Getting to Brussels

Since the emergence 25 years ago of his groundbreaking essay “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama has become one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Political Order and Political Decay is the second volume of his prodigious analysis of the development of political institutions across the globe from prehistory to the present. It will quickly become a classic of political science.

Fukuyama argues that modern democratic government requires a balance of three main characteristics: a strong administrative state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. Covering the period from the American, French, and Industrial revolutions to the present, Fukuyama uses this triad of state–law–accountability to examine how well different countries have achieved effective modern democratic governance, or, in the author’s phrase, their success in “getting to Denmark.”