More than 280 participants from the SMU Community, think tanks, government agencies, junior colleges, secondary schools, as well as members of the public listened with rapt attention as Dr Francis Fukuyama, the 14^th speaker of the SMU Presidential Distinguished Lecturer Series (PDLS), expounded his theory on the origins of the state at the Mochtar Riady Auditorium on 18 February 2014.

An accomplished author of numerous international bestsellers, including The End of History and the Last Man, The Great Disruption, Our Posthuman Future, State Building and After the Neocons, Dr Fukuyama is one of the most eminent political thinkers and writers today.

He is an Olivier Normellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. He is also a Visiting Professor at SMU, where he co-teaches the ‘Role of Public Policy in Enabling Private Sector Development’ as part of the Master of Tri-Sector Collaboration programme developed by SMU to empower emerging leaders from the business, government and civil society to work together to develop sustainable solutions to the major challenges facing the world.

Drawing on his latest book: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution published in 2011, Dr Fukuyama identified three key attributes of political order as the creation of a state, the rule of law, and an accountable government.

Quoting Max Weber’s definition of the state as an entity which successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory", Dr Fukuyama contended that China was the first civilization to move from tribal organisation into statehood, symbolised by the shift from political power bestowed by kinship to government that is staffed by officials selected from the civil service examinations. This led to a strong and cohesive state. However, in periods of political decay, kinship-based power relations tended to reassert themselves, because humans have a natural instinct to favour relatives.

Dr Fukuyama said the rule of law limits the power of government by establishing accepted rules of justice, which are higher than any individual who currently holds political power. He argued that the rule of law has its origins in organised religion, which created a set of rules with a legitimacy independent from that of the state. The rule of law developed before a modern state in those parts of the world dominated by Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism.

Dr Fukuyama noted that an accountable government is responsible to the people it governs. He argued that accountability must be defined not just in terms of procedure, but also in terms of substantive outcomes. Formal accountability made an important advance in seventeenth-century England when the parliament forced the king to respond to its demands, and this eventually formed the basis for democracy. Yet democracy was in some ways a historical accident, said Fukuyama, because during the same period other European societies, such as France or Spain, were unable to impose similar accountability upon their monarchs and lived under absolute rule.

[Photo: Many interesting questions were posed by an enthusiastic audience during the Q&A session.]

In a lively Question & Answer session moderated by SMU President Professor Arnoud De Meyer, Dr Fukuyama fielded numerous questions from an enthusiastic audience. They asked about the impact of social media and globalisation on political order, the role of Confucianism in state building, future trajectory of China under the current leadership, and the decay of political institutions in China and USA.

The Origins of Political Order is the first of a major two-volume work. The second volume, Political Order and Political Decay, to be published some time during the second half of this year, will bring the story up to the present, paying special attention to the impact that Western institutions had on institutions in non-Western societies as they sought to modernise it. It will also describe how political development occurs in the contemporary world.

The Presidential Distinguished Lecturer Series was launched in 2005 with the aim of stimulating discussions among faculty, staff and students as well as the larger external audience on issues of contemporary interest and significance. Internationally-renowned and respected academics, scholars and business leaders who have attained prominence in their respective fields, are invited to share their refreshing insights and experience at this lecture series so as to grow and enrich the intellectual capacity and diversity of SMU through interactive discourse.

[Featured Photo: Dr Fukuyama identified the creation of the state, the rule of law and political accountability as the key attributes of political order.]