need to organize for military conflict all right so let's turn to China itself I'm only going to deal with China up until the beginning of the Han Dynasty which was the second dynasty of a unified China so we're going to leave the story off even before the birth of Christ Chinese history is extremely complicated and extremely well documented this chart simply carries you up until the emergence of the Qin Dynasty which was the first unified dynasty in China human beings have been living in this part of the world for a very very long time the earliest remain you know they're in fact some archaic human beings that got to this area before the emigration Out of Africa the young Chou and longshan periods are not dynasties these are simply archaeological periods and we only know about them from from various kinds of excavations what the Chinese regard is the beginning of their historical period begins with the so called three dynasties which is actually the gia Shang and then the Zhu dynasty which was divided into two parts and confusingly enough the eastern jiu dynasty which was the second half of the the Zhu is itself divided into two periods known as the spring and autumn and warring States Period but the three dynasties actually takes you all the way from the gia up until the emergence of the Qin in 221 BC so I'm going to be using these terms and that gives you a kind of general reference as to where we are in Chinese history alright so the first thing to say about China is that it was a tribal society every society in the world has gone through a tribal stage and in China the earliest form of social organization was the agnatic lineage exactly like the new heir exactly like the Germanic tribes that would overrun Europe exactly like B well the Indians actually have some matrilineal tribes but by and large most Indian tribes were also collections of agnates if you remember from last week agnatic organization means that descent is traced exclusively through males as is inheritance so women Lee of their birth families and marry into the family of their husband and they gain status by not actually by virtue of being married but by having producing a male offspring and because the descent is unilineal the society divides into clearly segmented lineages and these lineages are corporate entities in China the lineage will own property meaning that each member of the lineage will own some private property but the lineage itself you know that traces their ancestry back three or four or five generations will also own corporate property usually in the form of an ancestral temple with the tablets that honor the founding ancestor of that particular unit in China you know one of the things when you had very low life expectancies it's extremely hard to produce a male heir and so one of the things that all of these societies do is come up with what are called strategies of heirship to produce a male heir and that involves sometimes divorce but in the Chinese case concubine age and and multiple lives and so if you've seen you know Chinese movie like raise the red lantern where this rich guy's got four wives you know part of that is a means to make sure that that especially wealthy powerful people have a male heir that then and it's not simply a matter of property passing property down but it's also the rope of descent because you're your descendants are required to worship you and if you don't produce descendants and there's no one to worship you then your spirit in the afterlife is is not going to be a happy one so the initial form of Chinese organization is completely tribal just as much as the new air or the you know the tribes in Papua New Guinea or the Solomon Islands the transition out of tribal society really begins in about 1200 or so with the rise of the shank I'm sorry with the replacement of the Shang Dynasty with out of the Jue the Shang Andrew were separate peoples we don't really know ethnically exactly what they were but the Zhu arrived on the scene in northern China they conquered the Shang and then they began what some historians have labeled China's period of feudalism feudalism we could spend a whole lecture just arguing what the definition is and I think the Marxists have muddied the waters considerably because they've got an economic definition they basically say that feudalism is an exploitative economic relationship between a lord and a master I think that the more proper understanding of feudalism is the one that the great French historian of European feudalism Marc Bloch put forward which is that it has to do with political decentralization but a feudal system is one in which you have decentralized sources of authority each of which possesses certain state like characteristics meaning it's got its own military it distributes just or it applies justice to its territory it sets rules and if that's the definition then in the western jiu period china was a genuinely feudal that is to say the jew monarch was not a centralised ruler he was really more the first among equals he distributed feudal benefits Azure Appa Naja's or fiefs to his kinsmen and so within the first generation the jus king had already distributed about 70 different fiefs across northern China but these were controlled and this is an important difference from European feudalism European feudalism it was not kinship based the the Lord in a European feudal society cared very much about his kin and his descendants because that because of the principle of primogeniture that determined who got the property but in European feudal society was not organized by kinship group I'll explain why that was the case later but in in in Europe's feudal history kinship was not an issue whereas it was in in China and so what is called a feudal estate or a feudal fief in Joe China was really actually the kinsman and his relatives in a segment Airy lineage that controlled a certain bit of a certain bit of territory and in this period just like in tribal societies you didn't have clear Authority most leaders of these feudal states there were called States in Chinese historians refer to them as States but you're really in this very tricky transition between a tribal society and a more hierarchical state like society so although they're called kings of states really what they are is tribal chiefs meaning that they are selected by consensus among the male relatives of the of the of the descent