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Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History ReviewThis is a work of historical interpretation. Every age must have its favorite broad-brush, evocative, wide-ranging historical leitmotiv, most of which in retrospect are but political spins on well-known events, and wish-lists for political activity in the present. Think of the Decline and Fall of the..., or Takeoff into Self-Sustained..., or even the Communist Manifesto. Think of the Road to Serfdom and think of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Most such endeavors, when successful, are cultural markers of their epochs, but rarely are more prescient that your average Hollywood blockbuster.
North, Wallis and Weingast (hereafter NWW) offer a story that is indeed a major morality tale of our age: the centrality of the nation state in promoting or hindering economic development. So many countries have made the transition from backwardness to development, more or less in the same way over the past few decades that it has become clear that "politics," not "economics" is the main sticking point in improving the welfare of the poor around the world. NWW claim that the predatory states that feed corrupt elites by exploiting a powerless citizenry are the source of the problem of underdevelopment, and in my opinion, they are correct. They also claim that such predatory states ("natural states" in their vocabulary) are self-reproducing, and make the transition to modernity ("open-access orders") only under highly specific conditions.
The authors of Violence and Social Orders are eminent intellectuals all, one having received a Nobel prize in economics. The book claims novelty in many places, but their general argument, while mostly true, is not at all new, and is not the whole story. North, Wallis and Weingast claim that there have been three distinct forms of human society, hunter-gatherer, the natural state, and the open-access order. All of humanity shared hunter-gatherer status until some 10,000 years ago when an explosion of trade and settled agriculture gave rise to sedentary societies with private property and complex institutions of state and military dedicated to sharing the means of violence used to allow a powerful network of elites to control and exploit the mass of citizens. This new state apparatus was the virtually ubiquitous child of hunter-gather life. About 200 years ago a new form of social order began to pop up here and there, the so-called open access order that relied on meritocracy, science, market competition, and eventually political democracy, to make use of modern industrial and organizational techniques.
All this is true, but Charles Tilly said as much, and with greater nuance and descriptive thickness in his The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Moreover, it is easy to neglect the positive role of the "natural state" in earlier eras in protecting the mass of citizens from brigands and organized mercenary armies, as stressed by J. R. Strayer in his Medieval Origins of the Modern State. NWW are warranted in stressing that the natural state is not an aberration but rather a self-reproducing social formation whose durability is at least as likely as that of the open-access orders that now, perhaps temporarily or perhaps for the foreseeable future, dominate modern life. But this is surely nothing new.
A second strand in NWW's analysis concerns the conditions for a transition from the natural state to the open-access order. They argue that there are in general two stages. The first involves the transformation of state power from personal relations among members of the elites to impersonal institutional relations in which state positions are regularized and bureaucratized, much in the manner described in Weberian sociology and stressed by Parsons in his brilliant, "Evolutionary Universals in Society", American Sociological Review 29,3 (1964):339-357. The second condition is that the dominant elites find it necessary to modernize in order to compete successfully with other states. This element in NWW's theory also has considerable truth, but is hardly new, being a central theme in explaining modernization in Japan, Russia, France, and many other countries.
I think the major weakness in NWW's story is that they have little to say about a central thrust of political development since the advent of open-access orders: the vibrant emancipatory thrust of history leading to representative government, political democracy, civil liberties, freedom of speech and association, and the separation of church and state. In our book Democracy and Capitalism (Basic Books, 1985), Samuel Bowles and I argued that the citizenry of developing states demanded representative government and universal suffrage, and elites reluctantly acquiesced, especially in the face of a new military order in which, because of the development of the hand gun, the standing army replaced elite and mercenary mounted troupes as the most effective instrument of war, and democracy was the price that had to be paid to permit the conscription of standing armies. A less detailed but similar view is voiced by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their recent book, The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: the elites gave democracy to the people out of fear of being swamped by out-and-out revolution. NWW offer the following critique of Acemoglu and Robinson: "Because they are not unified, elites cannot intentionally decide to do anything, let alone decide to share power. Members of the dominant coalition are rarely so unified." (p. 149) This is, after all, a quite pathetic critique. The idea that representative government and democracy are simply necessary elements in a system of impersonal institutions is not in the least credible.
This book is a one-dimensional interpretation of a period in our history that deserves more. You can read this book with profit, but please don't think that it says much new about how we got here in history, and what this book leaves out is at least as important as what it includes.
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