You're listening to the Unsiloed podcast with Greg LeBlanc, produced by University FM. Unsiloed is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. So, wherever you are, enjoy today's episode. And here's your host, Greg LeBlanc.
Welcome to Unsiloed. This is Greg LeBlanc. I'm here today with Francis Fukuyama, who is a professor here at Stanford University at the — is it the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies? That's right. But it does far more than international studies. I think you have been doing a lot of workshops on rule of law and democracy. It's a really interesting center, and of course you've written a gazillion books, right? Probably your first book, which I think you're probably most famous for, that first book, The End of History and the Last Man. And since then you've written plenty of other books. In a way, I think to the outside world, a lot of these books are seen as extensions, continuations, and elaborations, right, and defenses and modifications of the original thesis, which still is an incredibly powerful one, including the most recent book. This one's called Liberalism and Its Discontents. And then you've got this other one called Identity. You've got the book Trust, which I couldn't find. And then these are really amazing. I think Magna Opera, is that how you say it? Okay, I'm not going to remember my plural in Latin, but they're really about kind of the origins and evolution of the state going way back, right? You have a chapter on primates, but you know, the first one is called The Origins of Political Order, which takes you all the way up to the French Revolution, and then this one called Political Order and Political Decay, which takes us to the present. So, welcome.
Okay. Well, thanks very much, Greg.
Well, I want to go back to the first book, right? The End of History. And I think, you know, a lot of people shared a sentiment back in the early 90s that we had entered into a new age, right, of peace and prosperity, of democracy, of rule of law, if not in reality at least an aspiration, right? So that everybody around the world could agree that there was such a thing as the good society. And you know, political philosophers have been discussing this since the beginning of time, right? What is the good society? What is the kind of society that allows us to flourish? And what does it mean to be a good person, right, with a good life? And of course in the book you are somewhat skeptical, right? I think your skepticism is not well understood. But I think most people now would agree that there is less agreement about what constitutes the good life and what constitutes the good society. And that's not just in the general public, but even in the halls of academia and political philosophy. And so is that sort of just a reversion back to the norm, right? Was this notion that there was going to be any kind of consensus or agreement — was that an illusion? Was that sort of a blip on the radar?
Well, we don't know. I think that I made no claims to have a theoretical model for how history was going to work. One thing that I did think back then and I continue to believe now is that if you believe in a progressive long-term historical trend where institutions develop — and you know, that's what those thick books that you held up were about — that there is progress over time. You have to step back far enough to see it. But I think that you can witness the difference between an earlier historical period and the present if you go from a very poor developing country today, sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America or, you know, other poor parts of the world, to Europe, Japan, the United States. You know, these are all modern societies, and I think the contrast between developed and less developed countries in a way illustrates, you know, historical progress. We used to have this US Agency for International Development. And if you think about what international development was, it meant moving countries like, let's say, Myanmar, Guatemala, you know, into places like Switzerland or Denmark. And I think that's still a meaningful journey. It's one that many countries in Asia have actually succeeded in making over the last hundred years. And so it's not just something that happened only in the West. Now, once you admit that there's something like progress in history, then you have to say, well, where's that progress heading? You know, what's the direction of this historical development? And my argument was really, in a way, taking on Karl Marx, because Karl Marx agreed that there was progress in history, but he said that that progress would lead to a communist utopia, and for him that was the end of history. And what I, you know, argued back in 1989 was it doesn't look like we're going to get there. It looks like the stage before communism is about as far as we're going to get, which is a bourgeois society, market economy, and if history was going to terminate anywhere, I think that that's where it was. And I think right now it's true that a lot of people have lost faith in liberal democracy. But I still don't see anyone posing a real alternative of a higher society where they're saying, 'No, no, no, actually we're not anywhere close to the end of history. There's this utopia that I'm going to lay out for you that, you know, we really need to get to.' And I just don't see that right now.
Yeah. I mean, it does seem a bit puzzling that the places where democracy and rule of law and political accountability and the state have developed the most, they seem to be the places that have, I don't know, the most discontent, right? You know, if we think about the United States, you know, the UK — I know when you wrote this book, Identity, there was kind of — people became aware of this. It was sort of there underneath the surface, but it kind of rose to the surface at that moment. But when we go to other parts of the world, like Ukraine, they want this. They're like, 'What are you worried about? Why are you discontented? You know, this is where we want to be. You should appreciate it.' So why is it that we in the United States in particular have become, I don't know, discontented or disillusioned with what we have?