group and if they don't perform well or they don't you know the kinsmen don't like them they have the perfect ability to get rid of that leader and replace it with another kinsmen rule then do a better do a better job for them and what is really notable is the dramatic reduction in the number of these independent states over the you know this period and so you know who knows what this 10,000 number in the Jia dynasty refers to they were probably you know it's probably more accurate to say that these were ten thousand tribes that inhabited this part of northern China by the beginning of the Shang Dynasty that number had dropped at three thousand at the beginning of the Eastern Jew had dropped to 1800 by the beginning of the warring States period you had reduce the total number of political units only seven and so the the wars among the warring States were the seven survivors of this winnowing process finally when you get to the Year 221 and the emergence of the Qin Dynasty you're down to one unit now Europe went through a similar evolution at the end of the Middle Ages they were probably on the order of maybe 400 different political units in Europe as a whole and by the time you get to World War one you're down to about 25 and now you know I mean the EU is trying to put it all back into one but lots of luck you know and one of the big meta historical questions is why did that process of political reduction to a smaller number of states result in a single state in the case of China and led to a you know genuine multiple state system in Europe there's a woman named Victoria we that's written a very interesting book on this subject I would say it's probably some combination of social structure and geography because in Europe the geography is just much ruch rougher and it's much different much more difficult to conquer the whole of Europe the way that the Qin Emperor or the Qin King was able to conquer the other six warring States in that period okay but let me get to the tilly thesis because again this Chinese case the emergence of the first Chinese state is a beautiful textbook example of wardriving state formation in several respects first of all military organization in the Western dro period warfare was exclusively the province of of aristocrats who largely rode on chariots that were extremely expensive to equip required a lot of training in order to manipulate and war had a kind of formalistic character to it where in a sense they'd be tests of chivalric you know honor and a lot of times you leave the battlefield without killing your enemy because you wanted to make sure that he could get home to his mother to worship you know her memory at a you know for certain ritualistic purposes as the oh I'm sorry I actually didn't I mentioned forgot to mention one a very important point just the quantity of wars being fought in this period there were in the spring and autumn period from 770 to 481 in that period there were twelve hundred and eleven recorded wars fought among these different political units in the warring States period there were 468 recorded wars fought among those warring States and in that 242 year period only 89 years went by without there being a major war between one of these one of these political units the scale of warfare in China we don't think of the Chinese as being particularly militaristic but in this period it was unbelievable the degree of mobilization and the scale of it was enormous two Chinese population was already very substantially larger than that of the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic that was contemporaneous but they talked about mobilizing as many as half a million soldiers for a single battle you know the Livy says that the the Romans lost fifty thousand soldiers at Lake Trasimene II and a can I which everybody regards as a is a gross exaggeration but Chinese historians claim that there are certain battles fought in the 3rd century BC in which as many as 250 or even 400,000 soldiers were killed so if you discount for historical exaggeration and divide by 10 you still have you know extremely large battles being fought by these Chinese states in this period and one of the things that happens when you're under the pressure of intense warfare is that the military structure changes and so the Chinese made a transition that in Europe you know that in Europe you had a transition from mounted heavy nights to infantry deploying long bows and Pike's that then required the mobilization of large numbers of peasants and in China this really happened at the end of the spring and autumn period when individual states started running out of aristocrats basically because you had all of this fighting the fighting was done by aristocrats and they were simply killing each other off and he also had changes in technology that allowed you to deploy large infantry armies and this is the point at which Chinese states then began mobilizing masses of peasantry and to the extent that anyone can can quantify this they seem to mobilize larger percentages of their agrarian populations than did the Romans in a comparable period so they would mobilize you know seven to eight percent of the total manpower whereas the Roman Republic never got much beyond one or two percent of the total population so you bring about a social change because you've actually now mobilized a much larger part of your population which then requires you to create a military organization it is much more difficult to organize the logistics train for a mobilized large peasant army consisting of hundreds of thousands of soldiers compared to these old aristocrats just riding on their chariots so what does this do it leads to a growth of Taxation the first land surveys cadastral surveys were done by the state of Lu in about the fourth century you had cadastral surveys that then imposed in a uniform agricultural tax on all of the landowners in particular States the requirement for taxation then drove the requirement for a bureaucracy the first bureaucracies were military bureaucracies for understandable reasons but as their need for revenues increase you then had a strong demand for civilian bureaucracy that could manage the process of tax collection fiscal accounts so this is the first finance ministry and Treasuries these sorts of institutions you had a lot of technological innovation at that point that probably drove a certain degree of state