>> guest: righteous indignation is telling the mainstream media that we are motivated by negative things and the reason we are scared, that we are only lashing out because we are scared and racist and all those things. no, it's not just leftists in this country that want to save the world. senator people and tea party people, people who are not part of the media, we also want to save the world, and that is what it's about. >> host: do you think we have a chance to save it? >> guest: i hope so. i'm a pretty cynical guy but i we get everyday and that's what i'm trying to do. >> host: it has really been my pleasure. my honor that you wrote the book and i got a chance to read to recharge my batteries, energize, a talk about this book and i encourage people to read it because, you know, he were speaking for me and so many other people the world that can relate to what you said.

you have become a query in calls to some of the people. thank you for writing this book and we but wish you success. >> guest: thank you. >> host: and thank you c-span. i am armstrong williams, andrew breitbart. ..

>> up next on booktv, francis fukuyama discussing the tribal societies to the rise of politics in europe. >> good evening, everyone. thank you all for coming. this is clearly a standing audience, and i know that we're eager to get into this and have lots of discussion because we're here to celebrate the publication of francis fukuyama's major contribution, the origins of political order from prehuman times to the french revolution. before we begin, i want to just say that this -- this is a moe -- big time for politics and

prose. she and barbara immediate with the stellar staff here at politics and prose and you engaged with books and ideas and the community of writers, editors, readers, agents made this more into a bookstore. it is a thriving community institution. it is a setting for the discussion and december semination of ideas, and it's a public space where people meet, talk, disagree, discuss, and do it in a civil way, and it will continue that way under the leadership of its new owners, brad graham. i just want to continuity will stand and appropriate changes will be made too, but not around

what is a community institution, around ideas, and around public space. i very much wanted to introduce francis fukuyama tonight because i respect him even though as i told him, i taught civil society activists in asia and africa work on civil societies a went had a lot of vigorous discussion about the end of history 10-15 years ago, and so that's one reason, but the more important reason is he is an open-minded scholar who embraces big ideas, who's not incaplated by boundaries. he exercises nuance and complexity. don't be fooled by the fact that this book after the colon says

from prehistoric times to the french revolution. professor fukuyama takes us through the relationships of the state, law, and accountable government, and he wants to know what is the origin of state, law, and accountable government, and having one of those in place doesn't presuppose that the others will have vibrant and alive institutions. he discusses fail and failing states, provides probing questions about the united states as well. i love the fact you take us through april anxiety, political decay, and it makes us think about our own society here in the united states. i have not read the whole book yet, but i have already been made to think for me and reconstructed, and i'd like to

think an open-minded liberal, you helped me realize there's more to absolute -- let us welcome francis fukuyama. [applause] the folks who work the cameras and make it happen. [applause] >> well, thank you. it's really a great honor to be here and have this wonderful audience, and i'm grateful you're here at politics and prose. one of the nice things to speak about a new book is to go to real brick and motar bookstores and there's people who still like this because of the intellectual challenge and interest, so thank you all for

coming. i'll get straight into it. i wrote this book for a number of reasons. the political scientist was my teacher when i was a graduate student at harvard. he wrote a book called "political order and changing societies" which i think rereading it now in light of the arab spring actually is probably one 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 updated, and i thought of the project of doing a revision of this book among other things, it opens and 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 wall. the other major issue was just referred to. i've been thinking about nation building, failed states, affection, iraq, -- afghanistan, iraq, somalia, haiti, all these foreign policy challenges we faced, and we have this illusion of the trouble of

getting to denmark. denmark is in quotations. it's a mythical place with low corruption, stable democracy, good services delivered efficiently and so forth, and we have this vision of denmark in the back of our heads, and we go to a place like afghanistan and say, well, how do we get afghanistan to look like denmark? it doesn't work very well. [laughter] part of the reason i began to realize was that we don't understand how denmark got to be denmark. i actually have had a visiting professorship at argos university in denmark, so i've been going to denmark for the last few years, and most deans have no idea how denmark got to be denmark. [laughter] it struck me that there's not a basic book you can go to to see where political institutions came from. i didn't see one, so i decided to write it, and that's how we got the book that i produced, so

