Our concluding chapter examines race, civil society, and social movements. What do political actors do when the chain of democratic accountability and responsiveness is broken? How do we understand the origins of protest movements and more radical forms of political participation? How do ordinary citizens in a diverse democracy contest and claim power for the people and effect change?

This chapter summarizes the book and advances a synthetic theory on the development and maintenance of political orders. It argues that theories of political order in general and the state in particular have been one-sided in their emphasis on coercive power and the monopoly of violence. This books shows that coercion and violence must be complemented by consent, co-operation and integration as preconditions of stability in order to create more comprehensive social science theories of political order. Concerning modernity, there was no single path to the secular and egalitarian societies that developed in the West during the twentieth century. We could have ended up with societies that were administratively and technically modern but not egalitarian and democratic. Thereby the book problematizes the idea that premodern and modern forms of political orders are the timeless concepts claimed by modernization theory.