formation because it gave States much larger surpluses that they could play with the transition from bronze to iron improved agricultural productivity all gave States more resources more surplus to play with and finally ideas one thing that's really fascinating is that all the great classics of Chinese thought were written really in these kind of after the spring and autumn period so this is the period of Confucius the spring and autumn annals the book of history of the book of ODEs book of poetry all really concern the conflict and the deterioration of jus feudal society in in this period and Confucius himself is reputed to be the author of the spring and autumn annals which is an account of the moral deterioration of this tribal feudal society and its replacement with this much more modern in many ways a form of political organization now the real driver of this the Prussia of China was the state of Qin you know the word China comes from the state of Qin because that was the state that was one of the seven warring States that that actually ended up victorious this is a map of China by the way this is all just northern China and so you know the Yangtze Valley set you on the whole area down through Canton and Hong Kong did not play these were these were inhabited by different indigenous tribes and simply didn't enter into Chinese history at this point but the seven states where these states like Wei Luo Xiao Qin which is the far western state at the left side of the map yan and so forth I don't know they seemed not to have permitted States to have more than one syllable names in this period I don't really quite understand why but there you have it and the the single most important of these was a state of Qin in the Far West it probably benefited from its position as a frontier state because they had to deal with the Zhong Yu and other pastoral nomads so that they were constantly you know mobilized for that kind of warfare but they also in a certain sense had a protected rear and could develop their own institutions a little bit insulated from the the fights that were going on further to the east the state of Qin actually really is the one that pioneers all the modern institutions and it comes under a fellow named Shang yang who is an itinerant minister he was actually born in the state of Wei but he was hired by Duke Xiao of Qin to be his chief minister James Scott has this book called seeing like a state in which he says that all states have the same characteristic they want to make their societies legible because he realized that as long as you're based on lineages and tribal organization you're never going to centralize powers so he basically dispossessed all of the feudal aristocrats he created a uniform set of laws and punishments and he abolished the so called well-filled system this is basically a form of land reform one of the best markers of the power of the state is whether they are actually able to engage in a serious land reform dispossessed traditional landowners and the state of Qin did this well I am really running late here we haven't even got them to India okay I'm going to have to speed up a little bit sorry I haven't been keeping track of time alright so you know let me collapse the Chinese story very very simply state of Qin develops these extremely powerful modern institutions and by modern I mean modern in Max Weber sense of Weber defined certain characteristics that were possessed by the Prussian or German bureaucracy of his day which had to do with things like you know bureaucrats are subject to the authority of the defined state they're organized into a hierarchy offices are filled by free contract each office has a specific functional specialty their subject the officials are subject to strict discipline and control promotion is done on a merit basis your remunerated by fixed salaries every single one of these Weber Ian criteria for a modern state was fulfilled by the Qin state and then by the state that they created after the unification of China one of the big mysteries in the interpretation of Chinese history is why people in the West never gave credit to China for having done this Max Weber himself continued to talk he knew a lot about Chinese wrote a whole book on China kept talking about China as a patrimonial state but it actually was not they actually invented a kind of modern bureaucracy that really did not exist in the West for almost two millennia after that and I think part of the reason is that the political modernity was not accompanied by an economic modernity and the assumption is that if you have modern political institutions well of course you're going to have capitalism and growth and all of this other stuff and I think what this simply shows is that institutions aren't enough to produce the modern world you need a lot of other things science and technology universities a different more accumulative ethic and the like alright let me move on I really hate to do this that gives such short trip to India because it's actually much more complicated than than China so let me pose the following comparison because this stuff is really only interesting when you do this in a comparative light after the Qin Dynasty goes away its replaced within a generation by the Han Dynasty which lasts for four hundred years it's the dynasty that defines Chinese civilization and from them from the beginning of the Han up until the 19th century when it's conquering when China is occupied by foreign powers the default condition of China is to be a centralized unified state the dynasties are separated by periods interregnum zuv chaos when the country falls apart but it always comes back together and so in that entire period you know the typical condition is to be a centralized powerful state India's history is exactly the opposite its default situation is to be a decentralized relatively weak unconcentrated collection of principalities kingdoms and so forth punctuated by a couple of big empires but even these empires were never as powerful as the ones achieved in China so you had a shoka's Empire the Mauryan Empire that was pretty much coterminous with the Qin Empire in in in China about the 3rd century BC it's indicative of something about Indian society that even the memory of this Empire was lost because there are no written records of it unlike the case of China and actually the idea that even the knowledge that you had