Contemporary research on political orders in International Relations and Comparative Politics generally focusses on specific international or national orders, and in political theory, on ideal orders.[1] My work addresses the problem of order more generally. It asks what political order is, explores its relationship to social order, the relationship between change and stability, the extent to which stability is connected to principles of justice and their instantiation at least in part in practice, and the ways in which modernity, industrialization, and now the information revolution have affected political order.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Commentary III-4
“The Problem of Political Order”
by Richard Ned Lebow, King’s College London, emeritus, and University of Cambridge
26 February 2025 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/CIII-4 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux
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Contemporary research on political orders in International Relations and Comparative Politics generally focusses on specific international or national orders, and in political theory, on ideal orders.[1] My work addresses the problem of order more generally. It asks what political order is, explores its relationship to social order, the relationship between change and stability, the extent to which stability is connected to principles of justice and their instantiation at least in part in practice, and the ways in which modernity, industrialization, and now the information revolution have affected political order.
My principal work on the subject is The Rise and Fall of Political Orders, which posits relationships among values, hierarchies, and principles of justice.[2] In doing so, the book identifies the sources of political order and some of the causes of their resilience and fragility. This includes the subset of conditions in which economic inequality is most unacceptable. These conditions have to do with the relative importance that society puts on appetite versus honor and equality versus fairness, the thickness of the rule packages governing elite behavior, and the extent to which they conform to them. More recently, on the subject of order, I have co-edited Robustness and Fragility of Political Orders and Weimar’s Long Shadow with Ludvig Norman, and coauthored Justice and International Relations: East and West, with Feng Zhang.[3]
Political orders can be imposed or negotiated. Either way, they require some degree of consensus to endure. Their resilience and fragility are radically affected by the principles of justice on which they rest, the degree to which they instantiate and violate those principles, whether this is done overtly and blatantly or covertly, and the extent to which elites can control discourses about these matters. Discourses mediate orders. In the modern era, no government can make a rule and expect others to obey without providing some kind of reasoned argument about why it is necessary or advisable. Every argument gives rise to a counterargument, and every claim a counterclaim. The core contention in The Rise and Fall of Political Orders is that there is no political order without arguments that persuade some people that the order is just. As there is no political order that is invulnerable to counterarguments; no political order is permanent.
Political order can be defined as legible, predictable behavior in accord with recognized norms. Robust orders also require a high degree of solidarity among their members. Because social cooperation produces legible and predictable patterns of behavior, the two conditions are related. All societies of any size are hierarchical. Any definition of order must accordingly incorporate the organizing principle of social rank. It is another source of norms and solidarity, but also of conflict. Finally, one must recognize that orders are based on, and draw strength from, their ability to advance fundamental human needs, which include physical and material security, self-esteem, and social contact. One might define order as a hierarchical arrangement, supported by most of its members, which fosters security, self-esteem, and social contact, encourages solidarity, and results in legible, predictable behavior.
There is an important distinction between top-down and bottom-up orders. Top-down orders describe governments, bureaucracies, and especially military organizations, which rely on rules and procedures that are sanctioned and enforced by central authorities. Bottom-up orders are the product of iterative and self-correcting processes of trial and error with multiple feedback loops and branches in logic. They are emergent properties. Both orders are ideal types as they rarely exist independently of one other and generally penetrate one other to some degree. Most social, economic, and political orders rely on both forms. Their coexistence may be necessary but it is never unproblematic. Each kind of order responds to particular needs, and those needs and the procedures associated with each kind of order often come into conflict where they intersect.
This analysis of order and disorder rests on four substantive assumptions. First, disorder at the top-down level is the default, and all robust orders at this level are temporary. Second, robust orders, top-down or bottom-up, must be justified with reference to accepted principles of justice. Third, orders become threatened when those principles are challenged, or the discrepancy between them and practice becomes apparent and unacceptable. Fourth, orders require solidarity to soften the consequences of hierarchy.[4]
Justice is a fundamental human concern, but so is order because of the security, material, and emotional benefits it provides. If justice is the foundation of order, order is necessary for justice. In an ideal world, they would be mutually reinforcing, but this is never the case. They are always to some degree at odds, and difficult trade-offs must be made between them. Those who advocate reforms on the grounds of justice invariably meet opposition from those who assert that the status quo is essential to order and stability. The difficulty of predicting the consequence of changes and a general preference for the evils we know over those we do not, may help explain why people are often willing to put up with orders they consider unjust.
