If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins. This book examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. It starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions.

This is the story of how state, law and democracy developed after these cataclysmic events, how the modern landscape - with its uneasy tension between dictatorships and liberal democracies - evolved and how in the United States and in other developed democracies, unmistakable signs of decay have emerged. If we want to understand the political systems that dominate and order our lives, we must first address their origins - in our own recent past as well as in the earliest systems of human gove...