Reddit mentions of Origins of Political Order

There is historical evidence that religion has been the direct cause of political change and influence. Ancient India is a good example where Jainism and Hinduism influenced the balance of power, shifting the role of the state rulers from one that exerts power, to one that is supposed to serve and protect religious leaders. This meant that the Brahman priests of the time, could have great influence, if not direct dictating of the laws. They (now and then) believe in "the unchanging reality amidst and beyond the world", which is just an example that their ideas weren't necessarily rooted in physical reality. They valued virtues and spirituality almost above physical prowess. This difference allowed India to create a very politically different state than the rest of the other Asian civilizations.

To think that religion is a secondary player in how people think, behave, and rule others is easy to do, and it is something that we should consider dangerous. It is understandable to want to give the benefit of the doubt to Islam, given the gruesome history of the other religions, but 1) Islam isn't a young religion, and 2) that is no excuse anyway. Christianity is probably a lot more damaging if we were to tally up all the scores, but that's more reason to stop the next religion.

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

I'm afraid I don't have the ability to break down political and social orders into a few short, easy to digest paragraphs of general advice. Political worldbuilding is what interests me the most and is a focus of my world, but I wouldn't have the first idea how to give lessons on how to learn how to do it.

The best I can do is suggest a book, [The Origins of Political Order] (https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Political-Order-Prehuman-Revolution/dp/0374533229) by Francis Fukuyama. It attempts to understand and explain why political institutions developed as they did, why in some places and not others, and why some institutions survive and others don't. It is, in my opinion, the single best book a layman on the subject who seeks to improve their political worldbuilding could read on the matter. It attempts to tackle Big History and give general rules on institutional development and is probably the closest thing to a pageturner the field of political theory has ever seen, perfectly readable at the college freshman level. It will teach you to think in terms of political cause and effect far better than I ever could.

Not been too many great replies here. I have the perfect book for you. Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Ancient World. It takes you from the dawn of history (~3,000BC) to Constantine, and is a really easy read, in fact it reads almost like fiction. A real pleasure. She also has two more, taking you up to 1453, but you can decide if you want them after you have read the first one.

I'm also going to suggets Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order. This was the book that made me realise I didn't understand history or politics (most people go through life without ever realising this). Its also a history book, but focusing on the theme of the origins of our political institutions. A real good one. BTW ignore the boring cover that makes it look like a dry academic read; it isn't.

A work I recently finished that you might find interesting was King Leopold's Ghost. It was a rigorous study and explanation of Belgian colonialism in the Congo under King Leopold in the 19th and 20th centuries; I found the book gave a very vivid summary of that, and filled in a bit of a blind spot of mine to the exact horror European colonialism could reach to. I was familiar with colonialism in the general, but I think it furthered my understanding to see such a detailed work on just one example of colonialism in history.

A couple books ago, I also read The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution which, although a work of historical analysis primarily, still informed me in the process of elaborating its historical analysis of quite a bit of history to which I was hitherto unaware. I've heard its arguments come across even better if you're acquainted with Francis Fukuyama's other political philosophy work (famously, The End of History and the Last Man), but I had not read that and its arguments still came across well. It was fairly wide-spanning in history like the title says, but as a fairly long work it was still able to go into detail. The book shined the most for me when it was exploring state building in India and China, while relating and contrasting these processes to the mechanics of European state building, something I was more familiar about. He describes the story of state building in all these areas, starting from the very beginning, and attempts to answer why it went certain directions in some places but differed in others. He makes the very convincing argument that religion was an essential factor, relating it to the rule of law and informing me in the process a lot of the details of how religion operated in India and China historically. I'm not really qualified to accurately evaluate the book's core theses, but disregarding them, the journey to those theses was still very enlightening.

Also, I think I've seen you mention elsewhere on this subreddit your interest in phenomenology and philosophy at large. I was wondering how you would recommend approaching the canon to say, have a good understanding of someone like Heidegger. It feels a bit overwhelming to look at the sheer complexity of later philosophy like that and confront it. Do you think it would be best to try to start at the beginning of Western philosophy and move up from there, work by work? I have a basic knowledge of some philosophy, mostly gained at random from secondary resources and occasional primary sources I found really interesting, but it's all very scattershot and not super rigorous. I'm currently reading through a history of Western philosophy which I hope will give me a broader perspective, and some more insight into how all the ideas relate and developed. Anyway, I was just hoping you might have some thoughts or advice on this, thanks.

This question seems to be driving at how wealth & power was organized historically - although I'm not sure that most experts would agree with the claims that
>a hereditary oligarchy has wielded almost all of the wealth & power.

and the claim that
>the decisions they make are almost always for the benefit of themselves & their cronies & not the societies they rule

What follows is an attempt to give an answer framed around how political power has been structured historically.

There are and have always been different power centers in society, and the balance of power among those actors determined exactly who benefited from the state's monopoly on force. Usually one power center was a single executive (monarch, Roman consuls, etc), based on some sort of divinity doctrine, and they usually had enough power to ensure kin inherited the executive authority - and it took civil war/invasion to break the line of succession. But even in monarchies like that there were other power centers that had enough power that the state usually benefited them (examples include the Janisary armies in the Ottoman empire, sometimes the professional bureaucracy in China, the nobles in England and Ukraine, the Roman Catholic Church in Western Europe, etc)

India is an interesting example historically in that Hindu religion was dominant over even the heads of state very early in its history (India had lots of them - its current single state (...caveat: Pakistan) is a historic anomaly). So in that case there really wasn't a hereditary oligarchy holding power in most Indian states (monarchy wasn't uncommon and monarchs were usually wealthy, but oftentimes didn't actually hold a lot of power). But the system did create very rigid castes, and society was structured such that the lower casts ended up with the short end of the stick.

