For some 40 years, the American neo-conservative right has led an ever-more vehement crusade against the idea of the state. The aim has been to conflate the state with discredited socialism. The quest for a socialist utopia, runs the argument, has proved economically inefficient and politically coercive; because socialists deployed the state to achieve their ends, the state is thus economically inefficient and politically coercive as well. The superior form of economic and social organisation is a minimal state in a universe of moral individuals, families and companies freely contracting with one another in free markets.

This movement has reached its apogee in two fundamentalist political movements  the American Tea Party movement and, unexpectedly, the British Conservative party. In the weeks ahead, the Republicans are set to refuse to lift the ceiling on the US national debt unless the Democrats accept a decisive down-payment in cutting US federal spending towards pre-modern levels. They want to reduce the US government to the scale it was in the late 19th century, even if it involves the hitherto unthinkable idea that the US government may default on its debts.

Francis Fukuyama, a former favourite of the neocons, but increasingly disillusioned by how they led George W Bush disastrously to invade Iraq while indulging the recklessness that caused the financial crisis, has become more and more alarmed by the nihilism of modern American conservatism.

It has become a potentially fatal virus undermining the American political system, which is now showing the same alarming traits as other systems that could not deliver good government  the French Bourbons, the Confucian emperors and even the late Ottoman empire. But while those regimes all collapsed because they could not create the trinity of state, law and accountability, on which the political capability to address their problems would have rested, the US possesses such institutions  except modern American conservatism wants to eviscerate them. Worse, it is partially succeeding. Fukuyama wants no part in the depiction of the state as the enemy of liberty and capitalism. Rather, he sees the state in positive and conservative terms  as one of the foundations upon which sound political order rests. Without political order, communities rob themselves of the capability to fight and win wars, manage technological change and reconcile inevitable human rivalries and feuds. We return to savagery.

In this respect, the book is something of a landmark: it and its successor (which will take the story up to the present from the French revolution, where this volume ends) may be seen as one of the harbingers of the Tea Party movement and its little British echo reaching their high-water mark.

Their political philosophy menaces the functioning state on which political order depends. The assumptions that the Founding Fathers made  that all Americans are bound by common values and common expectations that there should be a state, rule of law and accountability  are being fractured. The neoconservatives have become part of the crisis the US has to solve and, given the political deadlock that now characterises Washington, there is not much time.

This is thus an immensely long letter to his fellow conservatives, reminding them that if social institutions such as marriage and the family are important, so too are state institutions. Fukuyama likes to argue by assembling an enormous weight of historical evidence to support his case and the core of the book is a Cook's tour of why and how varying civilisations have set about creating states, systems of political accountability and the rule of law.

The enemies of political order are partisanship and cronyism  of family, kinship and tribe doing everything in their power to keep their grip on property and economic rent. This ossifies and holds back the development of the economy and, ultimately, threatens the soundness, security and resilience of the wider society.

We are treated to accounts of how Spain buckled under the weight of its economically inactive aristocracy, China developed a highly competitive examination system for access to its mandaranite to stop jobs being given to family members, and how the institution of military slavery was created by Islamic and Ottoman rulers to avoid reliance on aristocratic family dynasties always tempted into internecine and destabilising rivalry. Some parts are banal and familiar; others, like the story of the mamluks in the Ottoman empire, new and riveting. All societies had to resolve the destructive impact of family cronyism and Fukuyama reminds us how Plato believed that families undermined the good republic.

But it is not enough to have a state that is built on impartial rules. There also has to be law to ensure the rules are followed and systems of accountability to make sure that the law is implemented. And all have to be embodied in functioning legitimate institutions. Britain's rise to industrial prominence came about because it was the first society to create the institutional trinity. Fukuyama's account of 17th-century England is too thin for my liking and far too focused on state structures. What laid the foundation of the industrial revolution was that England equipped itself not just with political order but with an entire Enlightenment infrastructure and value system that enabled it to support industrial entrepreneurship.