had an empire that spanned most of the northern part of the subcontinent all the way down into the deck on was actually lost in Indian historical memory until some British Orientalist was able to decipher these ROC edicts of Ashoka and then they realized that he actually had put together this extremely impressive Empire but it only lasted a couple of hundred years and then it fell apart and then you got this into a bunch of squabbling either tribal units or very small states the second one was a Gupta Empire about four or five hundred years later but again the Gupta Empire never unified more than let's say 2/3 of the subcontinent in even less than that they only were able to do this in northern India and southern India largely was outside of the control of any of these political authorities the weakness in Indian the the Indian ability inability to create a powerful centralized form of authority then left them vulnerable to foreign conquest and this you know begins with the ghaznavid invasion of the Muslims at the beginning of the second millennium and then of course with with with the British alright so the question is India is a tribal society at the beginning the indo-aryans that settled the Ganges explained are organized just the way the same way that Chinese tribal groups were organized same form of structure same tendency to Fisher and so forth and so why is it that in India you don't get powerful centralized states and in China you do well one answer possible answer is that the Indians never went through a prolonged period of military conflict the way the Chinese did in a way that begs the question however as to why this conflict never emerged or why you didn't have the equivalent of the warring States period in India but I think that the far more important issue was the question of religion and religious ideology which I think completely threw the indian path of development off onto an extremely different a different kind of track which I call the Indian detour because what I'm trying to do is this book is you know if China is a paradigm then you then have to explain why States did not resemble China in in their political development the detour in India's case really arises with the creation of a Brahmanic religion towards the end of the second millennium BC the brahmanic religion first of all creates a four-fold system of varnas you have the Brahmins at the top the Cassatt Rios or the Warriors second you have vices or merchants as third and then shuja's which is basically everybody else peasants farmers you know the people that do the actual work in the society as the lowest of these three broad social classes and what's really interesting and really different from from China is that the Brahmins placed themselves at the top of the the Warriors so that they have a higher social status than the people who actually wield military force in Indian society now there is a big argument that Weber and Marx and a lot of other great thinkers have engaged in as to whether ideas or material interests are the real drivers of history so Marx is famous for saying that religion is the opiate of the masses that religion is a kind of fairy tale that the powerful people in the society think up in order to convince people that they've got a right to exploit them you know essentially and you know Weber and Durkheim and a lot of 19th century sociologists said no no it's just the opposite it's the ideas that are primary the ideas are the ones that create social classes in the first place and you can't explain development without reference to these ideas now if you wanted a case of a group making up a fairy tale to justify their domination of the society I think the Brahmins do a pretty good job with all due respect to that I'm going to I'm going to explain exactly what I mean by that but if you think about this from an external point of view you know the brahmanas placed themselves at the top of this fourfold hierarchy which means that every act from the humblest Krishna or you know wedding ceremony or funeral all the way up to the investiture of a king requires a Brahmin priest to preside over it and the legitimacy of any Indian monarch depends entirely on their being able to get the assent of the local Brahmin or the Brahmin in the king's court to go along with it and so in a sense you know you can say well this was a religion that was made up to justify the social you know awarding the brahmins were there for awarding themselves this high social status and then making up this fairy tale too to justify it that's one way of interpreting history but I think that even though that may be an ex post way of understanding Indian religion you know that's looking at it only from the inside you know for me from I'm sorry from the outside from the outside many of the aspects of the Brahmanic religions seem very strange the prohibition on eating cows the concern with ritual pollution and so forth but if you look at at Brahmanic religion from the inside that is to say if you take seriously the metaphysical principles upon which the religion is based it is an extremely rational set of ideas and I think part of the reason that to this day you know young Westerners are drawn to ashrams in India is that you know there's a kind of brilliance to this religion that you can only perceive if you see it from the inside and you begin to accept some of its some of its basic principles and so in some sense the you know what the religion does is it it it you know the starting principle is the presumption that the entire phenomenal world is in some sense unreal that everything we see around us and particularly our material and biological circumstances in which we live are not the ultimate reality that there is a realm of the Spirit that is far purer than anything we see in day-to-day life and you know in some sense the purpose of the religious voyage that one begins not in just one lifetime but over successive lifetimes is an effort to get away from that the material conditions in which human beings were born there's one analyst of Indian religion that puts it this way the blood and gore associated with birth suffering and deformations or so with disease and violence the repugnance ease associated with waste effusions from the human body in the decay and purification associated with death are all associated with mortal life and hence need to be transcended and every characteristic