North, Weingast, and Wallis
The most under-rated model of political order
Violence and Social Orders, by Douglass C. North, John J. Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, is a fundamental work of political economy. Much of it rests on the distinction between what they call a limited-access order and an open-access order.
To have order at all, a society needs a mechanism to restrain violence. In a limited-access order (what NWW call “the natural state”), the government is like a crime syndicate. It incorporates any group with a potential for organized violence. It excludes anyone who is not a member of the coalition from obtaining the most valuable economic and political positions in the society. Those who are in the governing coalition benefit sufficiently to not want to disturb the status quo. Those who are outside the coalition are powerless to fight it.
I wrote that here. In a different essay, I wrote
In any society, who is allowed to form an organization that competes with powerful economic and political interests? In their 2009 master work, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast give a striking answer. They say that either almost no one is allowed to form an organization that competes against powerful interests, or almost everyone is allowed to form such an organization. In their terminology, there can be a limited-access order or an open-access order, but nothing in between.
Those essays of mine are worth re-reading. And I also recommend “vibe-reading” Violence and Social Orders itself. By vibe-reading, I mean having a conversation with an AI in which you ask about the main themes in a book. When the AI provides a summary, come up with your own interpretation. Test the validity of your interpretation by offering it to the AI, using examples you develop. Also ask the AI about critiques of the work that it is summarizing.
My reading of NWW leads me to believe:
a libertarian utopia in which the state is small and weak is not possible. A society that can create economic assets will tempt groups to use violence to extract wealth. For order to prevail, such violence must be suppressed. In a limited-access order, the governing coalition is able to extract wealth, but at least there is order in which wealth is created. People outside of the ruling coalition cannot get rich, but at least they can live in peace and security. In an open-access order, less of the available wealth is extracted by those in power, and people outside of the ruling coalition have at least a bit of an opportunity to get rich.
Nation-building will fail. That is, the attempt to impose an open-access order on a country will fail if it has groups that are not willing to refrain from violence.
Our open-access order is robust, in spite of authoritarian inclinations on both the left and the right. We are not going to ban entire classes of people from engaging in political or economic competition.
I think that anyone interested in politics can benefit from absorbing the ideas of North, Weingast, and Wallis. Of all of the works in political theory, I think it is the most under-rated. So I will continue to promote it from time to time.
I think the NWW theory may be the most important development in economic history (no expertise) and social theory (some expertise). The book is incomplete in that it
does not provide a full account of the transition, where it takes place, from closed to open access social orders and how the second type of order produces such extraordinary wealth. John Wallis' book manuscript, Leviathan Denied, addresses this hole in the account.
"a libertarian utopia in which the state is small and weak is not possible."
This reminds me of Arnold's summary of Mark S. Weiner's 2013 The Rule of the Clan:
"1. A decentralized order is possible. Indeed, it is natural for human societies to achieve such an order, rather than degenerate into the Hobbesian war of all against all.
"2. The natural decentralized order is, however, highly illiberal. It requires a set of social norms that bind the individual to the clan. Under the rule of the clan, peace is broken by feuds, commerce is crippled by the inability to put trade with strangers on a contractual basis, and individual autonomy is sacrificed for group solidarity.
"3. In the absence of a strong central state, the rule of the clan is the inevitable result. In order to graduate from the society of Status to the society of Contract, you must have a strong central state."
At the time, he found 3 unpersuasive.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2013/Klingclan.html