i also did not want to write a book on the origins of politics that told this traditional eurocentric story, not because i'm opposed to england or the west, but i think it's a distortion, and it's one that's been taught still in a lot of the discourse that really begins can karl marx as the present england. this is what you realize when you learn something about the history of england is that it is a very peculiar country in a number of ways i'll explain to you, and to expect other countries to represent england's modernization path i think is highly unrealistic, and, in fact, in my view, it was china, not -- china did not establish the first state. that happened in a lot of places in egypt in the valley of

mexico, but the chinese established the first modern state, modern meaning not based on hiring your cousins and friends to run the government, but based on rational bureaucracy and central administration. they did this is in the third century bc. it's an amazing achievement that a lot of people have not adequately recognized and instead of starting with england, or, you know, greece and rome, the magna carta, it made more sense to start with china. that's the basic background. now, there are three important baskets of political institutions that we need to think about. the first is the state itself. the state is all about power. the state is the ability to concentrate power in a hierarchy

and enforce it over a particular territory. 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 term i lived in fair fax county for 20 years, and the potholes get filled every spring, and why do they get filled but not in papa new beginny? there's a structure that provides the services efficiently like in a rich county like fair fax, not so well in the district. [laughter] it's interesting you know why the differences happen, and i think all the antigovernment 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 government that's able to enforce rules, you ought to move to somalia or afghanistan or, you know, a less developed country that actually cannot enforce rules on its own territory, somalia. if you want to own not just an

assault rifle but a shoulder fired antiaircraft weapon, you're free to do it, but it's not a very happy society because it doesn't have institutions. that's the state. second is the rule of law. the rule of law is all about community rules of justice that are regarded as superior to the will of whoever happens to be riding the government, whether it's the president, prime minister, king, monarch, whatever, the executive in the society doesn't feel that he or she can just make up the rules on the fly, whatever they want, but they actually have to implement a law that someone else makes, all right? that's the second set of important institutions, and then the third is institutions of accountability. today we associate those with democracy, with elections, but that's not the only form of accountability, and in any event when accountability institutions were first put into place in 17th century england, the king

was accountable to parliament that only represented 10% of the english population, the richest 10%, 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 elections. the question is where do these come from? the state of the concentration of power, rule of law are all about limbing power. you get the president of the united states, the most powerful individual in human history, can nuke the rest of the world if he wants to but doesn't because it's limited by law and by accountable political institutions. it's a kind of miracle of modern politics, all right? i'm going to tell you a few stories from the book in each of the baskets. let's begin with the state. the state in some sense is in my view a big struggle against the

family. human nature tells you a couple things, a universal human nature, a couple bilogical principles that govern socialability. we get this notion from thomas hobbs before rules you had people clubbing each other over the head. that was not true. human societies never went through that period. they were social because they were born with certain characteristics that allow them to cooperate. one is kin selection or inclusive fitness by the biologist means you are intruistic with the number of people, in other words, nepotism. you favor relatives. the second principle is reciprocal alterrism. you scratch my back, i'll scratch yours. no child anywhere is taught

these mechanisms. these are in built forms of socialability, the default ways of relating to each other, friends and family. in the absence of a modern institution that forces you to hire someone with qualifications rather than your cousin or brother-in-law, that's how you do it. that's the normal politics that inserts itself, and so in a sense, the, you know, the states arose in society that were organized tribally meaning that people were in large kin groups all believing they descended sphr a common ancestor and they are third and fourth and fifth cousins, and how do you get from a state based on kinship as the form of social organization to one that's based on citizenship in which it's not a matter of who you are related to, but i'm a citizen of the state of france or japan or whatever, and so that's why there's a struggle, a constant struggle against especially this bilogical urge to protect your children.