It's very difficult to answer your question because it is very difficult to even define what "benefitting the society they rule" even means. Arguably the fascists of the early 20th century did a reasonable job at this by defining society so narrowly that they could treat everyone not part of their definition of society as animals with no rights (to be tolerated at best, killed at worst). Liberal democracies are structured to do this by declaring universal rights enforced by strong courts that bind a democratically elected legislature (and the executive authority, which may or may not be independent of the legislature) - and succeed to differing levels.

I'm fairly confident there is no example in history where every individual in a nation-state benefited equally, so you could make the argument that an oligarchy is always the beneficiary of state power - but there has been a strong trend of making that oligarchy more and more inclusive (in theory, and not necessarily year-to-year, but definitely century-to-century).

Most of the above is based on "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374533229/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_3uMiDbF4CN8EE), which is a dense read but really interesting and covers state power and organization across the world up until the dawn of liberal democracy. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in the history of political organization throughout the pre-industrial era. He also wrote a second volume that focuses on industrial era state organization, bit I found the 2nd volume to be more opinionated and subjective (the author has been involved in US government, and so has a bias when it comes to contemporary political structure that I felt showed in the 2nd volume. But the 1st volume is much less relevant to current government policy and seemed to be pretty objective - although I'm just an interested layman, not an expert).

A good book on the subject is Poland: A History. I'm only answering since no on else did, so I will do so generally: for much of its history it had weak central authority and geographically powerful neighbors. The former was for a variety of reasons but ultimately due to a strong nobility. For a more general view on how political balance affects the state, I would suggest Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order - he speaks of Poland's failed oligarchy but moreover about the balance of parliament versus a monarch, etc. The powerful neighbors for their part would consistently meddle in the country's (and Commonwealth's) internal affairs and war was nearly constant. Its presence as a buffer state with overlapping cultures made it a constant bargaining chip in the European "balance of power" until after the French Revolution.

I really enjoyed The Origins of Political Order. Its focus is historical but all of the discussion parallels modern states.

This is a great list to start, but I would also suggest Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, which I think are as if not more accessible than Guns, Germs, and Steel.

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I've been reading some works by Piketty and Fukuyama and both seem to be looking at Europe prior to the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century and drawing parallels to our current stagnation. They point out that powerful elites had dominated both the royals families and the populous in their countries squeezing the monarchs on lowering taxes for them and their ilk shifting the burden onto the people. This caused a kind of death spiral where wealth became concentrated and the balance of the bond between monarch and subjects became strained, kings and queens had in years past a symbiotic relationship with the people because both gave the other power to keep the landed gentry in check. When this balance was undermined by the successful nobility that undermined the fabric of their countries civil order and finances creating both vulnerability from without, the invasions of Hungary, and strife from within, the revolution in France. They point out that this financial situation is not unlike what is driving the current economic problems ala tax expenditures to big business including property tax abatements and other sweeteners governments provide to take free rides from local and state governments.

It should be noted that these two economists, Piketty is French and an advisor to the British Labour Party and Fukuyama has been called a Neocon and was an advisor to both Reagan and Bush. They could not be politically farther apart really and yet they come to very similar conclusions. I think their prescriptions for ensuring a more fair distribution of wealth are different but it is notable that they come to very similar conclusions. I would also add that since the 70s businesses are paying roughly half of the taxes they would have paid since the disco era. They seem to also be predicting a certain amount of unrest as the consequence of concentrating so much wealth.

Well you'd definitely have to define free will some way

Does a dog have free will? Is it just being able to override your instincts? Does it have to happen in all instances, or do you always need to be in control? If so I'm not sure we meet the requirements. Do other primates have free will? Do other mammals?

Are we really sure our decisions are based on conscious thought and not some sort of subtle instinct?

I'm assuming this is the context you mean. And there is no definite answer for you.

We obviously weren't there, so we can't be sure how exactly our cognitive abilities developed. We have the fossil record and assumptions about life on the savannah for our ancestors. The common seems to be the social aspects of our lives coupled with the harsh lives they lived ended with only the smartest surviving.

Especially considering chimps and humans are the only species that will go to another group's territory just to kill other males. I would suggest the origins of political power, although I'm sure there are better books on pre-history. But it seems to be mostly conjecture anyway

http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Political-Order-Revolution/dp/0374533229

"you just asserted that a conclusion (labor creates all wealth) is fallacious in and of itself." Yes that's exactly what I did.The problem, I think, is that I didn't give evidence to support my assertion. If that's the problem, the question then is "why didn't I" The answer is "because I'm not going to do peoples homework for them". I've already sited two sources below for a deeper understanding of my assertion, here's two more:http://www.amazon.ca/Origins-Political-Order-Prehuman-Revolution/dp/0374533229/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422131282&sr=1-1&keywords=the+origin+of+political+order and http://books.google.ca/books/about/Efficient_Society.html?id=akr6vHAgAkIC&redir_esc=y