A BASIC rule of intellectual life is that
celebrity destroys quality: the more famous an author becomes the more likely
he is to produce hot air. Superstar academics abandon libraries for the lecture
circuit. Brand-name journalists get their information from dinners with the
great and the good rather than hard digging. Too many speeches must be given
and backs slapped to leave time for serious thought.
知识分子生活的一条基本规律是：名声毁掉质量。一个作家，名声大了，作品夸夸其谈的可能性也随之增大。明星学者会为了四处演讲而放弃研究。大牌记者不会再去深挖新闻，而是靠与大人物同桌共餐来获取信息。太多的会议必须参加，太多的关系必须去搞，留给严肃思考的时间就所剩无几。
Francis Fukuyama is a glorious exception to
this rule. Mr Fukuyama earned global applause with the publication of “The End
of History and the Last Man” in 1992. He won more plaudits in the early 2000s
with his broadsides against the neoconservative movement that had nurtured him.
But rather than milking his fame he has devoted the past decade to producing a
monumental study of the history of what he calls “political order”. In its
first volume, “The Origins of Political Order”, he took the story from prehuman
times to the late 18th century. This second and last volume brings the story up
to date. The two books rest on an astonishing body of learning.
弗朗西斯·福山是个值得称道的例外。
1992
年，他因为发表了《历史的终结及最后之人》而获得了全球的赞誉。
21
世纪头几年，他又因为对曾经养育了他的新保守主义运动进行猛烈的抨击而再次获得好评。但是，他没有利用这些名誉去换取好处，而是把过去的十年全都用在了他所说的“政治秩序”的研究上面，并写出了一部有关政治秩序历史的重要著作。在该书的第一卷《政治秩序的起源》中，他讲述了从史前时期到十八世纪后期的故事。这次出版的是该著作的第二卷，也是最后一卷，讲述的是从那时到现在的故事。作为这两本书的基础，其学识之丰富，令人叹为观止。
This burst of intellectual energy was
inspired by the half-failure of the liberal revolution that Mr Fukuyama once
celebrated. “The End of History” proposed that markets and democracy were
part-and-parcel of a single triumphant formula. But the past two decades have
produced a more depressing picture. China has adopted a mixture of state
capitalism and authoritarianism. Democratisation has failed in Russia and a
host of Middle Eastern countries. Mr Fukuyama suggests that a major reason why
history has proved to be more complicated than he imagined lies in the quality
of political institutions. Neither democracy nor markets can flourish properly
in the absence of a competent state. But such a state can produce many of the
virtues of modernity without the benefits of either democracy or free markets.
福山学识能量的大爆发，其触发点是他曾经为之而欢呼的自由革命的半途而废。他在《历史的终结》中写道：市场和民主是必不可少的唯一胜利模式。但是，过去的
20
年所呈现的却是一副令人愈发失望的图景。中国采用了国家资本主义和威权主义的混合模式。民主化已在俄罗斯和许多中东国家铩羽而归。福山指出，历史的复杂超出了他的想像，其主要原因在于政治制度的“质”。倘若缺乏有能力的政府，无论是民主还是市场，都不能正常地
繁荣兴旺。但是，这样的政府，即使是没有民主和自由市场所带来的好处，也能够带来现代性的许多优点。
State-building is difficult. Mr Fukuyama
argues that Europe and America have long led the world in doing the hard
lifting. They inherited strong medieval legal codes. They introduced
merit-based civil services in the 19th century. For the most part they
introduced mass franchises after creating efficient state machines. The man who
once talked about “the end of history” now talks about “getting to Denmark”.
政府的建设是困难的。福山指出，长期以来，欧洲和美国始终在这方面走在世界的前头。他们继承了强大的中世纪法典。
19
世纪，他们引进了择优任用的文官制度。在创建了高效的国家机器后，他们引进了普选权。一度谈论“历史的终结”的那个人，现在所谈论的是“到丹麦去”。
Mr Fukuyama contrasts the accomplishment of
Denmark et al in creating successful states with two types of failure. The
first is a failure of institutions to keep up with social change, as in much of
Latin America. After a spate of reforms in the 1980s Brazil's government is a
hotch-potch of first-rate departments and patronage dumps. The second is
wholesale institutional failure. The failure of the Arab spring was essentially
a failure of governmental capacity. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood failed to
understand the difference between winning an election and winning total power,
so the country's middle class reluctantly re-embraced authoritarianism.