Yeah, well, I think there's a kind of simple, mechanical explanation and a deeper explanation. So the mechanical explanation is that history kind of moves in these generational cycles, and the experience that people have in one generation fades away when they're replaced by somebody else. I think that in the 20th century — it was a terrible century. We had two big world wars. We had fascism, communism that were competing against democracy. And finally by 1945, you know, that conflict came to an end. But people wanted to live in a democracy. They wanted to live in the European Union because they saw how horrible the alternative was — you know, a communist dictatorship or a fascist, you know, genocidal dictatorship or the kinds of wars that these sorts of regimes spawned. But now, you know, you're living two generations beyond that moment where people have — certainly people in developed countries like the US, North America, Europe — they haven't experienced anything that terrible. That's something that belongs to their grandparents' generation. So I think that's the mechanical explanation: is that people, you know, remember bad things, but then they're lulled in a way to complacency by living in a peaceful, stable, economically prosperous society. Now, the deeper reason I think really has to do with the fact that peace and prosperity are good things when you don't have them, but they're not necessarily humanly fulfilling in the deepest sense. And people actually want to be able to struggle for something higher. I think about this, you know, watching — we had these encampments after the Hamas attack on Israel a couple of years ago, and you kind of ask yourself, all right, these are among the most privileged students in the world going to Stanford University. Why are they living in tents? You know, I understand that the Palestinians are suffering, but they're not Palestinians. They're thousands of miles away from this. And I think ultimately — not to denigrate their sense of, you know, moral outrage — but I think, you know, a lot of people actually just want to struggle for something higher. They want ideals that, you know, they can sacrifice their, you know, their fortunes and their sacred honor, as in the Declaration of Independence, you know, the original American patriots did, because they have a vision of some greater society. And I think that it's that desire to struggle for something higher that remains. But what's also quite striking is these students — and I think the same thing is true of like the January 6th protesters who also want to be seen as struggling — they don't have a coherent vision for what a better society is going to look like. And I think that's kind of the dilemma of actually being at the end of history, is that you want history to go on but you don't know where it's going to head.
So, I mean, this is the idea of thymos, right, which the Greeks wrote about. And I don't think — I mean, liberalism, the philosophy of liberalism, hasn't really incorporated a notion of thymos. I mean, there's something about liberalism that...
Well, no, I think it has. I think that, however, it's a particular form of it. So I think liberalism is actually based on this idea of thymos. So people want respect, they want recognition, and if they don't have equal recognition, they really want that. People hate it when you are disrespected just because somebody's father was an important person and nobody cares about talking to you or looking you in the eye. That creates a lot of resentment. If you are part of a racial group or a gender or sexual orientation that is not respected in the society, you feel that very intensely. And I think what liberalism is supposed to do is distribute respect equally — that all people are due a certain basic minimum amount of respect. And again, if you don't have it, you want that very badly. So I do think that there is an important element of thymos that's incorporated in liberalism. But again, the problem is people want more than that. Sometimes they want to be recognized as superior, you know, as...
It's a composition fallacy.
Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's, you know, I think that's what we're dealing with right now, is people that want something more than just equal recognition.
Yeah. But it's also the perception of recognition, right? So, you know, you can't define recognition objectively. You could say, hey, the law recognizes everybody equally. Everybody gets one vote. But that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody feels recognized.
Yeah. It is a kind of theoretical thing. And no liberal society has actually treated people equally. Even though it says that all men are created equal and everybody has an equal right to justice, to, you know, speech, to all the things that are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Actually, functionally, you know, if you're a poor person, you don't have the megaphone that other people do. If you're a billionaire, you do have that megaphone. And I think that that causes a lot of resentment.
Well, I think that — I forget which book it was. You had many years ago Donald Trump made an appearance. Was it in...
It was in The End of History.
Yes, man. Yeah. And you were talking about him as an example of someone who, you know, takes his desire for glory and his ambition and channels it into the domain of business. And I remember it reminded me there was an interview with Donald Trump back in the — I guess it was in the 80s, and they were asking him if he would ever, you know, run for mayor, and he said, you know, he had no interest in politics. So it seems that, you know, this desire for glory, which could be harmful, it has to be channeled somehow. And yeah, the Hamiltonian idea is that, well, within the world of politics you can have all these people butting heads and in the end it's fine. But the other idea is that, well, let's channel them into sports, let's channel them into business, let's let them be like Jeff Bezos and, you know, do rockets and so forth, and that'll keep them out of trouble.
