Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
This is an ambitious and thought-provoking study that seeks to account for the marked differences in economic and political development that have emerged among two groups of societies. Drawing on a wealth of anthropological, historical, and other forms of evidence, Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast distinguish between natural states, or limited-access orders, the type of social order that appeared some five to 10 millennia ago, and open-access societies, the social order that emerged in a handful of countries some 200 years ago. Natural states, maintain the authors, privilege some elites with the ability to establish organizations, while open-access societies permit all citizens to join and leave organizations at will. It is because the more fluid social arrangements characteristic of open-access orders foster competition and allow those societies to respond more flexibly to changing conditions, they argue, that those countries have become more stable and wealthier than natural states in which rent creation and limits on competition hinder economic and political development.
What explains why some societies limit and others open access to organizations? The answer lies in the different means that societies have used to confront what the authors consider the central problem facing all societies--limiting and controlling violence. Natural states constrain violence by providing powerful individuals and groups with incentives to refrain from using or threatening to use force. These incentives take the form of access to rents and the ability to form organizations that limit access to valuable resources to members of the dominant coalition. Because elite rents will shrink if violence breaks out, members of the dominant coalition have an incentive to commit to one another to limit violence. The control of violence in open-access societies occurs through the threat of punishment by a state that possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. In these societies, political actors are constrained from using the security forces to coerce others by the ability of other actors to use easily accessed organizations to compete for political control.
Violence and Social Orders joins a number of other prominent scholarly works that have sought to link processes of political and economic development to efforts to manage violence. North, Wallis, and Weingast contribute to this literature by...