Back in the 1960s, as the social sciences matured into the methodological and theoretical forms we practice today, two books shaped the study of comparative politics in a decisive way: Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (1966) and Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). In his new book, Francis Fukuyama takes on and extends the research agenda of both scholars—with a main focus, however, on Huntington’s research agenda. Fukuyama’s choice makes sense. In the last decades, the study of political regimes and political transitions has been cultivated intensively, reaching, in Fukuyama’s own words, a theoretical framework that, rooted in Moore’s work, is “with a few emendations... basically sound”(p. 411). By contrast, the examination of political order and decay has been sparser. Putting aside the literature on state formation spurred by Charles Tilly and Mancur Olson and a growing body of work on civil wars, we still know little about the determinants of state capacity and quality of government. In Huntington’s book, political stability depended on the presence of “strong, adaptable, coherent political institutions” capable of channeling the processes of social mobilization unleashed by economic modernization. The Anglo-American world succeeded in retaining its traditional Tudor institutions and adapting them organically to modern society. The developing world had the almost exact reverse experience. The state was too weak to cope with the popular demands brought about by development. Structural conditions, such as the gap between city and countryside or land inequality, mattered in order to achieve stability. But for Huntington—a “Leninist” where Moore had been a “Marxist”—order was ultimately created by a revolutionary (or a reformist) vanguard through a political party (or parties) that could stabilize mass politics.