of Indian social structure beginning with the caste system can be understood in terms of that need to avoid ritual pollution on the assumption that our material biological lives are not actually you know the true true reality and therefore the entire structure of caste is based on the need to move as far possible in higher castes away from sources of ritual pollution so therefore tanners Undertaker's people that deal with dead animals are at the lowest part of the hierarchy and those that don't have to deal with you know these biological realities are at the top of it if you ask you know why Brahmins are vegetarians well if you think about it what does it mean to eat meat you're eating a corpse right so think about that the next time you eat a cheeseburger and and so you know in some sense again if you if you accept the metaphysical Browns of Indian religion the entire social structure that emerges with all of the hierarchical organization of Indian society into castes makes actually perfect sense and this then leads to extremely different conditions under which you try to form a state because you are now forming a state in a society in which the people that deploy military force do not have a monopoly of legitimation in China the Emperor worships his own ancestors and he controls the priests that preside over the rituals in Indian society the the ruler or the King does not control that he has to rely on a class of Brahmins Indian society a village level is completely in a sense self-sufficient because what the caste system does is its Accra Liza's the occupational order it takes the principle of endogamy that exists in a lineage society and applies it to occupations like potter weaver tanner dancer and the so forth and means that you can only it defines that the boundaries of clan exogamy and says you cannot marry outside of those occupational castes but it creates a very interdependent and actually workable system at a village level by which Indian society can govern itself and so if you think about why we're Indian polities never able to generate the kind of striking power that Chinese polities were it very much has to do with this complex social structure that is created out of this particular set of out of this particular set of religious ideas just think about armies armies first of all are run by Kershaw trees which is one of the four classes but the other classes in the fourfold system of varnas do not participate in military activities so something like Shang Yang's mobilization of the entire peasant population was something that was extremely difficult to achieve in any Indian society you think about the prohibitions regarding blood and waist effusions you know battlefields are you know hate to tell you they've got a lot of blood in them and if for ritual purposes you can't deal with the corpse or you can't deal with blood it's going to limit very severely the number of people you can mobilize as soldiers and you know there's a number of other issues one important really important issue has to do with literacy it is really interesting the degree of documentation that exists in India versus China in China going all the way back to the Shang and even the gia dynasties you have extensive written records of government interactions in the Shang Dynasty you had a lot of oracle bones that were the shoulder bones of sheep in which bureaucrats would write their transactions you know that we collected X number of taxes and sent them to you know Lord so-and-so there is virtually nothing like this that comes out of the comparable period of Indian history and the reason for that was the brahmanas first of all maintained an oral tradition over the Vedic the Vedic texts were not written down until really kind of the end of the first millennium BC in a sense that preserved the monopoly that the Brahmins exercised over ritual because you know they had to then memorize all of the texts and their children their sons would then repeat the you know the memorized text and it reinforced a segmentation of literary knowledge to a very narrow class of people and even in later periods of Indian history you don't get anything remotely like the extensive dynastic histories that you get in in the case of China and you think about running a large empire the size of the subcontinent for bureaucrats do not have the ability to communicate through written language you know all of their routine decisions it you know it just creates enormous and you know simple problems of of public administration so there's a number of you know other reasons I think why it's just been hard for any political order to really penetrate Indian society given this kind of religiously legitimated social structure so let me just conclude a little bit by talking about contemporary China and India because I actually think that this early history tells you a lot about these two societies today as we all know China is a authoritarian regime and India has been a democracy since since its founding in the 1940s and a lot of people say well well they say number of things they say first of all that fact that one's authoritarian and one is democratic is is a reflection of things that happened recently of the colonial past obviously the British transmitted a lot of institutions to India including the idea of democracy and secular state and and all of that sort of thing or in communism you know created the grounds for the current dictatorship and the like people also when they're comparing China and India sometimes admire the Chinese ability to make decisions so if the Chinese want to build an airport they just basically you know plow over all the you know little homesteads that are in the way of the runways and move the people somewhere else in India the whole community organizes they complain they protest they vote you know for their Member of Parliament and then you know the political system then prevents the government from putting in this big infrastructure project so where does all of this ultimately come from and I would say that the deep root of this is really not the colonial experience the colonial experience obviously gave both or the colonial or the 20th century experience of both of these societies gave certain specific institutions to both countries but if you look at this longer pattern of history I don't think it's any accident that China is an authoritarian state today and that