A free press; free scientific inquiry; the development of banking and the spirit of Enlightenment progress: all were crucial in the cocktail. Economic historian Joel Mokyr has set out the whole story in his masterwork, The Enlightened Economy, and it's dismaying that Fukuyama seems ignorant of his thesis. In this respect, he has still not escaped the free market fundamentalist categories in which he used to think. Markets, as much as the political realm, need institutions in which to work effectively too.

None the less, he does have the bottle to take on the darling of neo-conservatism, Friedrich Hayek, who had a romantic attachment to British common law that he characterised as emerging spontaneously from British individualism. It was so effective, thought Hayek, because no central political authority had designed it or could design it, proof positive of the uselessness of the state and superiority of individual decision-making. Fukuyama shows that Hayek was 100% historically wrong. British common law only grew because of the universal court system created by the Normans: it was a product of the Norman state.

All this may seem arcane, but I agree with Fukuyama that the US  and Britain  is in thrall to a set of neo-conservative ideas both profoundly mistaken and very dangerous. This book is part of the intellectual fight-back, importantly written by a conservative, laying the foundations to hit neo-conservatism very hard indeed. He plainly implies they are nutters who are the enemies of the west. He is assembling the ammunition. In his next volume he must fire it  and not miss.

Francis Fukuyama will always be best known for one cosmic soundbite  "The End of History". This has given him an undeserved reputation as a political optimist, the man who believes that everything will turn out all right for democracy if we just let history run its course. In fact, Fukuyama is a much gloomier thinker than you might guess, always on the lookout for what can go wrong. The End of History, which was published in 1992, is a pretty depressing book (much more depressing than the original 1989 article on which it is based). It is overshadowed by the influence of one of Fukuyama's mentors, the conservative Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom. Bloom thought that American society was drowning in a sea of intellectual relativism and pop cultural pap, and Fukuyama worried that the post-1989 triumph of democracy threatened more of the same. With no big ideological battles to fight any more, politics would just become one mindless thing after another.

Fukuyama's new book is dominated by the influence of another of his mentors, the conservative Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. Huntington is best known for his own cosmic soundbite  The Clash of Civilizations. But his main interest was in political order: how to achieve it and how to mess it up. Basically Huntington thought there are two things that could go wrong on the road to a well-ordered society. You could fail to get there because your society never gets beyond a condition of internecine conflict and incipient civil war. Or you could get there and find your society gets stuck in a rut and fails to adapt to new threats and challenges. Fukuyama takes this framework and applies it to the problem of democratic order. Why is it that some societies have gone down the democratic route to stability while others have remained stuck with autocracy? And will democracies be able to adapt to the new threats and challenges that they face?

To answer the first question Fukuyama thinks we need to go all the way back to the origins of human society itself (though to call this a history from prehuman times is overselling it a bit: there are a couple of pages about chimps, but it's really a story that starts with early man). Human beings have always organised themselves in tight-knit groups  there never was a Rousseauian paradise of free-spirited individuals roaming contentedly through the primordial forests. The trouble was that the first human societies were too tight-knit. These were essentially kinship groups and generated what Fukuyama calls "the tyranny of cousins". People would do almost anything for their relatives, and almost anything to the people who weren't (rape, pillage, murder). This was a recipe for constant, low-level conflict, interspersed with periodic bouts of serious blood-letting.

The way out of the kinship trap was the creation of states (by which Fukuyama means centralised political authorities), which were needed to break the hold of families. States are one of the three pillars Fukuyama identifies as providing the basis for political order. The reason that powerful states aren't enough on their own is that political power doesn't necessarily solve the problem of kinship. Instead, it can simply relocate it up the chain, so that all you get are strong rulers who use their power to favour their relatives, a phenomenon that is all too easy to identify, from the ancient world to contemporary Libya. So the rule of states needs to be supplemented by the rule of law, which imposes limits on political power and corruption. However, the rule of law itself can destabilise political order by undermining the ability of states to take decisive action when it is needed, and giving non-state organisations too much of a free hand. Hence the need for the third pillar: accountable government (or what we might now call democracy). This retains a strong state but allows people to change their rulers when they start behaving badly.