By far the two most important principles of justice are fairness and equality. There are other principles, but they are more limited in scope and most can be reduced to fairness or equality. Commutative justice refers to relations between individuals or institutions regarding contracts and the equitable exchange of goods. It is restricted to a specific domain, and the norms and laws governing it rest on the principles of fairness or equality, usually some combination of the two. The same is true of procedural justice that refers to the methods used to settle disputes and allocate resources. Here too, norms, laws, and arguments are invariably justified, or, in the case of arguments, invoke the principles of fairness or equality.[5]
Orders are fragile because they are hierarchical. A minority of actors receive much more in the way of rewards than the majority. Stratification encourages exploitation. Elites have power and prestige that they can usually translate into material, social, and sexual rewards. Those at the bottom have little to no power or prestige and must labor more and receive less. Why do people, or collective agents, accept, endorse, and offer up their labor, wealth, even their lives, for orders in which others reap most of the benefits?
The most compelling answer is the powerful emotional and substantive rewards that orders provide. Most people believe that they are more secure, better off, and have higher status within orders than they would outside of them, even if inside them they may be worse off relative to others. Social integration confers identity, enhances self-worth, and enables social relationships and intimacy. Elites are generally astute enough to propagate discourses with the goal of legitimizing the orders from which they benefit. These discourses invoke metaphorical carrots and sticks, the former by raising the prospect of internal chaos or conquest by some external foe if order is not maintained, and the latter by exaggerating the material and psychological benefits of belonging. When these discourses find traction, they reinforce elite sanctioned practices, and may make them habitual. Discourses also shape expectations of what is reasonable for orders to provide.[6]
Most orders survive because they deliver, at least in part, what they promise or convince people that they do. When orders consistently fail to meet expectations, people are likely to become disenchanted and more willing to support change. Discontent is also brought about by shifts in principles of justice. If a political order which is based on the principle of fairness and equality increasingly becomes the dominant social norm, the order will be at risk. This is, of course, the story of modernity, and the root cause of many of its revolutions.
A Cultural Theory of International Relations explores the pathways to disorder in thumos- and appetite-based worlds are identified and explored.[7] Both worlds are sufficiently competitive that actors are tempted to violate the rules by which honor or wealth is attained. When enough actors do so, those who continue to obey the rules are at a serious handicap. There is a strong incentive to defect. This problem is best alleviated by the presence of multiple routes to honor and standing, which allow more people, with varying skills and interest, to achieve wealth, recognition, or both. Competition may nevertheless be intense in many of these pathways, especially high-status ones.
Competition in appetite-based worlds need not be zero-sum because the total wealth of a society can be increased. Actors nevertheless often frame the acquisition of wealth as a winner-take-all competition even when cooperation would result in larger payoffs. Lack of self-restraint in the form of defection encourages others to follow suit. So too does conspicuous consumption, which is the principal means by which actors in appetite-based worlds seek status.
Rules for achieving honor or wealth can be violated by actors at any level of their respective hierarchies. The most serious problem, however, is defection by those at the top.[8] It reduces the incentive others have for playing by the rules and can set in motion a vicious cycle that significantly weakens the order in question. Aristotle persuasively argued that the principal cause of the breakdown of orders is the unrestricted pursuit by actors—individuals, factions, or poleis—of their parochial goals. Their behavior leads others to worry about their ability to satisfy their spirit or appetites, and perhaps fear for their wellbeing or survival. Fearful actors are likely to implement precautions that run the gamut from bolting their doors at night to acquiring allies and more and better arms. Mutually reinforcing changes in behavior and framing often start gradually but accelerate rapidly and bring about a phase transition. When this happens, actors enter fear-based worlds.[9]
Lack of restraint, especially by high status actors, subverts the principles of justice associated with their hierarchies. Unconstrained spirit, which intensifies the competition for honor, gives rise to acute and disruptive conflict within the dominant elite. It has wider consequences for the society because it not infrequently leads to violence and reduces, if not altogether negates, the material and security benefits that hierarchies are expected to provide for the society as a whole. Unconstrained appetite also undermines an elite’s legitimacy and arouses resentment and envy in other actors. It encourages others to emulate elite self-indulgence and disregard the norms restraining the pursuit of wealth at the expense of the less fortunate. In the modern world, both kinds of imbalance are endemic. The two pathways to decline can be synergistic, making the decline that much more likely once societies have travelled a certain distance down these pathways.[10]
Order is best defined as legible, predictable behavior in accord with recognized norms. Robust orders, therefore, require a high degree of solidarity among their members. Solidarity is the product of social interaction and cooperation, which in turn requires appropriate norms and predictable patterns of behavior. Declining orders reveal a breakdown of solidarity, which is often attributable in the short-term to elite violation of rule packages and the sharper contradictions they create in perceptions between existing practices and the principles of justice on which orders rest. Elite violation of rule packages can lead to expanding and more acute conflict in a society but can also encourage others to violate norms that sustain solidarity. In the longer-term, I attribute decline in solidarity, and, in part, elite violations of rule packages, to loss of traction of principles of justice and shifts in the relative appeal of competing principles and their different formulations.