India is a democracy India is not a democracy in the sense that amar chiisana seems to think that they're deep you know precedents for democracy in India but there are no precedents for authoritarian government in India there really are no precedents for it anyone that has tried to create a powerful centralized regime that's capable of really penetrating Indian society has failed you know all the way back to the days of Ashoka and so it is inconceivable that India could be ruled by a you know a totalitarian regime of the sort that overtook China in the malleus period and conversely the fact that you've got strong centralized government in China also should be no surprise because what you lack in Chinese history is a any tradition of rule of law that would limit the discretion of of the sovereign authority in China and you don't really have organized social groups like a landed aristocracy an organized peasantry independent commercial cities all of which in the case of European political development were critical counterweights to the centralized power of the state and therefore you know in a sense you become path-dependent because once you get this powerful state going the state can then suppress the organization of new forms of AAPIs to its rule so just as you know the Chinese suppress various religiously based peasant uprisings in the Han Dynasty so they're suppressing Falun Gong today now we're not at the end of this lecture series so I don't think that we're all stuck in these two millennia old historical patterns but I do think that it suggests that you know some of the roots of contemporary political behavior actually are much more deeply rooted than simply 20th century history so I'm sorry we never got to the other civilizations but we'll have to try to do that maybe in in the next lecture thank you very much [Applause] so you're free to get up and go in anyone that wants to stay and ask a question is welcome to you Roger why don't you stand I was saying that this is sounds a little bit discouraging if you're thinking about modern political development because based on what you just finished saying there's a certain element of predestination in inevitability the way societies developed and if that's true how can we influence the future direction of development if it's all preordained well okay I never use the word preordained I just said that there are certain long-term patterns you know historical patterns and if you don't take account of them you're really not going to understand where any of this comes from but this is something I'm going to try to elaborate further in the last lecture when you get out of the Malthusian world that you're living in here and you enter you know past the Industrial Revolution when you enter into a period in human history where you have possibilities for continuous economic growth then a lot of these considerations begin to change because among other things it creates a much more fluid social environment you have middle class you have other actors that can get rich outside of the purview of the state and I think that to the extent that there is a hope that you're going to get democracy in a country like China and I believe that that is entirely possible you know in my lifetime see how long I live but you know I think it's entirely possible it's going to because it's going to be because in a modern globalized capitalist economy the state simply cannot snuff out all of its competitors and that from the bottom you get a lot of organization of new social actors that simply would not have existed in any of these earlier historical periods now there's an Indian counterpart to that is will there ever be an Indian state that is sufficiently powerful to really you know break the caste system or you know change some of these deeply rooted social practices I kind of doubt it but on the other hand in India as well you have the same phenomenon you have a middle class you have entrepreneurs you have the growth of a modern economy that bubbles up you know a sigh you know parallel to these old institutions and that again changes the whole complexion plus globalization you know plus all of the external influences and ideas that that come in so I don't think it's quite as pessimistic is you know as you might think yeah David you said that China is this perfect perfect example of Charles two least the area of the state making war and that sounds frightfully plausible and so forth but Charles Tilly also argues in that book that you know he's got that full cartoon that panel version of how history falls out and it starts with a king wearing on that ends up with the prime minister president wearing a suit and worrying about the voters and that II argue provided one of the other pillars which we refer to of accountability now if China is such a perfect example of the first part of the titie thesis why doesn't it develop this accountability which still he also said happened in Europe well unfortunately going to have to wait around for lecture 4 which is all about accountability but a short version of that is as follows the modernization process involves state building which is to say the concentration of state power centralized state power and accountability arises because other political actors are able to organize themselves in a sufficiently cohesive way that they can prevent the state from you know from from undermining them and where you get accountable government is where one of those actors like parliament becomes so powerful that they can actually force the king to back down right and and and that's really what's never happened in China in in this historical period the big difference I think between China and Europe was was the aristocracy because in Europe you had a very powerful landed aristocracy that resisted state centralization and in China for a variety of reasons their aristocratic class was much more dispersed weaker didn't have its own military forces and therefore could never force any Chinese monarch to accept any degree of real accountability so I think that's you know that's the kind of nutshell cinnamon Frank thank you very much that was brilliant and really really provocative you talked about the role of religion in the state you talked about the Prophet Muhammad and kind of intimated the role of religion and you just touched on it in India with the Brahmin class I wonder if you could just delve a