The Dawn of Politics

Adam Kirsch

 Francis Fukuyama goes back to the beginning.

It’s possible that Francis Fukuyama does not take unmixed pleasure in his fame as the author of The End of History and the Last Man. Ever since Fukuyama published that book in 1992—indeed, ever since he published the article on which it was based in The National Interest in 1989—he has been shadowed by the phrase “the end of history.” Since then, he has written five more books on big, complex subjects, ranging from the decline of trust in American society to the future of genetic engineering, and he has participated in countless policy debates. Yet on the cover of his new book, The Origins of Political Order, he once again is identified as “the author of The End of History and the Last Man.”

Will this book—a 500-page survey of the growth of states “from prehuman times to the French Revolution,” with a promised second volume taking the story up to the present—finally be the one to emancipate Fukuyama from the end of history? The question is justified not simply by the size, scope, and ambition of the project but, above all, by its emphasis on origins. If the end of the Cold War represented the end of history, Fukuyama’s new book starts over at the beginning, with the emergence of the first states out of kin-based tribes more than 4,000 years ago. In the introduction, Fukuyama explains that his purpose in The Origins of Political Order is to offer a new theory of political development, to supersede the one that his mentor Samuel Huntington advanced in his 1968 study Political Order in Changing Societies.

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_2_fukuyama.html

 

Adam Kirsch Reviews Sera L. Young’s New Book “Craving Earth: Understanding Pica”.

If dirt, as William James put it, is matter out of place, then the dirtiest dirt of all is the kind you put where you’re absolutely not supposed to: in your mouth. We teach children not to eat dirt even before they can talk; conversely, telling someone to eat dirt is a powerful expression of contempt, a way of demoting them from human to animal. Yet as Sera L. Young explains in her quirkily informative book Craving Earth: Understanding Pica, eating dirt—in particular, certain kinds of dry, crumbly clay, as well as other non-food substances like uncooked starch, chalk, and ice—is a very widespread human practice, and always has been. Pica, as this behavior is known—the name comes from the Latin word for “magpie”—is especially common among pregnant women.

This has been recognized since ancient times: Hippocrates, the 5th-century BC Greek physician, noted that pregnant women often had cravings for earth or charcoal, and a classic Indian poem describes a pregnant queen who “set her heart upon clay in preference to all other objects of taste.” Today, Young reports, Americans with pica buy boxes of chalk at Walmart, or bags of ice (the cubes at the Sonic fast-food chain seem to be especially popular), or even order prime Georgia dirt over the Internet.

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Craving-Earth/ba-p/4601