In "The Origins of Political Order," Francis Fukuyama takes us from the beginnings of humanity to the French and American Revolutions. Here, he picks up the thread in the second installment of his comprehensive account of the emergence of humans as political beings. This is the story of how the state, law, and democracy arose after these catastrophic events, how the modern landscape—with its tense relationship between dictatorships and liberal democracies—developed, and how unmistakable signs of decay have emerged in the United States and other developed democracies. To understand the political systems that dominate and organize our lives, we must first examine their origins—both in our own recent past and in the earliest systems of human governance. Fukuyama argues that the key to successful government can be distilled into three essential elements: a strong state, the rule of law, and institutions.