how did this happen? in china, it unfortunately, happened as a result of century's long military conflicts. there's a famous political scientist, charles tilly, famous for arguing in the case of europe that the state makes war and war makes the state. it's really military competition that drove people out of tribal societies into these more organized high ark call units, and if you look at chinese history, that's the story that unfolds. at the beginning of the western joe dynasty in 1100bc, these tribes come in, conquer the shang peoples, they are split into 3,000 try tribal groups. in the spring and autumn they fight 1200 wars with each other. the number is reduced because states are snuffed out at this point and not many states left

to fight. dpienlly the process widdles down, seven survives states, and finally in 221bc, the state of chin, the powerful western state conquers all rivals and establishes the first chinese dynasty. as in europe, another 1800 years later, the process is driven by the needs of welfare. first you fight with aristocrats, but if you can scrip peasants, you do better. you need to tax, need resources, and that requires you do surveys, you create a pure bureaucracy in order to tax, and you need an administrative hierarchy to run this whole machine. this is what the chinese do and figure out if you hire again your cousin to be a general as lincoln, you know, did all these patronage appointments early on in the civil war, you lose the war; right? you need a different principle,

an impersonal merit based principle, and that's what the chinese did. they have a civil service examination as a means of entry into the government. they did this third century bc. unfortunately, it didn't last. the great hahn dynasty saw the flourishing of centralized high quality government. it falls apart in the third century ad for a number of reasons, and what happens? it's repat trough mon yalized. people with wealth and power recapture the government, and this continues through the tong dynasties, and this modern chinese state established already in the third century does not get put back into place until 1100 or so in the northern period. the struggle against the family goes on for a very long time. now, the weirdest institution designed to create a powerful

state and to beat back the family is a system of military slavely that developed during the seconds big arab dynasty and was carried to its logical conclusion by the automins. what they did every three or four years is send out a group of people into the balcan prosinces of the empire like football scouts looking for young men between the ages of 12-19, forcibly take them from their families, raise them as slaves in the palace, but they would train them not for lies of degradation, but to be senior military officers and administrators, and in effect the prime minister of the empire. why did they create this strange institution? by the way, the people recruited in this fashion were not allowed to marry or have children. if they did, they were either

expelled from the corp. or the corp. and children were never allowed to rise to positions of status. why did they do it? again, all because of the family. the moment that you allow people in elite positions to have children, what are they going to want to do? secure positions for their children, and the automins understood that a modern administration has to be based on promoting people by merit and therefore if you allow them to have families, you wouldn't be able to do this. they created in effect a one generation or stock sigh, and the system began to clams the moment -- collapse the moment these groups took the opening caused by famine and rising inflation in the 17th century to start the demand that their children be allowed to assume their positions. this is a general problem in france. old regime france, before the

french revolution. they faced exactly this same problem. wealth elites that potentially could oppose the king, so what do they do? what does the french monarchy do? they sell offices. they sell the aves of finance -- office of finance minister to wealth individuals. this had an important impact in breaking up the opposition to this centralization product of louis the xiv and other great monarchs. first of all, there's a desire to privatetize public office. you want to grab as much of the public sector that you can, and in the early 1600s under an institution palled the palllette, it was possible for wealth individuals who bought public officers to turn them over to their children as property. as long as the chateau and vineyards, you get some public office, and so by the time of

the revolution, the entire french public sector was sold off to wealthy individuals. you can't create a modern state under these circumstances, and one of the things that the revolution did was basically divested all of these old elites of not just their property and offices, but their heads in a lot of cases, and, you know, it took a violent revolution to eliminate that system. now, let's talk about the rule of law. so this was a second really important basket of institutions, and as i said, the rule of law are limitations. they are rules that limit this question of rulers to do as they want, so where does this come from? where do you get this kind of system in in my view, historically, it's come out of religion because if you think about it, religion is the only source of rules that is outside of politics where rulers are actually limited by rules that they themselves don't make, and

