Fukuyama discusses how Huntington’s Political Order In Changing Societies remains relevant:
‘Something like this Huntingtonian process has unfolded in recent months in both Tunisia and Egypt. In both cases, anti-government protests were led not by the urban poor or by an Islamist underground, but by relatively well-educated middle-class young people used to communicating with each other via Facebook and Twitter.’
and on modernization theory, which was dominant at the time the book was published:
‘By pointing out that the good things of modernity did not necessarily go together, Huntington played a key role in killing off modernization theory. Political development was a separate process from socioeconomic development, he argued, and needed to be understood in its own terms.’
Fukuyama laments the lack of broad and deep synthesizers like Huntington:
‘On a policy level, we need far more mutual understanding between those who promote socioeconomic development and those who work on democracy promotion and governance. Traditional development agencies like USAID already think politically to the extent that their aid projects are designed to support U.S. foreign policy.’
It takes humility and understanding to understand what the social sciences can do:
‘The aspiration of social science to replicate the predictability and formality of certain natural sciences is, in the end, a hopeless endeavor. Human societies, as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and others understood, are far too complex to model at an aggregate level.’
But that won’t stop people from trying, and potentially producing being a lasting, useful map:
‘The part of social change that is the hardest to understand in a positivistic way is the moral dimension—that is, the ideas that people carry around in their heads regarding legitimacy, justice, dignity and community.’
Likely worth your time.
Related On This Site: Adam Kirsch Reviews Francis Fukuyama’s New Book At The City Journal: ‘The Dawn Of Politics’
Walter Russell Mead At The American Interest Online: ‘Obama’s War’…From The WSJ: “Allies Rally To Stop Gadhafi”…From March 27th, 2009 At WhiteHouse.Gov: Remarks By The President On A New Strategy For Afghanistan And Pakistan…From CSIS: ‘Turmoil In The Middle-East’…From The New Yorker: ‘How Qaddafi Lost Libya’
A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
From The Atlantic: Samuel Huntington’s Death And Life’s Work…From The American Interest Online: Francis Fukuyama On Samuel Huntington…From Foreign Affairs Via The A & L Daily: ‘Conflict Or Cooperation: Three Visions Revisited’
Do we try and invest in global institutions as flawed as they are…upon a Kantian raft?: Daniel Deudney On YouTube Responding to Robert Kagan: Liberal Democracy Vs. Autocracy
