Question
What were the most significant innovations in the history of politics? Why?
Answer
I am leaving out some basic ones that enabled things other than politics, such as language and trade. In rough chronological order:
You'll notice "democracy" isn't on the list. It is not well-defined enough, except with 20/20 hindsight codification. In various incomplete forms, it existed long before the idea was codified, and it is loose enough that it is continuing to evolve. Democracy is more an ideology concerning the use of a set of mechanisms than an innovation. Among these mechanisms, the most crucial innovation was probably the secret ballot. It allowed the group to act cohesively, but not require open alignment to cohere. De facto elections existed before, but the secret ballot crucially recognized that secrecy changed the dynamics of how groups could glue themselves together.
Over the years, as I've come to understand politics, I've also come to understand the extent to which most major political ideas existed in nascent, uncodified form for a long time before they were codified. It has made me completely rethink what I consider the major innovations. I suspect if you went to a typical nomadic tribe in 10,000 BC, you'd find most of the basic mechanisms of politics already in operation in nascent, uncodified form. In many ways, these uncodified forms work better than the corresponding codified ones.
In this list, I consider divorce laws and estate taxes/succession laws the most important, because they served to break up the family and clan as units of political organization.
The civil service bureaucracy is also underestimated.
Debt amnesties/bankruptcies fundamentally made politics the master of trade.
Separation of religion and state, and the denial of the divinity of royalty are also crucially important.
To summarize, the core ideas in politics aren't by themselves particularly imaginative. It's in the slow ascendancy that politics gained over other domains of life that we find the big innovations: how it tamed family, war, trade and religion.
- The basic protection-for-loyalty trade
- Federation (alliances among sub-Dunbar tribal groups)
- Ritual posturing (replaced actual fighting)
- Elections (even in the most rudimentary form of which hunter gets the loudest cheer at the post-hunt barbeque)
- Rhetoric and debating
- Political trade, especially marriage and dowries
- Debt amnesties (precursor of bankruptcy)
- Arbitration (the use of disinterested 3rd parties to settle disputes, the foundation of all legal systems)
- Land measurement and rational taxation
- Divorce
- Estate taxes and succession laws
- Deliberate general assemblies of populations, specifically to talk and negotiate
- Representation of one person's interests by another (presumably starting with families, or village heads at federations)
- Denial of special/divine status of royalty/nobility (unclear where this happened for the first time)
- Treaties between warring groups (earliest known one is Hittite)
- Secret ballots
- Parliamentary/senate type institutions
- Civil service bureaucracies and merit/examination based admission to, thereof
- Limits on the powers of rulers (Magna Carta for example)
- Individual rights and abolishing of slavery
- Separation of religion and state
- Constitutions
- Communism
- Detente
- Fiat currencies
- Modern central banks
You'll notice "democracy" isn't on the list. It is not well-defined enough, except with 20/20 hindsight codification. In various incomplete forms, it existed long before the idea was codified, and it is loose enough that it is continuing to evolve. Democracy is more an ideology concerning the use of a set of mechanisms than an innovation. Among these mechanisms, the most crucial innovation was probably the secret ballot. It allowed the group to act cohesively, but not require open alignment to cohere. De facto elections existed before, but the secret ballot crucially recognized that secrecy changed the dynamics of how groups could glue themselves together.
Over the years, as I've come to understand politics, I've also come to understand the extent to which most major political ideas existed in nascent, uncodified form for a long time before they were codified. It has made me completely rethink what I consider the major innovations. I suspect if you went to a typical nomadic tribe in 10,000 BC, you'd find most of the basic mechanisms of politics already in operation in nascent, uncodified form. In many ways, these uncodified forms work better than the corresponding codified ones.
In this list, I consider divorce laws and estate taxes/succession laws the most important, because they served to break up the family and clan as units of political organization.
The civil service bureaucracy is also underestimated.
Debt amnesties/bankruptcies fundamentally made politics the master of trade.
Separation of religion and state, and the denial of the divinity of royalty are also crucially important.
To summarize, the core ideas in politics aren't by themselves particularly imaginative. It's in the slow ascendancy that politics gained over other domains of life that we find the big innovations: how it tamed family, war, trade and religion.