this is true in many civilizational conditions. it's true of ancient israel. it is true in the christian tradition. it is true in the world of islam, and it is true in india under hinduism. in over one of these -- in every one of these societies, you have a religious law that is made by religious authorities interpreted by hierarchies of religious judges, you know, the lama, the scholars, the priestly class in the case of india, and in all cases, the ruler has to go to the religious authority to get sanctions. in india, you have to be sanctioned by a bramum. there's a clear status distinction and it's the pres on top of warrior in that society. that's rule of law. that's what we mean by rule of law. the only world civilization that did not have rule of law in this sense is china. the reason i believe the chinese

never had this rule of law is they never had a religion. they had ancestor worship, but it's, you know, it's amazing that chinese got to be so sophisticated with a primitive religion. ancestor worship, you worship your ancestors. there's no authority that comes from it. it was controlled by the state, and so no chinese emperor felt there was a higher source of law they have to obey, and that continues to the present day. the chinese communist party, you know, they have a constitution, but they make the constitution. the constitution does not limit what they want to do. now, in the west, the rule of law develops early and very powerfully. one of the heros in my book, you know, the classic modernization theory, i like the catholic church in a couple historical respects. in terms of the rule of law, the church was extremely important. in the post period, in the early

middle ages, bishops and priests could marry and have children, and guess what they did? they all turned their ben benefits to their children, got involved in court politic, all wrapped up in the clan shenanigans, and you have the at one point in the late 11th century, the rise of a pope gregory the vii, a titan tick historicalxd figure like martin luther who realized that unless the church itself eliminated this buy logical principle of having children, it would not have the moral authority to become an independent institution. furthermore, all bishoped at that point were appointed by the emperor, so the church did not have control over its own

personnel policy basically; right? he declares the church is inexcellent, they appoint the bishops, and all of the priests and bishops cannot marry or have children. this comes as a surprise. they do not like it. it's a struggle in the church and bigger struggle for the emperor. he wants to keep the church as his source of authority. they fight a two generation war, the allies of the pope versus the allies of the emperor, and at the end of this period, the church achieves independence, and at that point, they can establish a second law presided over by bishops and priests appointed only by the church, the first lawyers are e close yatic lawyers. it's really a creation that happens first in the church and then gets transferred todd

secular realm and also divides church and state at this very early point and the legal authorities have legit legitimacies and a separate hierarchy separate of european rulers, and this was extremely important for subsequent european development because any european ruler that wants to be like a chinese emperor and do whatever the hell he pleases has to content with the fact there's a preexisting set of legal constraints that prevent him or her from doing that. all right. the final basket of institutions are institutions of accountability, aka, democracy. so you sometimes get the idea, and i think this comes from tokeville that once the idea of equality is out, it's unstoppable, and it just, you know, happens. i think one the things you realize when you look at the actual history of the rise of ghok is just how -- democracy is just how weird and

ring, in a way contingent its emergence was, and it arose because of the survival of a peculiar feudal institution into modern times called the parliament. every european country in the middle ages had a body called an estate, a parliament, a sovereign court in spain, the courts in russia, they were the dias, all places of high nobility sometimes. by waw see, and they had to wage war and collect taxes, all right? in the late 16th and 17th centuries, you had all these powerful monarchs that wanted to behave like a chinese emperor creating a centralized powerful bureaucratic realm in which everything was uniformed, and they wage the this long struggle

against these estates in every single country, and only in one of them did the parliament or the estates win that battle, and that was england, and, you know, in a sense it shows you how accidental history is. parliament didn't prevail in france. it didn't prevail by the way, because of the french selling off all the offices to wealthy individuals. once you take care of me and my family, i'm fine with everything else. we don't defend our liberties. the french interpreted liberty as privilege. it didn't happen in spain and certainly not in russia where the czar recruited the entire nobility into his own military organization. it did happen in england for a very pee -- peculiar reason. they hung together, not only did

they hang together, but raised an army, fought a civil war with a king, defeated him, cut off his head, this was charles the i #, and in 1788, they deposed james the ii and brought in william of holland to be the new monarch because they did not want to be taxed without parliamentary concept, all right? it just happens in this one island nation, you get this powerful parliament that is able to force a constitutional settlement on the english monarch. from there to the american founding is a really short distance because john locke was a participant in the events of the glorious revolution. he wrote the second treaties on government justifying rule as something that has to come out of concept of the governed, and then you get to the american revolution which is based on the principle no taxation without representation, so the distance from those english events during

