Customer Reviews

A Theory of the State: Economic Rights, Legal Rights, and the Scope of the State (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

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I'm using Barzel's book , along with a number of other books and professional journal articles, to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the current back-door privatization of a massiv e portion of New Zealand's South Isalnd High Country. I suspect only economists with a strong interest in property rights theory analyzed from the perspective of modern institutional economics will like this book. It's not for the average reader who isn't willing to do some hard slogging to understand key theoretical ideas. But there are few who can match Barzel's understanding of the development of "enforcement" or "governance" institutions that both facilitate - and limit - the potential gains for specialization and exchange that neoclassical economics takes for granted.
Dr John Fountain
Senior lecturer in economics
University of Cantebrury, New Zealand

If you like the fantasy models of economists who know virtually nothing of non-capitalist economies or pre-state societies, this book is for you. If you are interested in actual information (empirical data) on what the earliest states were like, how their economies worked, and how they might have developed, then try some of these works instead:

--- Earle, Timothy (2002) Bronze Age Economics: The Beginnings of Political Economies. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
--- Feinman, Gary M. and Joyce Marcus (editors) (1998) Archaic States. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM.
--- Hansen, Mogens Herman (editor) (2000) A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures. The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen.
--- Johnson, Allen W. and Timothy K. Earle (2000) The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State. 2nd ed. Stanford University Press, Stanford.
--- Smith, Adam T. (2003) The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities. University of California Press, Berkeley.
--- Smith, Michael E. (2004) The Archaeology of Ancient State Economies. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:73-102.
--- Trigger, Bruce G. (2003) Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Cambridge University Press, New York.