Well, that's what I was hoping back in the 1990s when I wrote the book, you know. Yeah. I mean, it was Bob Iger, some big CEO, wanted to climb every, you know, the seven highest mountains in the world, you know. So there's a lot of ways that you can demonstrate your superiority that are basically, if not socially constructive, they're at least peaceful. You know, they're not going to harm other people. But it turns out that for Donald Trump, at least, that wasn't enough. So, and I think that's, you know, a basic problem. You want outlets for this what I call megalothymia. This is the desire to be recognized as superior. And basically, you can't have a society without that. I mean, you're not going to have any great baseball players, musicians, you know, philosophers if you don't have people that want to be excellent at something. But that also unleashes a kind of tyrannical desire to simply dominate. And I think that's the problem we're dealing with right now.
Yeah. I mean, well, there's obvious positional externalities, right, when people do this. But isn't there a way — I mean, I always thought that liberalism gave everybody the opportunity to be kind of the king of their own castle, right? That they could, in some domain, view themselves as being, you know, the best or being excellent because there was no objective criteria for, you know, what it meant to be excellent.
Yeah. You know, one of my favorite books was one written by the economist Bob Frank at Cornell called Choosing the Right Pond. And he pointed out that people don't regard equality in absolute terms, right? And so it turns out that they do these opinion surveys in different countries, and it always turns out, no matter what country you are in, no matter what level of income, if you're in the top 5% you're happy, and if you're in the bottom 5% you're miserable. And that's true in Nigeria, it's true in Switzerland, it's true, you know, anywhere, because you're not comparing yourself on an absolute scale. You're comparing yourself relative to the people that you see around you. And if you seem to be doing better than them, then that's the whole idea about being a big fish in a small pond. If your pond is small, but you're the big fish, you're going to be happy. And I think that's a very good insight into actually the sources of happiness.
Mhm. Yeah. I know people who have one foot in multiple camps, multiple countries, you know, they go from being sort of lowly grad student in America to being kind of wealthy person back in their home country. And it's sort of like if they need to sort of top off their self-esteem, all they need to do is travel home where they have servants and so forth. Well, the other thing I think in this book you, I think, make the point that to get to where we were in, say, 1989, right, 1992, to get to where we are at the present, it's a very difficult process. I mean, I think if you were to place a bet 2,000, 3,000 years ago on the existence of societies that had these features that you're looking for, right — political accountability and rule of law — I mean, it would be kind of like the evolution of life on Earth, right? [laughter] It's highly unlikely that you're going to get just the right amount of carbon and hydrogen and so forth to get human intelligence. Why is it so difficult for this equilibrium to emerge and kind of remain an equilibrium?
Well, actually, I don't think it is an equilibrium. That's what's kind of scary about it. It's a kind of moving equilibrium that keeps changing all the time. No, it's a big question. I've been reading a couple of Joel Mokyr's books recently. You know, he won the Nobel Prize in economics this past year, economic historian. And I think this is the central issue in social science: is why all of a sudden, beginning roughly in the 16th, 17th century, does this big transformation happen? Because if you look at per capita incomes, really from hunter-gatherer times up through the end of the Middle Ages, they were largely flat. You know, the vast majority of people were living at subsistence, meaning that if you had a bad harvest or, you know, the head of your family got sick, you're going to starve to death, right? That's still the case in a number of developing societies right now. But many people in our world have escaped it. And they've escaped it because of something that happened in Europe back in, you know, those centuries. And it was a combination of things. You know, what Mokyr talks about most is about a culture that promoted continuous innovation and invention. And without that technological innovation, we simply would not have the modern world that we have, as well as the political institutions that really depend on a certain level of material prosperity to, you know, to sustain them. And he says that a lot of that was cultural. That, you know, what's interesting, his chapters on the classical world, the Greeks and the Romans, although they reached unparalleled heights in terms of culture, in terms of literature, philosophy, art, and so forth, they actually didn't do that much in terms of technology and useful, you know, economic inventions. The standard of living at the end of the Roman Empire was not that much higher than at its beginnings, you know, the Roman Republic. So something happened in Europe that all of a sudden incentivized people to use their great intellectual talents to, first of all, create new inventions, but then, you know, to spread it out through the rest of society. And, you know, how that happened is a really complex combination of ideas, certain kinds of freedoms, institutions, material, you know, plenty. One of the big issues that many economic historians and philosophers have discussed is why Europe. And one of the theories is that power was spread out in Europe compared to China, India, you know, other places that had huge empires. Europe was cut up into a lot of different regions where you had a relatively small number of — you could have fairly powerful kingdoms, but they're all competing against each other. And it was that competition that gave your local prince an incentive to sponsor somebody that had a brilliant invention for some new device. Whereas if you lived in a big empire like in China or in Persia, you know, you wouldn't have that. So I don't know. I'm not saying that this is the decisive factor, but it's one of the possible things that explains why this happened all of a sudden at that particular moment in history.