the english civil war and our own founding as a country based on democratic consent is really not a long distance at all, but it wouldn't have happened if, you know, a, we had been colonized by spain, and indeed in latin america it didn't happen on that time scale, and it didn't result in a powerful commercial empire the way england evolved except for this balancing of rule of law, accountable government, and a strong state, all right? so this is the miracle, you know, this miracle happened, but if you think about it, there's no necessity. there's no historical driving forces that dictated that this would be the outcome. once england got there, it was a very powerful model and other people wanted to imitate it, but the fact they got there in the first place was kind of a historical accident. in china because the state was powerful at an early state, they never allowed free cities or

opposing religious groups to appear, and they don't do it to this day. you know? they control because it is a potential source of opposition to the regime, so let me just conclude with a couple of observations about how this is relevant to understanding politics in the modern world. let's begin with india and china. every business school for the last 10-15 years has been doing emerging market courses contrasting india and china. when china wants to build the three gorges dam, they have to move 1.2 million people out of the floodplain, they just do it. people kick and scream and there's a lot of unhappiness, but they do it. the people are moved out. they build the dam. high speed rail, the beautiful airports in commie these cities, you know -- infrastructure. because they have this strong

and relatively high quality author authoritarian government that doesn't need to respect the interest of citizens. in india, just to give you one example, the motor company a couple years ago wanted to establish a car assembly plant in west bengal. what happens? they get hit with lawsuits, trade unions go on strick protesting the signing of this plant there. finally, enough. we're not going to do it. they put the plant elsewhere, and so in india you got the real problem with basic infrastructure because they are divided law governed democracy. there's check and balances. the indian state can't do anything it wants because it evolved in a fashion where law and accountability are actually much more important. now, a lot of people will say that this is the inherent of british clollianism or something

that happened in the last hundred years of the countries, and i think having written this book i now understand this is total nonsense. these reflect patterns of government that are at least 2500 years old. since the unification of china in 221 b.c., the country has fallen apart in periods, but also has come together, and it spent more time as unified authoritarian country governed by a single authority than it has in a state of disunity. india is almost the mirror opposite unified for two brief periods under the empire and then another empire later. when the britishs invaded, none of them could extend their rule, so the fact that india is a democracy i don't believe has deep historical roots, but the fact it's not a chinese

dictatorship is not accidental. nobody in indian history has ever been able to rule india in that kind of fashion because indian society is way too tough, you know? it's organized into casts and village associations and very powerful religious groups all of which resisted any political effort to, you know, dominate, all right? the final thing, i mentioned that i think the eurocentric accounts of modernization don't understand how peculiar modernization is, i think that's important to remember. when we try to modernize, you know, through development assistance, a country in the third world today. how is european development peculiar? well, first of all, the exit from kinship was again not done by a state, but a powerful state that demanded that people have

allegiance to it. it was done by the catholic church. the church at the end of the roman empire set rules of inheritance. they forbade concubines, forbade divorce and marriage up to five degrees of relatedness, of cousins, and all of these were means of cutting off the ability of clans, of tribal groups to keep property within the clan, and they also supported the right of women to hold and alienate property in the early stage of the middle ages. they did this for self-interested reasons. they wanted to break the economic power of the tribal groups earning it worked -- and it worked beautifully. a lot of widows in this period ended up with all the money in the family, and when they died without children, who inherited the money? it was the catholic church. they holding went up 30% in the

first part of the eighth century because of the changes in the rules. it means individualism started in europe at a much, much earlier point. it's not a product of the industrial revolution or reformation or anything like this. within two or three generations of the conversion to christianity, all these tribes were already no longer living in these tribal associations, and in england, it gets carried to this extreme where if you are a parent who was prom meant to turn your fortune over to your son before you died without signing a maintenance contract, you could be in big trouble because, you know, the kid could just say, sorry, dad, i got my own, you know, business to worry about, and i'll try to take care of you, but it's not a priority, and so in century english families, you know, already in the 1300s, you're having families sign contracts with