One of the fundamental paradoxes of top-down orders, and societies more generally, is that there is always a minority who receives more of whatever is valued and a majority that receives less. The paradox is made more acute by the fact that in so many societies, Western and non-Western alike, those who receive less are often the strongest supporters of their orders. There are multiple reasons for this curious phenomenon, including the fewer life choices available to the disadvantaged. It forces them to be more concerned with preserving the few they have, more risk averse, and more fearful of change. Because they are less educated, and perhaps less confident or arrogant, they are also more likely to internalize the discourses elites propagate to justify the existing order and their privileges. When those who are disadvantaged—by far the majority in any order—do become disenchanted, they may become more risk prone, and more willing to support change. Orders rapidly lose their legitimacy in this circumstance and are likely to confront a crisis; as most Western political orders currently do.
Top-down and bottom-up orders draw strength from their ability to satisfy fundamental human needs. These include physical and material security, self-esteem, and social contact. The definition of order can be further refined and described as a hierarchical arrangement, supported by most of its members, that fosters security, self-esteem, and social contact, encourages solidarity, and results in legible, predictable behavior. To a certain extent, people understand the relationship between order and human fulfilment. Many are motivated to overvalue the benefits they receive and undervalue those they lack. This bias helps to rationalize acceptance, even support, of the status quo. It may also help to explain why those at the bottom of the hierarchy are often so hostile to those who criticize their orders.
The principles of justice that enable and sustain orders find expression in discourses and practices. Discourses define justice and its associated norms and practices. They also attempt to justify discrepancies between the behavior required by these principles and how people act. In the US, popular discourses have undermined some of these practices for ordinary people, while elite discourses, most notably, neoliberalism, have done so for many in the elite. These popular discourses might be regarded as counter-discourses as they oppose existing practices that were traditionally supportive of order. The irony here is that these counter-discourses were sponsored by the elite in the case of neo-liberalism, and to some extent propagated by them in the case of popular discourses. Counter-discourses might be conceived as products of those opposed to the status quo, and this is often correct. The US experience suggests that counter-discourses might be produced by those who support the existing order and hope to profit from it. This was certainly true of presidential speeches, television sitcoms, and popular music. It is not only capitalism, but successful orders of all kinds, which generate immanent critiques.[11]
In addition to distinguishing top-down from bottom-up orders, one needs to differentiate government from society. Governments are always top-down, but so are many institutions of civil society. Society precedes government, and often outlives it, and regimes not imposed by force only come into power by to some degree instantiating societies’ values or promising to do so. Societies can constrain government in the sense of providing incentives for it to conform to valued norms and practices. Governments can over time transform society. Strong governments like France and so-called totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea have successfully fostered top-down social transformations. Such success is always Janus-faced.[12] It creates greater expectations among populations about what government can and will do for them, creating more alienation when and if they fail to deliver it. This phenomenon was pronounced in the Soviet Union and most Communist countries in Eastern Europe.[13] It is a serious risk in contemporary China.[14]
The society-state difference is important when analyzing the origins of states and their decline. As noted, societies precede states and generally survive them. Chaos is the opposite of order; it is characterized by the absence of rule-based behavior, functioning institutions, lawlessness, and often, unpredictability. True chaos requires the collapse of both top-down and bottom-up orders and this rarely happens. When it does, some kind of bottom-up order quickly forms, often initially, of a rapacious, gang-based kind. Order and predictability do not necessarily co-vary. Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature is lawless and violent but all too predictable.[15] So too are many other places across the globe, including Brazilian favelas and the streets of Mogadishu.[16]
One of the most important political facts of the last one hundred years is how long-lived societies are in comparison to states, and how much more so compared to regimes, many of which have a short life. Societies too can decline, but it is usually a much slower process. An analysis of decline typically focuses largely on political orders: states and their regimes. But societies are integral to this implication because social change can be, and often is, the principal underlying cause of regime or state decline. They are getting more attention in the aftermath of the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States, where changes in society are seen as critical causes.[17]
Top-down order relies on a combination of enforcement and voluntary compliance. It rests on the questionable Hobbesian assumption that government—or a hegemon in international affairs—is necessary to coordinate mutually beneficial cooperation and punish those who do not conform, and that most actors conform because they see the utility of this arrangement[18] Top-down political orders often appear more robust than warranted. They may function well in a limited range of circumstances—those in which they can minimize or control uncertainties—but even here their seeming authority may be misleading. Charles Perrow describes how tightly coupled complex systems (e.g., nuclear power plants, electrical grids, air traffic control, major hospitals) only function effectively when operators make informal arrangements among themselves to circumvent many of the rules and replace them with simplified, informal procedures.[19] Bottom-up order may be more essential in a society with highly regimented the top-down orders. They are also less tolerated by such orders, as the Communist experience in the Soviet Union and communist countries of Eastern Europe testify.