Fukuyama thinks that we too often treat the three pillars of political order as though they were separate goods in their own right, capable of doing the job on their own. We champion democracy, forgetting that without the rule of law it is liable simply to entrench social divisions. Or we champion the rule of law, forgetting that without a strong state it is liable to lead to political instability. But he also thinks that whole societies can make the same mistake. He distinguishes between a good political order, and an order that is simply "good enough", which occurs when only one or two of the building blocks is in place, giving the illusion of security. For instance, ancient China arrived at a strong centralised state far earlier than the west, in order to combat the problem of endemic civil war. But the Chinese state that emerged was too strong: it crushed the warlords but also crushed any incipient civil society or ideas of accountability. Thus China enjoyed an early advantage on the path to political order, but it was this advantage that set it back, because too much power was concentrated too soon. It is this fact, Fukuyama believes, that explains the autocratic condition of Chinese politics to this day.

Another country, perhaps more surprisingly, that got it right but got it wrong was Hungary. In the 13th century, just seven years after Runnymede, Hungary arrived at its own Magna Carta moment ("the Golden Bull"), which enabled the nobles to impose legal limits on the arbitrary power of the monarch. Why didn't Hungary then progress on an English-style path to freedom and constitutional government? Because the nobles got too much: they so weakened the king that they ended up being free to do whatever they liked, which basically meant exploiting their peasants and enriching their own families. By restricting the power of the state to the point of impotence, the Hungarian nobility effectively destroyed their chance of achieving a stable political order, but greatly enhanced their own ability to enjoy themselves.

Fukuyama often seems more interested in the ways human societies fail to achieve political order than in the ways they might succeed. The real question he wants to answer is not why didn't Hungary end up like England but why didn't England end up like Hungary, ie a mess. His answer is essentially with a lot of good fortune. The successful creation of political order on the edge of western Europe depended on a series of contingencies: the right mix of religious ideas, legal reform, talented administrators, and then in the 17th century a dose of civil war and plague to remind people of what things might be like if they let it all fall apart.

Fukuyama wants us to remember that good political societies are hard to achieve and require a lot of things to come right. But he wants to draw a positive message from this: if arriving at political order is a haphazard business, then that means there are lots of different ways of getting there. No society is guaranteed to make it but no society is stuck either, not even China. Still there is something fundamentally unconvincing about this good cheer, as there is about the whole book, even though it is full of incidental interest. Too often, Fukuyama sounds as if he is having it both ways. Political order is essentially an inadvertent product of centuries-long political struggle, yet knowing this is somehow supposed to make it easier to achieve. How? There is only so much you can do to make your own luck. Moreover, this too often ends up as a kind of chicken-and-egg history. Britain achieved its Glorious Revolution in 1688 because it had become a relatively ordered society; and we are also told that having a Glorious Revolution was what made it an ordered society.

The other problem is that Fukuyama doesn't really answer the second question he starts out with. What is to stop stable democratic societies from getting stuck in a rut? Political order can breed complacency as well as security. Fukuyama acknowledges this is a problem even for societies built on his three pillars but says that the third pillar offers grounds for hope: political accountability means we can change our governments when things go wrong. But this is glib as well as unconvincing. It seems just as likely that rotating governments is simply moving the deckchairs while the fundamental challenges (climate change, debt, the rise of China) mount. The Origins of Political Order is volume one of a two-volume work, and Fukuyama says the second book will take the argument up to the present (this one ends with the French revolution). But for such an ambitious book to defer the basic question it sets out to answer is not really good enough. 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). But the history he offers here doesn't provide the answer. On its own, this book is Hamlet without the prince.

Political Hypocrisy by David Runciman is published by Princeton University Press.