each other because you could not rely on children to take care of their parents in old age, so already, that presumes a huge amount of individualism that we're not -- we're not bound by what earnest gellnor called the tyranny of cussens where everything is in this big bunch of relatives. finally, the sequence of development in europe goes like this. it goes first rule of law, then you construct a powerful centralized state, and only later do you get democratic accountability, but law comes before the state building. the early modern european monarch that wanted to create chinese style states had to do this against the background of existing laws that limited their ability to exercise power. final note i'll leave you with is my favorite character in the book is the evil em per rows woo

was the only woman who established the dynasty in her name rather than through her son or husband. she came early in the tong dynasty in the 6th century, originally a concubine of the second tong emperor. she got into his graces, and she displaced existing em prowess, and the death was blamed on the em per rows, and made madam woo the new emperor. she killed her own sons in the rise to power and killed off a lot of nobility that stood in her rise to power, and, you know, she -- it -- it didn't do much for women's empowerment in

china. there's a plaque somewhere in the forbidden city that warns against women in politics after the experience of the evil woo. you contrast that to a couple stories in europe, there was a couple big revolts. in the 1520s, there's this revolt against the great hosberg emperor, charles the v. they fought a few wars, every roar won, defeated enemies, and there's another war in france 130 years later under lose the xiv. it was a bloody war, and the king defeated his foes. in both of those cases, it's remarkable that charles v and louis xiv pardon their opponents and lived happily ever after. if this was clie that, they

would have killed off every member of the lineage of the opponents to make sure the rope of dissent was broken, and so i do think that, you know, the army presence of law in european development made some difference in terms of the kind of authoritarian government you could actually create, of course, until the horrible governments, the 20th century where as a result of mod dearnization -- modernization you undermind the forms of law. this is the book. well, it's not the book. it's a small part of the book. [laughter] i guess what i learned in the 20 years since the end of history is that, you know, the whole process by which we get to liberal democracy, the only alternative for a modern society, was actually based on an awful lot of accident, and in a sense, good luck, and it means that if we try to create similar

institutions in other societies that haven't had similar experiences, it's a hard process. right? thank you very much. [applause] >> what a rich explanation. one of the things you ought to know is that the francis fukuyama has been in public service. he's been one of those who's tried to let government have a longer range outlook than governments have by serving on the state department policy planning twice, and as the deputy under dennis ross, and as you know, there's been a distinguished group of people who served as head of the state department policy planning

staff, george cannon, sam lose, winston lose, and others who have a passion of service like francis. >> that was a wonderful overview, and maybe this question is too specific and not general enough. you began by saying how do we begin to be denmark? there's now a divide opening between england and us, and europe. their vision of the state involves a lot more state responsibility to take care of retirement, to organize health, and we seem to be going in exactly the other direction. is there something in your theory that kind of speaks to that? >> you got to wait for volume two for that one. [laughter] it's a good question. it is a volume two kind of

issue, but, you know, most of what i know about this subject i learned from seymour, the great socialologist and political scientist who wrote "american exceptionalism" a book about why the united states is so peculiar when you compare it to other developed countries, and one of the important ways it's different is we don't trust government. we just don't trust government. in europe, people see the government as the embodiment of public interest and you respect it because it remits a public interest. in the united states it's regarded as something that is potentially oppressive and it was argued that that came out of the american revolution basically because the u.s. was born in a revolt against overweaning power, and that's, you know, in a way stuck with us. then i think the other issue is that since america was a land of

new settlement for europeans, not for the indigenous people living here, but for the new settlers, it always had a much greater degree of social mobility so you could arrive, and if you didn't make it your children, your grandchildren could, you know, rise in economic status, and that, i think reenforces this american view that, you know, if you're -- if you're poor, it's because you haven't worked hard enough, and if you are rich, it's because your industrial and thrifty, and there's enough truth to that that i think, you know, it reenforced this american kind of unwillingness to have the state, you know, put you ahead. it ought to be individuals doing this on their own. >> okay. >> ifer a question because the -- i have a question because the state department talks about democracy ooze a process. there's one element you didn't bring up, the issue of