Top-down systems can suffer catastrophic failures when confronted with unanticipated development because efforts to respond, based on existing repertoires or informal procedures, may not be at all appropriate to the challenge. They can also have the unintended and counterintuitive effect of exaggerating the problem, as they did at the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear plants.[20]
Bottom-up orders reveal different kinds of vulnerabilities. They can be more rapid in response to local challenges, even extreme ones, but may find it difficult to respond to those that require considerable outside resources. Disasters like floods and fires illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of bottom-up orders. Local communities quickly organize, often without reliance on officials, to fill sandbags or provide quarters, clothes, and food for people who have been evacuated. If there is much destruction, they in turn become dependent on others for supplies and funds for rebuilding.[21] Bottom-up orders are also at a serious disadvantage in conflicts with top-down orders because of the respective power balance. When boundaries between bottom-up and top-down orders are ill-defined or poorly recognized in practice, there is a risk of conflict and disorder where they come into contact.[22]
Top-down and bottom-up orders rarely exist independently of each other and generally penetrate each other to some degrees. Each kind of order meets particular needs, and problems arise, as noted, where the two intersect. In a fascinating book about recess in American schools, Anna Beresin found that pupils allowed free time in the schoolyard organized their own rules about space, games, and comportment.[23] Recess order is bottom-up and emergent, in contrast to classroom order, which is clearly imposed from above. Jostling, name-calling, and fights arose in the liminal space between the orders, when students spilled out of the classroom or were forced after recess to go back in. This phenomenon is widespread. In healthcare, a substantial proportion of medical errors occur during handovers from one department or professional to another. This is because the so-called “systems” for patient care “are a patchwork of poorly connected—or entirely unconnected—constituent parts that don’t work well together.”[24] These problems are likely to be most pronounced when bottom-up orders hand off to top-down ones, or vice versa.
Robust orders of scale require synergy between their top-down and bottom-up components. Like Yin and Yang, these seemingly opposing forms can be made to some degree complementary, interconnected, and interdependent.[25] They may even give rise to each other, as top-down orders do with bottom-up ones in the tightly coupled systems that Charles Perrow describes.[26] There is also good reason to suppose that societies came before governments, and that top-down orders were based on and outgrowths of bottom-up ones.[27] As James Sheehan notes in his recent book, the most robust top-down orders may be those that build on and copy bottom-up rules and practices.[28] What works on the street, in everyday life or in face-to-face encounters in different professional domains, is often the product of trial and error, implicit and explicit communication among actors, and common attempts to maximize certain shared values or goals. To the extent that these values and goals are widely shared, their adoption by top-down orders and efforts to regularize and enforce them can win popular approval and enhance efficiency.
Top-down and bottom-up orders roughly—but only roughly—coincide with state and society. Governments and most of their associated bureaucracies are unambiguously top-down orders and most, but by no means all of civil society, can be characterized as bottom-up order. The distinction is not a binary but a continuum with a fair number of institutions, depending on the society, found in the middle.
The tensions that arise within and between bottom-up and top-down orders encourages a recognition that life is more complex than humans’ conceptions of it acknowledge, that peoples’ behavior is often motivated by multiple motives they do not fully acknowledge or grasp, that the consequences of behavior are often unknowable in advance, but people must act as if they are predictable, and the political order is something required but do not really understand. People act to uphold or benefit from it and may unwittingly do the reverse. Political order cannot adequately be represented by a single, coherent, and consistent formulation. Such formulations blind people to the tensions and contradictions and the behavior and uncertainty to which they give rise. Knowledge requires people to go beyond them, not to resolve the tensions, as that is rarely possible in practice, and often ill-advisable in theory, but to foreground them and make them central to our definitions and analysis. What may appear intellectually sloppy and inelegant may have the virtue of being philosophically profound and conceptually useful.[29]
As I unpacked my definition of order, its tensions became increasingly evident. I consider this one of the rewards of this exercise. The tensions are internal and external. My definition embodies components (e.g., predictability, solidarity, hierarchy) that sometimes work at cross-purposes. More of one component may mean less of another—or not—depending on the circumstances. The external tensions arise from efforts to apply the definition to historical worlds. Our categories never quite fit protean reality, or they do in ways that differ across societies. The several components of my definition may also have different interaction effects. Both sets of tension tell us important things about the nature of the order and politics, more so, I believe, than simple, seemingly consistent definitions that attempt to ignore or finesse these tensions.
