In the final book of a trilogy begun almost two decades ago, The Rise and Fall of Political Orders, Richard Ned Lebow attempts to fulfill his “rash promise” to produce a theory of order, an explanation for “how and why orders form, evolve, and decay” (p. 1). It is a strange, even surreal, moment in which to review a book on political orders. I read Lebow’s book while in quarantine in my home, as a pandemic raged across the globe. As COVID-19 spread, nations spurned the international political order, turning away from institutions such as the World Health Organization, and instead competed fiercely over medical supplies. In the United States, months of pandemic lockdown ended with an explosion of protests against racial injustice and police brutality on a scale unseen since the civil rights movement.

It seems that political orders, both domestic and international, may be at a tipping point. According to Lebow, what drives the decline and fall of political orders is their increasing illegitimacy; in particular, the increasing discrepancy between an order’s principles and its elite’s behavior. As Lebow argues, all orders are hierarchical, and even democratic orders will be unequal in their distribution of power, wealth, and status. Despite this, members of a polity are willing to sustain orders, as long as the distribution of valued goods is justified in terms of two principles of justice. On the one hand, an order may distribute valued goods on the basis of equality, a more or less even distribution of what people value. On the other hand, orders may rest on principles of “fairness,” where who contributes the most gets the most.

Lebow argues that, in general, modern societies have moved more toward principles of equality to justify political orders. Nevertheless, in most political orders, there is tension between those who value fairness and those who see equality as the foundation of a just society. Maintaining the legitimacy of the order depends on those at the top of the political hierarchy exercising self-restraint and investing their relative largesse in the rest of the political community, so that even those at the bottom of the hierarchy perceive there is more value to working within the order than outside of it. Yet over time elites may begin to pursue their narrow and myopic “self-interest,” instead of its more enlightened form. Craving more wealth, they may begin to flout the rules of norms of an order (rampant tax evasion is one manifestation of narrow self-interest). As elites become less restrained, the rest of the society sees the gap between the principles of a just order and its reality. Appeals to fairness and equality seem mere rhetoric designed to mask the operation of power.

How much light does Lebow’s theory shed on the present moment? This is a fair question to ask. Although his scholarly background is in international relations, Lebow’s book devotes two chapters to what he sees as dangerous fissures in the contemporary American political order. But, if anything, contemporary politics casts a harsh glare on the shortfalls of Lebow’s book. To begin with, there is Lebow’s decision to reduce an order’s legitimating principles to fairness and equity. It seems odd that a constructivist approach—a theoretical tradition usually attuned to cultural variation and complexity—would reduce order to two legitimating principles. Lebow defends the decision by noting that these two principles appear widely across every culture, in every time period, and indeed, even among primates.

Although this claim may seem convincing, part of the ubiquity of these principles stems from the fact that they are defined so broadly. Take, for example, “fairness,” which ultimately seems to refer to any form of legitimation that justifies an unequal distribution of goods on the basis that some actors “contribute” more. This might be a statement of “merit”—those who are competent get more. Or a statement of divine right—those who are born in the lineage of the kings deserve more. Or one of racism and imperialism—those nations that are white, by definition, bear the burden of civilization and thus deserve more.

To be clear, Lebow understands and says outright that many narratives of “fairness” are not actually just. But to analyze all of them as principles of fairness obscures more than it reveals. As noted earlier, Lebow’s analysis of the American political order suggests that the ongoing polarization and fractious politics stem from a division in US society between those who prefer “fairness” to those who want “equality.” But are those currently on the streets rejecting a principle of “fairness”? It seems more likely that protesters suspect that what is presented as a narrative of “fairness”—those who contribute more get more—is based on an assumption that whites contribute more than Black and brown people. It’s not the fairness; it’s the white supremacy. Reducing it to “fairness” leaves us unable to understand the pathways of contestation within the order.

Current politics also raises questions about Lebow’s proposed cause of the breakdown of political orders: the inability of elites and eventually all individuals to exercise self-restraint and contribute public goods toward sustaining the order. Here I suspect there is much that is resonant in Lebow’s argument. Actors of all scholarly and political stripes have bemoaned the turn away from community toward a more individually oriented, “neoliberal” model of politics, where a person’s narrow, parochial, material interest is king. In his study of the United States, Lebow demonstrates this through a content analysis of two types of source material: (1) a series of presidential addresses and (2) music lyrics, drawn from a sampling of Top-100 Billboard-rated songs since the 1950s; the latter analysis shows that, whereas music of the 1950s demonstrated the “highpoint of collective identification,” later lyrics demonstrate “increasing privatism” and deviance from social norms. This shift is unfortunate, he argues, because “self-interest well understood requires people to restrain their appetites and respect reasonable legal and social constraints” (p. 191).

It is this latter empirical analysis, in particular, that gives me pause. The vast majority of lyrics used to demonstrate “privatism” come from hip-hop/R&B. He notes that rappers such as Notorious B.I.G. and Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs violate norms by “making theft and murder important themes in their own right” (p. 192). TLC’s “No Scrubs” is used to show how songs now “regard the impoverishment of others to advance one’s own wealth as acceptable behavior” (p. 193). Songs by Rihanna and Pharrell are used to show how “songs have become focused increasingly on individual short-term sexual gratification, often accompanied by alcohol or other drugs” (p. 192). Lebow’s content analysis, as he describes, relied on a seminar group of eight students at Dartmouth to code the material. He relies on interviews with 30 students at Dartmouth and Kings College London to analyze why these songs were appealing. There is no sense that the students were steeped in the vast literature on these musical genres or were in some other way equipped to decode the language.

Perhaps even more jarring is the fact that this part of Lebow’s chapter contains no citations to scholars who have focused their academic careers on the role hip-hop plays in social and political activism. Although they may not be named Aristotle, it might have been wise to engage with the experts on this subject, such as Michael Jeffries, Imani Perry, and Aisha Durham, just to name a few. Rather than embracing the language of rampant individualism, much of current hip-hop deploys satire and subversion to mobilize a community. Nor is Lebow’s sample representative. If he had looked at the work of KRS-One or Public Enemy a generation ago—or Kendrick Lamar today—he might have drawn very different conclusions about the music’s meaning. Beyond this, scholars of comparative politics have long argued that we can find the roots of social mobilization and collective mobilization against order in coded text. It may be that connection to community—not the rejection—is part of the movement we are seeing today.

What is perhaps most surprising about these oversights is that they seem so inconsistent with Lebow’s own theoretical and epistemological commitments, both in this book and in his corpus as a whole. He has long argued for careful attention to culture in the analysis of human behavior and orders. In this book, he notes the importance of language in both legitimating orders and mobilizing against them. Yet all of this ends up taking a backstage to much thinner conceptions of “justice” and “elite self-restraint”—which is perhaps the result of the ambition of creating a generalizable theory. As scholars push forward the study of political orders, this may underscore the importance of careful attention to variation and context in their rise and fall.