Books make the best Christmas gifts, especially for people who read op-ed columns about books. So with only a few shopping days left some recommendations in history, biography, and politics.
• Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the sequel to The Origins of Political Order. Taken together they provide a sweeping history of humanity's struggle to "get to Denmark," defined as a place that is "stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and has extremely low levels of political corruption."
Whereas Fukuyama's prior volume covered everything from primates and scattered human tribes up into the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Political Order and Political Decay narrows to the past two hundred or so years, and includes some troubling speculation about the possible deterioration of established democracies, including the United States (the most important democracy but, alas, according to Fukuyama, also the one now most infested by decay). The end result might be the most comprehensive scholarly treatment yet of the phenomenon of political development and the importance therein of effective governmental institutions.
Fukuyama's central thesis is that establishing the modern state constrained by the rule of law and democratic accountability has been exceedingly difficult and thus not an accomplishment to be taken for granted. What is perhaps most interesting about these two volumes, then, is that they dispute in subtle ways the central thrust of his The End of History and the Last Man, which suggested that there was a certain inevitability to the triumph of democratic governance, that it was even the "end of history" itself.
To partly correct Parks and Recreation's Ron Swanson, history didn't really begin on July 4th, 1776, but there were plenty of mistakes made before and after.
• Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: Volume One: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (Penguin Press) addresses what might have been the biggest of all those mistakes, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. The first of a planned three volumes (the second will presumably cover collectivization and the great purges, and World War II and onset of the Cold War in the third), this might be turn out to be the definitive study of one of history's most vile creatures.
Hitler killed more methodically, and Mao almost certainly killed more, but Stalin might have killed a larger percentage of his people than any other despot (scholarly assessments are inevitably uncertain, but continue to hover around the 20 million mark). In many respects, the body count was even more horrifying because the Soviet Union was supposed to be a proletarian heaven on earth and the mass slaughter was therefore dictated by the most idealistic of motives.
Kotkin's task is to explain how Stalin became Stalin, the unconstrained tyrant. In doing so, he places Stalin within the broader context of late imperial Russian and early Soviet politics, with a special emphasis upon his interaction with the other Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and Stalin's nemesis Leon Trotsky. Somewhat surprisingly, and in contrast to most other treatments of Stalin, which depict him as a thug using ideology as a disguise to gain power, Kotkin attributes much of what he did to a sincere if perverted commitment to Marxism-Leninism. Ideology not only mattered more than often assumed in Stalin's case, it was crucial to understanding his crimes.
By the end of this first installment, Stalin has won his power struggle against Trotsky following Lenin's death and is on the verge of establishing the world's first totalitarian state, over which he would acquire a degree of concentrated power unrivaled in human experience. Again, not even Hitler (whose Third Reich borrowed extensively from the contours and content of Stalinism) would rule over his domain in such unchallenged fashion.
• Henry Kissinger's World Order (Penguin Press) does for the history of statecraft what Fukuyama does for the history of governance. As such, World Order represents in many ways a summation of the ideas that Kissinger has developed over more than half a century as one of our most important scholars and statesmen. Now 91, it might be his last such contribution.
The various chapters in World Order therefore neatly pull from his previous works: those on the European Westphalian system hearken back to the classic which launched his career, A World Restored (1957), while those dealing with a Wilsonian America ("the ambivalent superpower") echo his 1994 magnum opus, Diplomacy. His most recent work, On China (2011) likewise provides the basis for his discussion of The Middle Kingdom's conception of world order. Throw in a couple chapters on Islam and its global community of believers and what you have are four different and clashing conceptions of how the world should be organized.
Although Kissinger therefore brings religion and other cultural variables into his analysis for the first time (in shades of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations"), his primary concern remains the same--the need to create an international system endowed with sufficient legitimacy to provide stability and order, because no other values, including democracy and freedom, can flourish amid instability and chaos.
"Wisdom" is a word seldom heard these days in relation to American diplomacy. But it is the word that comes to mind with just about every page of Kissinger.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 12/22/2014