technology in the spread of information, and i suspect that's going to be in the second volume, but i wonder if you can speak to that briefly. it seems to me we may be at that end of history moment where information technology has radically changed. a lot of the underlying theories of the argument, i think. >> i think there's been this important, you know, change with social media, for example, so it played obviously a big role in the arab spring. it's good at mobilizing people, and social mobilization is really critical for, you know, producing democratic change. what's not clear to me is whether it's as good in producing institutions down the road as it is in this kind of short term mobilization. if you look at tunisia or egypt right now, what they desperately need is not more social mobilization. they need political parties,

leaders, free media, all of these institutions that make civil society powerful and able to stand up and demand things of the government. technology can help with that. it certainly can help with that, but i think it's not kind of the panacea that some people see it as being. >> yeah, i was referring to it more in the sense of transcending the other inherent problems. you know, that the information can overcome some of these things that we didn't have before. that was more the nature of my point. >> yeah, okay. >> thank you. >> for the second volume, you might want to check other authorities. since the end of the second world war, the rate of intergenerational social mobility in parts of western europe have been higher than ours presumably because of the

welfare state and investment. >> he did not assert factually mobility was higher. >> it was believed, yes. >> [inaudible] >> yes. i have a question which represents a professional defer mages. you think in big terms. you're one of the people, one of the social scientists who do. every campus has one for better or for worse. some have two, three, four. [laughter] yet this city is full of tens of thousands of university graduates, highly educated in the federal bureaucracy, armed services, general petraeus is extremely proud of his princeton ph.d., and yet if you look at the results of in terms of policy derivatives of what we think they might have learned in the universities, the results

are far from sublime. what's your comment? [laughter] >> well, as a professional educator, i don't want to denigrate the impact of university educations. i mean, i talk for a decade, and, you know, i think some of my students are here. [laughter] as we speak. did you learn anything? [laughter] yeah, okay, so they -- however, let me make this comment. i actually think that the direction that a lot of the social sciences have moved in the last 0 years has not -- 20 years has not been helpful because it's been taken over by economics so actually one of my agendas in writing this book that's full of history is to remind people that they can't understand the way the contemporary world is unless they know more history. you can't do things by models and regressions alone, and i

think one of the reasons that a lot of contemporary american political science has actually not been terribly useful to policymakers is because they, you know, it's now moved into this abstract realm where people don't know about real places, and therefore, you know, they can't tell you, you know, what do you do when you are con franting these tribes because nobody bothered to learn the languages or spend time in the villages and figure out what's going on there. i'll grant you that much. of course, my students spend time in the villages. [laughter] they are big exceptions to the general rule. >> my students -- fellow students are awful, so congratulations. [laughter] >> an english professor at georgetown and wrote many, many

fascinating books and presented here as well. [laughter] >> hi, in the end of history in the last man, you argue that liberal democracy remits the end point of history, capital h history, which is to say that unlike previous stages of history does not contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction. it does not have those interim contradictions that destroyed all others. in the first chapter of your new book you touch on some disturbing themes in our culture, the notion amongst a lot of people that the government is simply bad and not needed, stratification of wealth, lies of corporations. in the 20 years since you published the end of history, have you had reason to doubt that we are, in fact, at the end

of history, or do you think we're seeing the destruction of what we thought was the end of history to spawn something new? >> well, i -- there's a couple of different parts of the answer to that, so i have been thinking a lot about the last 20 years. [laughter] i vice president -- haven't stood still, and one of the current themes in the book is the theme of huntington's of political decay because you see clearly you create institutions for one set of purposes, and then people invest them with a kind of intrinsic worth through religious sanctions or historical tradition or whatever, and then the circumstances change and the institutions need to be changed, and they become dysfunctional. now, i would say we have a problem right now in the united states because we face certain long term challenges, you know, fiscal stainability of where we are and so forth, and our political system is so checked

