CONCEPT

Order Before Liberty

Huntington's Hobbesian correction to liberal political theory: the most important political distinction among societies is not their form of government but their degree of government, because without sufficient institutional capacity to impose order, neither liberty nor any other value can be secured—and the AI governance crisis is the clearest recent demonstration that he was right.

Huntington argued in Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) against the dominant development consensus of his time that order must precede liberty, not because liberty does not matter but because without the institutional capacity to maintain order there is nothing within which liberty can exist. The claim was Hobbesian in a Lockean discipline, made enemies, and has proven more durable than the optimism it attacked. It transfers with force to the governance of artificial intelligence: the dominant discourse about AI governance is overwhelmingly a discourse about liberty—rights, fairness, transparency, accountability, the protection of individuals from harm—but these presuppose an order that does not yet exist. Before asking whether AI governance is fair, the prior question must be answered: is there any governance? Does any institution possess the authority, the competence, and the reach to impose binding order on a technology

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