Reddit Reddit reviews The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

We found 7 Reddit comments about The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
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7 Reddit comments about The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution:

u/DavlosEve · 6 pointsr/singapore

> the ease with which populist rhetoric can manipulate our emotions is absolutely terrifying to me

Then you should be terrified by everything which has popular appeal, right now. Especially Christians and their rhetoric over 377A when they wield sloppy reasoning. Don't pretend it doesn't already exist here.

>different chauvinisms appeal to us at some level - sexism, racism, nationalism, religious biases. All throughout history time and time again these -isms have vaulted the corrupt to power, thrust into powerful positions by the masses

You're heaping scorn on the symptoms while pointedly ignoring the cause of the disease.

In The Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama lays out the three pillars of a stable state: state-building, rule of law and accountable government. If people feel that either pillars are broken, or not working for them they will reach for an excuse for rabble-rousing. People have good reason to feel dissatisfied if they're just being ordered around without being represented. It's just human nature, and to rail against it is as silly as getting angry with a cat for killing birds.

Just as proper measures should have been taken to prevent the cat from even coming close to birds in the first place, the real problem lies with an unchecked self-serving political class and/or business elite who neglect their noblesse oblige. Gone are the days of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Tan Tock Seng, Tan Kah Kee, Teresa Hsu and Khoo Teck Puat. Also gone are the days of our 1G Cabinet and instead we have absentee MPs and Ministers who spend much of their time justifying their salaries. Those are the people who are causing the disease which results in the symptoms of populism.

People who feel satisfied with their lives do not bother to share Temasek Review posts, let alone read its contents. Or InfoWars for that matter. Censoring those kind of platforms and pretending those opinions shouldn't exist does not fix the problem because their audience still have good reasons to feel dissatisfied with their lot in life.

u/go_west · 4 pointsr/CanadaPolitics

They don't have anything to do with Canadian politics specifically but two very interesting books that I just finished.

  1. Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama

  2. The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond

    Diamond's new book has opened my eyes on the value which traditional societies can provide to modern one's today. A really thought provoking book. Fukuyama is one of my most trusted authors on topics including sociology and historical development, the book focuses on political institutions and their development specifically through China and the Middle East (because that was where it all started).
u/Liara_cant_act · 3 pointsr/politics

Thanks for your kind words. I started having these thoughts back in my early college days when I was majoring in econ. I found it odd how the theories I was being taught were so simple and clear, yet there was so much political disagreement. I thought, "Why is there so much argument over what to do when the answers are so obvious!?"

Then I started actually reading history and realized that things were not nearly so simple. That economics as it was taught to me is simplified and censored to the point of having almost no relationship to the real world. I eventually stumbled upon political economist Karl Polanyi's classic The Great Transformation and his concept of fictitious commodities, and that broke the dam/blew my mind.

Once I got into science, I found it very telling how all the economists and business people I had met were much more confident in their theories of the world than the chemists and biologists I was working with, despite the fact that the latter had much more solid empirical ground to stand on. That's the effect of ideology, I guess; you don't question it or even realize it is there.

If you are interested in these topics, I would recommend:

the aforementioned Polanyi book

Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama

This long academic paper by law professors Jon Hanson & David Yosifon

And some essays by Pierre Bourdieu, such as Social Scientists, Economic Science and the Social Movement and Neoliberalism, the Utopia (Becoming a Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation, which can be found in Sociology is a Martial Art

A quick Google or wikipedia search will reveal these authors' backgrounds and any possible biases they may have in your view. It is fun to see a founder of neoconservatism (Fukuyama) and an anarchist anthropologist who helped start Occupy Wall Street (Graeber) essentially agree on the total historical inaccuracy of modern economic thought and the corrosive impact of economics on the other social sciences.

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/booksuggestions

I've suggested these in the past, but I still like them.

Despite the stupid title, Cocaine: An UnAuthorized Biography is a pretty fun and comprehensive book. Part history of cocaine from the Spanish conquests to today, part story of this guy's experiences while researching the drug.

On Ugliness, the counterpart to another book (On Beauty) by Umberto Eco. Looks at the different ways ugliness has been perceived throughout history. Mainly focuses on art.

I'm about to read The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama.

u/DirectedPlot · 1 pointr/Libertarian

That states have arisen throughout human history?

Take a course in world history or read the rather interesting book: The Origins of Political Order