福山用来做对比的是丹麦等国家在创建成功政府方面的成就和两种类型的失败。第一种类型的失败是制度未能跟上社会的变化，其典型代表是拉丁美洲各国。在经历了上世纪
80
年代的一系列改革后，巴西政府成为一盘大杂烩，一流的政府部门与庇护制残余同时存在。第二种类型的失败是制度的整体性失败。从本质上来说，阿拉伯之春的失败就是政府能力的失败。在埃及，穆斯林兄弟会没能理解赢得选举与赢得全部权力的区别。因此，这个国家的中产阶层不情愿地重新接受了威权主义。
Yet this is not a simple story of the West
versus the rest, or the developed world versus the underdeveloped world. Mr
Fukuyama notes that southern Europe lags a long way behind northern Europe:
Greece and Italy continue to distribute jobs on the basis of patronage. But he
is at his most interesting on East Asia. China produced a highly competent
state, staffed by first-rate civil servants chosen by written examinations and
capable of monitoring the affairs of a vast empire. Mr Fukuyama argues that
what we are seeing in China now is the revival of this tradition after a
century-long collapse: the Chinese Communist Party is reaching back into
history to prove that you can create a competent state without the benefit of
the Western traditions of democracy or the rule of law.
然而，这并不是一个西方对抗世界其他地区或者发达世界对抗不发达世界的故事。福山指出，南欧远远地落在北欧的后面。其具体表现是，希腊和意大利仍旧在庇护的基础上分派工作。但是，他最感兴趣的还是东亚。中国产生了一个高度胜任的政府，其职位皆由经过笔试选拔且能够管理庞大帝国事务的第一流文职官员担任。福山写道：我们现在所看到的发生在中国的事情，正是这种传统在经历了一个世纪衰落后的复兴。中国共产党正在回到历史中去证明自己，即便是没有西方的民主和法制的传统的益处，他们也能创建一个有能力的政府。
The book is sometimes frustrating. Mr
Fukuyama frequently overloads the reader with his learning, and the first two
parts of this book, on the state and foreign institutions, are too lengthy and
the second two parts, on democracy and political decay, too short. But two
things more than make up for Mr Fukuyama's occasional failures.
这部著作有时给人一种失望感。福山不仅经常用他的学识让读者不堪重负，而且其论及政府和外交制度的前两个部分太长，论及民主和政治衰朽的后两个部分又太短。但是，福山用两件事情弥补了偶尔的失误。
The first is the quality of his intellect.
He litters the book with insights that make you stop and think. The United
States preserved the main features of Henry VIII's England long after England
had abandoned them, he says, including an emphasis on the authority of the
common law, a tradition of local self-rule, sovereignty split among several
bodies and the use of popular militias. Africa's botched state-building can
partly be explained by the fact that it is the most lightly populated continent
in the world: it was only in 1975 that its population density reached the level
that Europe enjoyed in 1500.
首先是他的学识的“质”。他倾注于书中的是那种能够让你停下来进行思考的真知灼见。他说，美国在英格兰已经抛弃了亨利八世时期的一些重要特征之后很长一段时间内，仍旧保留着它们。比如说，对于普通法权威的重视，地区自治的传统，主权分散于数个机构之中，以及使用民兵武装等等。非洲的国家建设之所以落后，其中部分原因可以用它是世界上人口密度最小的大陆这一事实来解释：非洲的人口密度直到
1975
年才达到了欧洲
1500
年的水平。
The second is his despair about the current
state of American politics. Mr Fukuyama argues that the political institutions
that allowed the United States to become a successful modern democracy are
beginning to decay. The division of powers has always created a potential for
gridlock. But two big changes have turned potential into reality: political
parties are polarised along ideological lines and powerful interest groups
exercise a veto over policies they dislike. America has degenerated into a
“vetocracy”. It is almost incapable of addressing many of its serious problems,
from illegal immigration to stagnating living standards; it may even be
degenerating into what Mr Fukuyama calls a “neopatrimonial” society in which
dynasties control blocks of votes and political insiders trade power for
favours.
其次是他对美国政治现状的失望。福山指出，让美国成为一个成功的现代民主国家的政治制度正在走向衰败。权力的分散总是在为僵局制造可能性。但是，两大变化已经让可能性转化为现实。一是政党在意识形态方面的两级分化，二是强大的利益集团在遇到他们不喜欢的政策时对于否决权的行使。美国已经堕落为一个“相互否决”的国家。不仅几乎无力解决众多的严肃问题，如非法移民和生活水平的停滞；甚至还有可能已经退化为福山所说的“新世袭民主制”社会。在这样的社会中，世袭王朝握有大量的选票，政治内幕的交易者用权力换取支持。
Mr Fukuyama's central message in this long
book is as depressing as the central message in “The End of History” was
inspiring. Slowly at first but then with gathering momentum political decay can
take away the great advantages that political order has delivered: a stable,
prosperous and harmonious society.
福山这部巨著所传达出的失望感恰如《历史的终结》所传达出的那种振奋感。初期的缓慢加之随后的猛然加速，政治衰朽能够吞噬政治秩序所带来的那些巨大优势——一个稳定、繁荣与和谐的社会。