Richard Ned Lebow is Professor of International Political Theory Emeritus at King’s College London and Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He has made contributions to International Relations, Comparative Politics, Political Theory, Political Psychology, Classics, and Philosophy of Science. His most recent books are Robustness and Fragility of Political Orders (Cambridge, 2022) and Weimar’s Long Shadow (Cambridge 2024), both co-edited with Ludvig Norman. His Multiple Selves: Identity, Self-Fashioning and Ethics is forthcoming from Ethics International Press.
[1] For example, Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, Exit From Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020); Feng Zhang, Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History (Stanford University Press, 2005); Alexander Cooley, Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States, and Military Occupations (Cornell University Press, 2005); Ayse Zarakol, ed., Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Brian Barry, Theories of Justice, vol. I (University of California Press, 1989); Alasdair MacIntyre, , After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Anansi Press, 1991); Anthony Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Harvard University Press, 2015).
[2] Richard Ned Lebow, The Rise and Fall of Political Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[3] Lebow and Ludvig Norman, eds., Robustness and Fragility of Political Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Lebow and Norman, eds., Weimar’s Long Shadow (Cambridge University Press, 2024); Lebow and Feng Zhang, Justice and International Relations: East and West (Oxford University Press, 2022).
[4] Lebow, Rise and Fall of Political Orders, ch, 1.
[5] Lebow and Zhang, Justice and International Order, 31-61.
[6] Lebow, Rise and Fall of Political Orders, ch, 2, building on Aristotle, Durkheim, and Marx.
[7] Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations.
[8] Lebow, A Cultural Theory, 561.
[9] Aristotle, Politics, 1302b34-1303a-21; see Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, (Princeton University Press, 1984), II, pp. 1986-2129.
[10] Lebow, Rise and Fall of Political Orders, ch, 4, building on Book 1 of Thuycidides’ account of the Peloponnesian War; see Robert B. Strassler , ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (Free Press, 1996), and Aristotle, Politics, especially 1302b22-34
[11] Lebow, Rise and Fall of Political Orders, chs, 3, 5-6.
[12] From the ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, duality, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces.
[13] Lee Edwards, ed., The Collapse of Communism (Hoover, 2013).
[14] Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St. Martin’s Press, 2022).
[15] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan.
[16] R. Ben Penglase, Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life (Rutgers University Press, 2014); Catherine Nicholls, Irene Nasser, and Manveena Suri, “At Least 32 Killed After Suicide Bombers Target Beach Restaurant in Somali Capital,” CNN, 4 August 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/03/africa/mogadishu-attack-beach-intl/index.html.
[17] For recent studies, Erica Frantz, Barbara Geddes, and Joseph Wrights, How Dictatorships Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Frederick Solt, “The Social Origins of Authoritarianism,” Political Research Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2012), pp. 703-713; Natalia Forrat, The Social Roots of Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, 2024).
[18] Hobbes, Leviathan.
[19] Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Basic Books, 1984).
[20] Perrow, Normal Accidents; Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD), “Chernobyl: Executive Summary,” 2008, https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c0e.html.
[21] Aitlin Dickerson and Louis Ferré-Sadurní, “Like Going Back in Time: Puerto Ricans Put Survival Skills to Use,” New York Times, 24 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/us/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-coping.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0.
[22] Lebow, Rise and Fall of Political Orders, ch. 1 for discussion and references.
[23] Anna R. Beresin, Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling (University of Mississippi Press, 2010).
[24] Richard M. J. Bohmer, Designing Care: Aligning the Nature and Management of Health Care (Harvard Business Press, 2019).
[25] Robin Wang, “Yinyang (Yin-yang),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/yinyang/.
[26] Perrow, Normal Accidents.
[27] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017).
[28] James J. Sheehan. Making a Modern Political Order: The Problem of the Nation State (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023)
[29] Lebow, Rise and Fall of Political Orders, ch. 9.