Yeah. I mean, this is such a huge question, and I think as you point out, the number of cases is relatively small and the number of variables is really large. So I mean, we talk about political science. Can we actually be scientific here? I mean, how do we actually sort out all of the different causal relationships?
Well, yeah. I guess it depends on what you mean by scientific. By the standards of modern economics, no, I don't think we can possibly be scientific. You know, it involves a lot of process tracing. A lot of these causal pathways may be completely unique, and so you wouldn't be able to do a large-sample study and see where did it happen and where did it not happen. I mean, it just happened in Europe in this certain period because a lot of different factors. You know, religion, for example, played a role. At the time of the takeoff, you had this big conflict within the Christian church. The Protestant Reformation created this completely divergent interpretation of the Bible, and so the Catholic Church could not exert this stultifying, dogmatic hegemony over thought in Europe.
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That was true in the Byzantine Empire. It was true in China. But in Europe, you know, you had more freedom of thought because you had this big schism in the church. And that was also, I think, an intellectual factor that supported intellectual innovation. Just to further complicate this, one of the factors, the social factor that I think is underappreciated really has to do with the family. So in my view, you can't get to either a modern market economy or to a modern political system without a certain degree of individualism. Now, almost every human culture has grown up under the influence of what we colloquially call tribalism. Anthropologists might call this a system of lineages, segmentary lineages, where people trace their ancestry to a common ancestor maybe several generations ago. A lot of the Arab world is still organized that way, but most of humanity was organized in this fashion. And it meant that you couldn't buy property by yourself. Your tribe bought the property, and your tribe owned it collectively. And you can't really have a modern market economy without a greater degree of individuals being able to make their own decisions. And it also meant that there was very little trust across these different groups. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the tribal groups all had solidarity because they're fighting other tribal groups. And so where does the individualism come from? How do you get out of this kind of kinship-based society? And Karl Marx believed that, you know, it was really capitalism that did it. But in fact, I think a lot of more recent historians have said, 'No, no, the individualism preceded capitalism, and it actually is what made capitalism possible.' And Christianity was — well, not simply Christianity, but there's a certain interpretation that in the late Middle Ages the Catholic Church itself began to go after a certain set of practices like cousin marriage and the degree of consanguinity that's necessary to inherit property. And the result of this was to basically undermine the economic basis of these kinship groups. And for example, women were given the right to devolve property to their descendants, which was impossible in most tribal societies where the men controlled all of that. And so already, especially in England, you had a high degree of individualism back in the 12th, 13th century, where people would give wills to individual children, and the children would, you know, make decisions completely independently of their parents and grandparents. Whereas in most parts of the world you simply couldn't do this. And if you didn't have this kind of empowering of individuals, you couldn't have had a market economy, and you certainly couldn't have had anything like modern democracy. I encountered a friend from the Balkans who said even to this day in her country, if you have an election, everybody in your kin group votes for the same candidate. You know, nobody makes an individual decision. It's all done collectively.
And so there's some feuds going back to the 14th century that are still alive and active, right?
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So, you know, it's one of those social changes that, for peculiar, historically contingent reasons, it just happened in a certain part of Europe, but it turned out to be very, very useful for economic development, and it turned out to be useful for politics.
Well, we can walk into each of the three features that you've identified as being at the heart of modern liberal capitalist democracy. Right. First of all, the state. Obviously, you need some kind of strong state. There are some people — maybe not necessarily within academia — but there's people who believe that the secret to the success of the West, in particular England, was the weakness of the state. And we all know that it was quite a strong state. But these strong states, they evolved in other parts of the world as well, right? China in particular, we all know, very, very strong state. And one of my favorite people to study is Henry II, you know, and he was really instrumental in getting the common law off the ground and getting some kind of bureaucracy that was somewhat meritocratic off the ground. So what's so difficult about creating an effective state?
