Nations are not trapped by their pasts but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of
years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the
politics that we now take for granted we need to understand its origins. Francis Fukuyama
examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of
political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the
eve of the French and American revolutions spanning such diverse disciplines as economics
anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the
emergence of mankind as a political animal by one of the most eminent political thinkers
writing today.