and balanced and so polarized, you know, the underlying political culture is so polarized that we can't make basic decisions. if we can't solve the problems, there's no reason to think our particular american democracy is going to do all that well, and it could certainly decay over time. now, that's a slightly different question from the one i raise in the end of the history which is, okay, in theory, can you think of a better political system that would solve these problems? right now, i think the, you know, the one that's out there is this authoritarian capitalist china, and for a number of reasons i think they are on a roll right now, but i don't actually believe that that system is sustainable over a long period of time compared to a system like ours that has checks and balances largely because i don't think the chinese ever solved this problem that they themselves call the bad emperor problem which is to

say that if you have an authoritarian system without checks and balances, and you have a good emperor, you're sitting pretty. you know, you can make quick decisions much faster than a democracy that has to get consensus and agreement and so forth, interest groups and that thing. if you have a bad emperor, you're in big trouble because there's no way of getting rid of that person. the evil woo or the emperor chin, a guy who buried 400 scholars in an open pit because he didn't like what they said about him, and that was the last bad emperor that most chinese would acknowledge. you don't get that in a democratic system because we have checks and balances. in that respect i still vote with, you know, our system down the road for all of its current problems. >> thanks very much.

>> you dated the importance of the law in the church to the 8th century. >> no, that was the end of the family. the investor happens in the 11th century. >> awe, okay, that shoots the question. we were told that charlamane saved foundation, and if it already had that, he would have been the -- he did not have that? >> no. >> okay, misunderstood you. >> congratulations on the book and your success. i wanted to ask you somebody who believes you made very correct predictions a year before the end of communism in europe, and kind of the two persons before me asked the question, but i want to emphasize more. obviously we don't want war.

we don't want chaos. we can want have democracy -- we cannot have democracy in the free world all at the same time, that's obvious. is it something you recognize to policymakers now in the united states although they have to deal with a lot here in the united states? should we be not afraid of saying we want democracy and free markets to prevail? obviously, you know, without chaos, without wars and so forth? >> yeah, absolutely. look, i believe that historically the united states regarded it as its national identity. we are democratic here in north america, but we are a model to other people. we believe that this is, you know, based in universal, you know, human rights, and rules of justice, and we have, you know, we promoted democracy in, you know, all over the place. my objection during the iraq war is we should not do it militarily. you know, it ought to be based

on people in these societies that want democracy, and there's plenty of ways to level out the playing field when they are facing very repressive authoritarian regimes, so the means was different, and also i, you know, i never believed that american democracy per se was the model for democracy as such. in many ways the european union represents a more accurate version of what the end of history would look like because they want to tran send power and politics, replace power by rules and so forth. >> thank you, dr. fukuyama. quick question. how does india's policy in kashmir fit it with democracy? 75,000 deaths unaccounted for in the past two decades. >> i'm not going to act as a spokesmen. i don't know why they are doing this in kashmir. you know, democracies do a lot

of dumb things. look at american foreign policy, and you see we make a lot of mistakes in the world as realm. just because a country is a democracy doesn't mean they put the promotion of democratic values first and foremost in policies. we support saudi arabia because they have oil, not democracy. that's a fact of life. i think, you know, and it's interesting actually that a lot of newer democracies like india, turkey, brazil are also different from the united states because they actually don't regard the projection of democratic values around the world, you know, with the same -- as the same imperative that americans do, and it's interesting why that's the case. >> going to take everyone who's in line to the questions, and then we'll have to come to an end. everyone who is in line gets to

ask. >> i think this is a volume three questions. [laughter] given the supernational organizations, u.n., world trade organization, world court, and a lot of regional organizations, can i coax you into commenting on the prospects of a world state? >> oh, sure. [laughter] i think the prospect is zero. [laughter] i mean, no, i just think that, you know, if you look at, if you look at a political system, it has to be based on some minimal degree of con sen us of basic rules, justice, values, and so forth, and in a big democracy like the united states, we're having trouble with that. you know, in rural louisiana, people think