There's a couple of things to state building that are important. It's not that hard to create a strong state if you mean by that a coercive state that can use violence to get its way. I mean, that exists in many parts of the world.
Just a stationary bandit, right?
Yeah. Stationary bandit, right. What's much harder is to get a state that is sufficiently strong enough to provide necessary public goods like security — that monopoly of power that Weber talks about, legitimate monopoly of power. It can enforce laws, but it's constrained so that it doesn't use that power to constantly violate the rights of its citizens. So it's a balance between state strength and state constraint that really, I think, is the winning formula for a, you know, for a modern political order. And how you got that, I think, again, was the result of several political accidents. In the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, you had this effort by many monarchs in Europe to centralize power and create something like the Chinese emperor, where you have a strong state, a single bureaucracy that can exercise tyrannical power over a large area. This involved a fight with an institution, a medieval institution left over from much earlier times, called the system of estates. So the clergy had their own estate, the aristocracy had their own estate, and a kind of proto-bourgeoisie had an estate. And in most countries, certainly in Russia, in Spain, the monarch beat those estates into submission. So they basically had to do what the monarch said. There's one country that managed to resist this, and that was England, where its kind of taxpaying estate rose up against the king. They fought a civil war with him, cut his head off, and basically tried to establish a republic. It was a little premature to do that under Oliver Cromwell. So they had a restoration of the king. But in 1688, you had something called the Glorious Revolution, where the king accepted the fact that it was only Parliament that could make basic decisions like taxation. Parliament represented the taxpayers, and that's where the phrase 'no taxation without representation' comes from, because the wealthy taxpayers said, 'God damn it, we're not going to pay a cent to you if we don't have a say in what you do and the way you use that money.' And so in that sense, you know, the estate was this leftover feudal institution which had disappeared in most other countries. But in England, it turned into the basis of modern parliamentary democracy. It was transplanted to North America. So it seemed natural to the colonists that they would also build a republic based on this principle of no taxation without representation. And that's really the way that modern democracy originated. Now, it wouldn't have survived were it not for the fact that the protection of the rights of those taxpayers to enjoy the fruits of their labor had been protected by a system of law. And that's another thing that the English had that was very unique, was a common law. So, you referred to Henry II. You know, the common law was really, you know, in a way — well, it was never really codified, but it was seen as dominant in England all the way back to that period in English history, in the whatever it was, the 11th, 12th centuries. That's what protected the rights of non-elites to hang on to what they had created. In the reign of Henry II, there was a legal institution in England called the assize of novel disseisin, which basically is a kind of Latinate phrase for you can't just rob people of their property just because you're stronger than they are. And it was a legal tool by which a villein, that is to say, a kind of ordinary commoner, could actually sue their lord if they felt that the lord had taken their property without justification. And this was upheld by the king, you know, beginning in the reign of Henry. And again, that was completely novel in Europe. There was no other legal system that gave ordinary people these kinds of rights to hold private property. And that's one of the origins of this English tradition of the protection of property rights, which then becomes in later years the basis for modern economic growth.
Yeah. But you did have rule of law throughout Europe, right?
Well, yes. It was that although a lot of that law was, you know, based on the Justinian code, it was very centralized and it tended to enforce the privileges of this hierarchical society. So one of the things that most of those early civil laws did was establish the special privileges of the aristocracy, and those don't get undermined until the Napoleonic code, really, in the early 19th century.
Right. Well, you know, we talk about political science. I've always been kind of surprised at the lack of development in political science when it comes to prescription, right? So, you know, we look around the world, we see nations that are failed nations, right? You know, you can look at Somalia. I mean, you can look at Lebanon, right, to another extent. And it seems like political science doesn't really have anything to offer. It's kind of like you go into a doctor and you say, "I got a disease." And they're like, "Well, great." You know, we can talk about it and describe it. But in terms of actual steps, so we all know institutions matter, but it seems like the state building initiatives that have been launched, in particular Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth, they were started with a whole lot of hope, but they were kind of doomed to failure, I think, because of the lack of expertise in this area. So I mean, why don't we know by now, you know, how to provide an institution toolkit to some actors to say, okay, here's how you, you know, go from a failed state to a successful state.
Well, in my humble opinion, that is a disease that Americans tend to get more than other people because I think that Americans simply don't like to think about states.
You know, they kind of take them for granted.
