Disappointments with Violence and Social Orders

I’m sorry to report back that North, Wallis, and Weingast’s book left me pretty disappointed after the introduction.

The authors sell the book as a really grand and sweeping narrative of all of human history, but then the empirical scope is actually quite narrow once you get started; it’s pretty much all England, France and the United States. If the theory felt really clearly validated by these cases, that would be one thing, but as I read on I felt that I knew less and less about what the theory even was.

I think it’s fair to say that NWW’s driving idea behind the book is that all societies that aren’t basically some form of liberal democracy live under some system of predation from a dominant coalition of violent actors who buy each other off from starting civil wars by maintaining each other’s predatory privileges. That’s a neat and generative idea, but what it means in practice is incredibly mushy, because NWW obviously have to fit an insanely wide number of cases into that same concept. They have to say Babylon and early 2000s Mexico both fit this mold.

To differentiate within these “natural states” they talk about different kinds of institutionalization that can happen. The state itself can become less personalized. Public law can become more binding. The military can be centralized and brought under political control. That’s all true, but at that point, what are we even talking about? Isn’t a society with an impersonal state apparatus under a binding regime of public law with a tightly controlled military an incredibly different thing from a world where there’s a loose coalition of nobles behind a king? How is the shadow of civil war possibly similar between those two cases? Maybe I just didn’t get it, but this felt less plausible to me as I went.

Particularly disappointing for me (though perhaps not for the average reader) was the coverage of political dynamics in open access orders. NWW acknowledge that open-access orders can fall apart, but they give us very little that would predict when they would or wouldn’t and thus the explanation of why they persist feels almost completely lacking. Several times they seem to say that the underlying glue is that small coordinated interests have to compete with each other through elections and often meaningfully defeat each other. They keep saying “Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations Theory would have predicted the US would be dead right now!” The irony of course is that they wrote this book right at the time that sharp people like Ed Glaeser started saying “wow Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations Theory is such a good explanation of why the US is dead right now.”

And those kind of complaints are just about US losing its state capacity and optimal institutions for growth! There’s basically nothing to be said about the risks of mass politics and democratic backsliding. They just say that open access orders are stable because people trying to attack them are unpopular and lose elections. That’s clearly only a little bit true! We’re going to figure out soon enough how true it is in the US. Sadly this book does not give us many tools for thinking through what to expect.