[3] The book is an attempt to understand why modern statebuilding and the building of institutions in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone and Liberia have failed to live up to expectations.

[6] Fukuyama points out that at the time of writing ninety contemporary 'primitive' societies had been engaged in war,[7] suggesting that political order is preferable to primitive social structures if stability is to be achieved.

It is an extension of Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies and similar in scope to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Fukuyama also confessed that he did not have the insights of an anthropologist, economist or biologist but his broader landscape covering history of multiple countries across time and space revealed political patterns which might not be available to the experts in the fields mentioned above.

[13] The Guardian was quite critical in its review [14] stating that "Fukuyama borrows a phrase from contemporary social science to explain what he's really interested in: how to get to Denmark (ie a stable, prosperous, dynamic society, and one that now even has the world's best restaurant).

[16][17][18][19] Fukuyama uses recent work in sociobiology and other sources to show that sociability built on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is the original default social state of man and not any isolated, presocial human (as suggested by Hobbes and Rousseau).

[25] For example, Fukuyama cites Mohammed as an example of what Weber labels a "charismatic leader" because he used the idea of an umma (community of believers) to bind together the territory that he ruled.

[11][page needed] Mandarins or scholar-officials, who functioned as the ruling class of traditional China, were not allowed to pass on the lands given to them by the emperor to their own children and were restricted as to whom they could marry.

Denmark and the United Kingdom arrived first at a modern balance of the three components in a single package, followed by others by the nineteenth century, as the Netherlands and Sweden.

[16] Qin China wielded extreme violence to cow its population (especially under the influence of legalism[35]), but had a weak rule of law and the emperor had no accountability to anyone.

India could not use extreme force on its population due to the traditional power of the brahmin priestly caste, who protested violence against the populace and war against neighboring states, by refusing to perform ancestral rituals for the Raja leaders.

[37] Certain Muslim states developed the practice of making imported slaves as the ruling class, as with the Mamluks of Egypt and the Janissaries of the Ottoman empire, a process which started around the 8th century.

[15][38] A later example would be the 16th-century Ottoman Empire practice of seeking out intelligent Christian children for high civil service or military positions, who were cut off from their family for their training.

The papal intercessions against wars between Catholic countries also led to the survival of small states in Europe, similar to India, but in contrast to what had happened in China.

The existence of small states who were restricted by the church from recruiting mass armies waging wars costly in casualties, as had been the case in China, combined with the existence of independent university scholars, led to military innovations on land and sea to empower fewer soldiers to wield wars effectively and later gave these relatively small countries a military advantage large enough to conquer colonies in the rest of the world.

Grundtvig in Denmark advocated general literacy since they believed that every Christian should read the bible and established schools throughout the country, leading to voting rights 1849.