Well, they take them for granted, but they also, both on the left and the right, they see them as a source of tyranny. States are the things that take away your rights, you know, as individuals and as citizens. And so you want to constrain the state in every way you can. And Americans tend not to appreciate the fact that states are necessary to preserve basic order, to defend the community, to enforce laws. And I think that you can see this. We had a postdoc at my center quite a few years ago that wrote this very interesting study comparing the colonial administration of the United States in the Philippines and that of Japan in Taiwan. Now, the Japanese don't have this anti-statist hangup that we do. You know, they actually believe that you have to have a state, and it, you know, they get this from China because China has this very longstanding tradition of statism. And so when they went into Taiwan and took it over as a colony, they actually built centralized state institutions, not controlled from Tokyo, but controlled in Taiwan itself by a governor that actually have survived, you know, into the present. The United States, when it took over the Philippines, you know, thought that democracy was more important than building a state. And so you had a broadening of participation but no effort to actually build a modern state in the Philippines. And as a result, the state that you had got captured by a bunch of wealthy landed families. And you ended up with a kind of feudal landholding system in the Philippines because the, you know, Americans didn't understand that one of the ways you prevent that is by having a strong central, centralized, impersonal state. So I think that the mistakes that we made in Afghanistan and Iraq probably would not have been made by other cultures that didn't have this kind of anti-state bias. But we certainly have that.
Well, I mean, we look at China, they did have this very strong state, but when you look at their tax revenue, I mean, it was kind of puny, right? I mean, so in the countries that had the rule of law, the states were stronger, right?
Yeah, it's a weird thing about modern China is that, yeah, you're right. They've got a very low tax rate compared to almost any Western democracy.
That's kind of always been true, right? I mean, well, hasn't it? I mean,
I don't know that it was true in earlier years out of a matter of principle. I think that a lot of it had to do with the weakness of the centralized state and its inability to collect taxes. China was one of those countries that used a system of tax farmers where you basically give private individuals the right to collect taxes and they can skim money for themselves off the top of that. But the central government always kind of struggled with that. As you made a transition to a market economy in the 1980s, they kind of went to the opposite extreme of not giving the state taxation authority. And yeah, I don't know enough about the development of modern China to explain why that happened. Obviously, the Chinese government has lots of other sources of revenue. I mean, the main one is they own all the property in the country.
And so all the local governments get their revenues by selling state-owned land to private developers. And that's really how they funded their whole capital stock.
Well, what's astonishing is when you go through the history, right? So the history books, they're a story of change, but there's a remarkable amount of continuity, right? Some of the differences between, say, China and the West, there's persistence, right? Which suggests that these equilibria are quite, I guess, entrenched. Is that right? I mean, would it be difficult for a Chinese regime, suppose we had some new regime, to implement something like rule of law? Where would they even begin?
Well, okay, let me get to that question because I think I'd give a kind of complicated answer to that. But it's true that there are these very long-term continuities. I would compare China not to the West but to India because they have almost mirror image histories. So in China, beginning in, you know, the 6th century BC, you always had a strong centralized state. Every couple hundred years a dynasty would fall apart and you'd have this period of chaos, but it would always come together relatively quickly into another centralized state. The history of India is almost the mirror image of that. You have only a couple of periods where you had a centralized government, you know, the Mauryas and the Guptas, you know, but then you have these prolonged periods where there's no centralized government whatsoever. And I think that that is a result of the fact that in China the state is very strong. It's got very powerful traditions and civil society is relatively weak. Whereas in India it's the mirror opposite. The state has always been weak, but civil society in India is very powerful. You have caste associations, you know, you have villages that are very powerful, and the state has never been able to dominate, you know, those kind of lower parts of society or penetrate them. And that's why I think you get these long-term continuities. So it makes you realize that dictatorship in India has never been very easy, and I think remains very difficult, whereas dictatorship has been kind of the norm in China, you know, for several millennia. And I think that makes you a little bit skeptical about the possibility of change, except that, you know, in a modern economy you need certain forms of governance to actually get rich. And if you have a state that is too strong, too grasping, that is too predatory, you're not going to get rich because the people that create wealth are not going to be able to keep it, reinvest it, and so forth. And so there's a very powerful economic incentive, given modern technology and productive capacity, to actually constrain the state and make sure that it operates under rule of law where property rights are protected. And that's why I think Taiwan can take off. Taiwan socially looks a lot like China. Families are very important. Certain forms of social organization, there's continuity, but...
They're both in the Confucian camp.
They're both in a Confucian...
Your adviser and mentor, Samuel Huntington, had this theory that these different...