little bit more deeply into the role of the religion and the state and what how that shaped the theory of thinking about the state um again the next lecture which will be in two weeks is about the rule of law and the story of the rise of the rule of law is entirely a story about religion because in my view you don't get genuine rule of law except out of religious sources and so for that reason the Christian West the the Muslim world and India all have something that identifiably looked like the rule of law but China has never had it because China you know really never had religion in the sense that any of those other civilizations did I mean they had ancestor worship and then and in Chinese history most religion is kind of protest religion so you get Buddhism and Taoism and a lot of times these are ways of mobilizing peasants or you know people that are not in the elite and and organizing them against the state and then the state beats them back and and and the Confucians kind of end up on top again and for that reason you never had a separate class of priests that were the guardians of of laws that's one important way that that that religion you know impacts political institutions but in essentially religion solves this problem that the rational choice people can never really quite explain is that you know why do these rational actors decide to cooperate with one another at certain circles of cooperation and I think what religion does is it provides people a basis for cooperating that goes beyond their material interests and so as I said you can see that's very clearly with the rise of a powerful arab state in place of Arab tribalism once you have the introduction of of Islam yes comparisons between warring States China and early modern Europe they seem to be a lot of natural analogies I'm not a classicist but is there any anything to be gained looking at classical era European state formation or is that they're just less fruitful I'm here Richard period of well Roman Republic or Greek city-states or any of those earlier periods of European Mediterranean Basin state formation in compare yeah I mean this book has taken a lot of work and if I had more energy maybe I could have you know put in a few chapters on that as well it just seems to me that that whole period has been covered rather well in western historiography and I don't think that you're going to find a terribly different story you know about the relationship of a military conflict and the emergence of these higher forms of political organization it's just that I didn't pick Rome in particular because I just think that in many ways the Romans actually never achieved a very successful in the sense that they cobbled together this big Empire but they never created anything remotely like what the Chinese did which was a centralized bureaucracy that could actually penetrate society in fact the Romans didn't even offer citizenship to everybody that lived in the Italian peninsula the social wars were all because other people wanted to be Roman citizens and they wouldn't let them and so you know the the real core of Rome was actually a very small a political unit despite its you know it's its long-term reach oh thank you for a wonderful lecture I'm I think it's great that you've looked into the ideological sphere in addition to the materialist one because you know a lot of people read books like Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel and you're left wondering why why not India and it doesn't really have a good explanation my question is if you compare India and Christian Europe you have also a clergy and a priestly class yeah and you also have many different ethnic groups that are in divisions that are difficult to put together yet Europe does the different states to go in conquer and I'm just wondering why you think that is is is it because maybe one group is able to incorporate conquered peoples into the religious ethnic group and the other isn't or is it reproductive restrictions on the priesthood or I'm sorry the question is why is Europe write more successful or less successful in India more well more successful at an imperialist expansion yeah yeah I would say that there are probably a lot of specific reasons that are rooted in yeah it's rooted in in geography and in and in some of the details of religion so that for example I don't think that Christianity ever quite stood in the way of the penetration of European states into their society well okay actually let's back up part of the election I didn't get into is why did tribalism disappear in Europe at such an early date and the basic answer to that is the Catholic Church I mean it's really the Catholic Church that on a social level killed Catholicism you know already by the seventh eighth centuries this is all disappearing and so to the extent that kinship was an obstacle to the consolidation of state power that just wasn't a problem in Europe the way it was in China in India and so forth and then I think religion was organized on a different institutional basis where you had a one you know centralized religious institution that could act powerfully to limit in certain ways the power of European monarchs but it could also as an institution collaborate with that same monarch and achieve therefore a higher level collective action that I think these Indian polities were simply never able to you know to achieve I mean for example there's just nothing like the equivalent there's no Indian Pope you know that can give his blessing to the Holy Roman Empire if he chooses to do so because it's a much more decentralized system thank you very much for your lecture I really admire your intellect for courage to deal with this kind of big best issues you usually have done and then other academics or the feel pity to deal with yeah well a lot of them don't have tenure you know as an economist who has been working on development I don't have that much knowledge about politics and other deep issues I'm just curious that while you are comparing between China and India in India you know like home even as why your Indian Premier of Rimini religion was not really affected by anything else like in your example Ashoka was actually adopting the Buddhism which came out of the approving Negro Legion but which really pervaded by why they are not they didn't have a chance to really be affected by that and in China while you are talking about