Transcript Slide 1

Violence and Social Orders
John Wallis
University of Maryland
&
NBER
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Violence and Social Orders:
A Conceptual Framework for
Interpreting Recorded Human
History
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and
Barry R. Weingast
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Two Revolutions
• The scale, complexity, and organization of
human societies made decisive leaps forward in
two revolutions:
• The neolithic: 10,000 years ago with the
discovery of agriculture, the emergence of larger
social units, urbanization, and hierarchical
societies.
• The industrial: 200 years ago with the
development of new technologies in energy use
and materials fabrication, nation states,
impersonal exchange, impersonal politics, and
large corporate organizations in the private and
public realm.
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Summary of the argument
• Three distinct social orders
• The limited access order, or natural state,
is a social order in which the political
system manipulates the economic system
to create rents that the political system
uses to sustain order.
• In open access orders, political, economic,
and other forms of competition sustain
order.
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The Concept of Social Orders
• The concept of the social order provides:
- A framework for understanding how
violence is contained.
- A framework within which we can
simultaneously understand the operation of the
political, economic, and other social systems.
- An integrated social science framework.
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The Logic of the Natural State
• The Natural State political system creates
economic rents through limited access and
then uses the rents to sustain order.
• The Natural State is a solution to endemic
violence.
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Natural States
• Natural states create incentive-compatible
agreements among powerful individuals
and groups by recognizing the privileges
of each individual to control valuable
resources, activities, and organizations.
• The interaction of these incentives both
orders the dominant coalition and limits
the use of violence.
• All natural states are limited access
orders.
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Personal and Impersonal
• Natural states build on personal
relationships between individuals with
repeated interaction.
• They also build on unique personal
identities of elites,
• Elite identity is tied to privileges and
organizations, e.g. the Duchy of
Lancaster.
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Two Fundamental Types of Organizations
• Adherent Organizations:
-- Organizations whose internal
arrangements depend only on incentivecompatible, self-enforcing agreements.
• Contractual Organizations:
-- Organizations that utilize third parties to
enforce some or all of their internal
arrangements.
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Adherent Organization
A
B
a
b
a
a
b
b
Contractual
Contractual
The Logic of the Open Access
Order
• Open access orders control violence by
consolidating control of violence in a single
or small number or organizations: military
and police and placing control of the
military in a political organization.
• Then subjecting control of the political
organization to political and economic
competition through open access.
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• Consolidated control of the military is
dangerous.
• Putting the military under the control of a
political process requires the ability to
control the political actors and political
system,
• The political system is subject to
constraints from the economy,
• An open access political system must be
matched with an open access economic
system.
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What is Open Access?
• Not just neo-classical competition
• Organizational tools are well developed
• Organizational tools are available to a
wide class of citizens.
• Open access is not universal access, but
open enough that systematic rent creation
cannot be used to order relationships
between powerful groups.
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The Transition/Doorstep
• The transition process begins in the
natural state.
– The early part of the process must be
consistent with the logic of the natural state.
• Some natural states move to positions in
which moves toward open access can be
sustained.
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Doorstep Conditions
• Rule of law for elites
• Support for perpetual elite organizations
• Political control of the military
• The conditions:
– Must be self-enforcing;
– Create the possibility of impersonal exchange
among elites.
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Development: Economic and Political
• There are two development problems
• The first is development within the natural
state
– This involves changes in the structure of
organizations
• The second is the transition from limited to
open access orders.
– This involves changes in access to
organizations
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Political Economy
• The Weberian state assumption is a real
problem for understanding political
dynamics in most societies.
• Coalitions and organizations are the
elements of a social dynamic, and we
must understand the dynamic
relationships.
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Organization Theory
• Support for organizations are at the heart
of the framework
• Organizations are rarely self-enforcing and
self-sustaining sets of relationships, yet we
have paid relatively little attention to
external supports for organizations.
• Organizations and coalitions, and social
dynamics
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Institutional Economics
• Impersonality versus Anonymity
– Is dealing with people you don’t know the
same as treating everyone the same?
• The relationship between organizations
and institutions.
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Economic History
• What was the transition?
• The transition versus the industrial
revolution
• 19th century versus the 18th century
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