a lack of religion but in Chinese or dynasties every dynasty want needed some political legitimacy and even in even in transition from Qin Dynasty to Han Dynasty Han Dynasty had to choose the Confucianism from legalism you are talking about which was the really basest of the Qin Dynasty so in some sense in my in my view that you you know it seems to be unclear to say Chinese didn't have a really religion they had a silver heaven knew it I'm not a Chinese so they had a sort always the kings and emperors needed a sort of legitimacy as a heavenly rear which was a basis to of the Confucianism and other things so well I'm just curious about you know all of that those are good questions and there's actually a good answer I think to all of them first of all it has to do with well let's just begin with definition of terms Confucianism is not a religion it's a secular ideology you know it does not refer to a transcendental being or a spiritual world sort with it just as it's a set of ideas when I say that China never had religion it did have ancestor worship and as I said it did have Taoism and Buddhism but those entered into Chinese society not from the top I mean there were Emperor's that that were Buddhists but by and large those were protest religions of people that were not in power that you know wanted some source of unity and identity and and so forth but the more important thing was an institutional one which is that religion China right from the beginning was what Weber called Caesar o papist meaning that the emperor was the one that had the power to appoint the priests in Europe in India and in the Middle East the secular ruler did not have that power that religion was under the custody of a separate class of priests who appointed themselves they had their own form of legitimation they did not need political power to get ahead in the Eastern Church this then got United you know and the Eastern Church became si0 papist but in those other societies you all had always had a separate ulama or Catholic Church or Brahmin class that was not simply under the heels of the religious authority and therefore were in a much better position to resist that political authorities effort to centralize political power and I think that's really why China is different Thank You professor for all for your lecture I'm a little bit surprised by your comments on in the classical world or specifically on Roman history but I understand that it's difficult to make these very broad comparisons between China and the classical war but it seems to me that in the formation of the Roman state there are many essential elements of the motor state for instance if you consider the fact that the Roman Republic was a republic rice public a Commonwealth I think that going back to the classical world we we find the first this presence of representative institutions which probably also in the sophisticated ward off machine and Han Dynasty China were not existing and in addition to that I think that the contribution of the state formation of Rome was the concept of a law the Roman law which which which is really an essential element of a differentiation with there with a China and I think that is still a very very important factor between nowadays China and the Western world look again this is a it's a confusion I think that's created in a way by the piecemeal way these ideas are coming out but the China India part of my book is about state formation and state building and then there's another part of the book which has to do with the emergence of law and the rule of law and there is a third part that has to do with the emergence of accountable so you're right Greek city-states and the Roman Republic had elements two and three they had rule of law and they had some form of political accountability but in this question of who had the modern state first there's no question in my mind that the kind of centralized public administration that the Chinese created was much more impressive than anything that was done either by the Greeks or the Romans now as I said if you only have one without two and three you get a great dictatorship and you know and for that reason I would never say that the Chinese figured it all out they figured they missed two thirds of the modern you know political solution and that's still their problem today right and the Romans and the Greeks had you know parts of elements two and three but not so much part one and in fact as we will see in Latin America I think that's exactly the problem is that if you get too much rule of law and too much accountability and a weak state you also have a kind of funny you know a political order as well but that's you know that's the way I would respond to that so it's not that I'm not giving credit to those societies but I'm we're just in the part about state formation right now but we'll return to the Romans because they are extremely important in the formation of European civil law as you get into a later historical period yeah thank you very much you mentioned the Prophet Muhammad as an example of a political leader who was able to use religious charisma and also um and for partially end loyalties and kinship loyalties among tribes but would you call Medina a city-state yeah that's an interesting question because I've actually got a few pages in my book asking when did Arab society actually make the transition into something that you could call a state and it's very complicated answer because even when even under the Prophet Mohammed it was it was actually a lot more like a tribal Federation that was simply kept together by his authority and then the moment that he died all those tribal rivalries reappeared and in some sense the whole Sunni Shia split is a split between the Hashemites and the Umayyads were two lineages of the same tribe that had been contesting for power in the in the medina period and you know the place kind of fell apart I actually have to give another lecture at two so maybe with that thank you very much for your attention [Applause]

Channel: Johns Hopkins University

Views: 72,511

Rating: 4.7440476 out of 5

Keywords: francisfukuyama092309

Id: Gc_EZWUHBkg

Length: 83min 14sec (4994 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2009

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[u/tesla_god_of_thunder]

Very nice introductory lecture on how state emerged historically in China and India