Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Hardcover)

~ Douglass C. North (Author), John Joseph Wallis (Author), Barry R. Weingast (Author) "The task of the social sciences is to explain the performance characteristics of societies through time, including the radical gap in human well-being between rich..." (more)
Key Phrases: open access orders, mature natural states, perpetually lived organization, United States, Doorstep Condition, Western Europe (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This much-anticipated, pioneering, sweeping millennial history explains how the evolution of impersonal and standardized treatment, a rule of law for elites, perpetual forms of organization, and consolidated political control of the military combined to produce the 'open access' logic of rent erosion and economic growth often observed in the modern world. Emphatically multi-causal in approach, the book will persuade all those who want to analyze the complex interactions of beliefs, institutions, and organizations that they have to deal with its arguments." - James Alt, Harvard University

"Why do we obey laws, adhere to rules, and conform to norms? Doug North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast offer a simple, powerful, and compelling answer - disorder and the violence it entails. This book is must-reading for anyone serious about the origins of social order and the reasons for its disintegration." - Stephen Ansolabehere, Harvard University

"A masterful and revealing interpretation of how 'nasty, brutish, and short' became healthy, wealthy, and peaceful and why the transformation occurred in some nations but not in others." - Claudia Goldin, Harvard University

"Violence and Social Orders is a thought-provoking, pioneering, and ambitious study. It should be read by anyone interested in the institutional underpinning of development." - Avner Greif, Stanford University

"This book presents a powerful new theory of the interaction between law, politics, and the structure of power. It is sure to be influential for decades to come." - Daniel Klerman, University of Southern California

"Why are poor countries poor and rich countries rich? North, Wallis, and Weingast explain why - it's the politics stupid! A compelling book for anyone who wants to understand the world." - James A. Robinson, Harvard University

"A major work of great ambition, this book will become a standard reference in any informed discussion on how societies make the transition from anarchy to democracy, and from poverty to wealth." - Dani Rodrik, Harvard University

"Violence and Social Orders expands institutional economics into new realms, presenting an innovative perspective on the organization of pre-modern societies. Anthropologists and other social scientists will find much to think about in this important book." - Michael E. Smith, Arizona State University

"If anyone is iconic in the economic history world Doug North certainly qualifies.... This time, North is joined by two prominent and strong-minded co-authors, John Wallis and Barry Weingast. Their collaboration has been fruitful.... Above all, the notion that one cannot simply 'get rid' of the superficial exterior of natural states and thereby uncover the beating heart of an open access order yearning to be free is the book's most important idea, and profound." - EH.Net

Product Description

All societies must deal with the possibility of violence, and they do so in different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger social science and historical framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked. Most societies, which we call natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of the economy to create privileged interests. These privileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doing so hinders both economic and political development. In contrast, modern societies create open access to economic and political organizations, fostering political and economic competition. The book provides a framework for understanding the two types of social orders, why open access societies are both politically and economically more developed, and how some 25 countries have made the transition between the two types.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 326 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (February 26, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521761735
• ISBN-13: 978-0521761734
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #75,194 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #58 in

  Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Violence in Society

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Conceptual problems of the NWW Conceptual Framework, March 21, 2009

By	Frank S. Fang "Author of 'China Fever'" (Chicago) - See all my reviews

Institutional analysis in Economics has long been waiting for a study that is more substantive than formal and more prognosis-driven than diagnosis-driven. Two landmarks of the more formal and diagnosis-driven study are Douglass North's Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990) and Avner Greif's Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy (2006). Now we have a new landmark of the more substantive and prognosis-driven study--Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (2009) by Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NWW).

In North's Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005), we learned that "there is no set formula for achieving economic development. No economic model can capture the intricacies of economic growth in a particular society. While the sources of productivity growth are well known, the process of economic growth is going to vary with every society, reflecting the diverse cultural heritages and the equally diverse geographic, physical, and economic settings" (North 2005: 165). In Violence and Social Orders, the "set formula for achieving economic development" appears to be eventually found.

The message from this book is: Natural state (fragile, basic, and mature) and open access society are two basic forms of social orders in which violence control is the central problem; the degree of open access to political-economic organizations (impersonality and perpetuality) defines various social orders and their level of social development. In other words, the key message of the Social Orders Framework can be summarized by the "open-access logic": Open access in political-economic competitions drives social development; societies are different simply because they are different in how they provide political-economic access to different social groups.

This review is not intended to add one more to the long list of praising how good this book is. There is no question about the landmark status of this book (exemplified by chapter 5 and 6). My intention is to show its weaknesses so that readers will know there is another way of evaluating the book through a different window.

1. "Political and economic development appear to have gone hand in hand" and "high income and good political institutions are closely related" (p. 2-3). This conclusion is obviously falsified by the 7 countries/regions (including oil-rich countries) cited yet ignored by the book. The relation between high income and good political institutions are simply not strong enough. The hasty conclusion reflects the fact that the authors are too eager to establish a causal relation between economic development and open access in political competition while in fact rule of law and open access in economic competition are more fundamental (note that not all oil-rich countries are similarly rich). Even if there is only one anomaly, "good political institutions" will be out of the picture as the "common denominator" for economic development. In fact, open political competition can explain neither the experience of rich countries, nor the experience of emerging markets.

2. "Impersonally defined access (rights) to form organizations is a central part of open access societies." (p. 7) Yet impersonal characteristics may be highly cultural. The discussion of impersonal characteristics in a non-cultural context demonstrates a regretful shift of attention from "formal-informal rules-organizations" to "formal rules-organizations" in explaining institutional changes, which deviates the balanced treatment in the North 1990 framework. In fact, informal rules play a key role in explaining why various social orders progress or regress in different directions. The choice of social order is not only political, but also cultural. It remains a challenge for institutionalists to carry the balanced logic of their formal framework into their substantive framework.

3. "All societies face the problem of violence" (p. 13) doesn't necessarily mean that controlling violence is the basic problem of all societies. In fact, predation is a broader and more proper notion, and controlling predation (both violent and non-violent predation) is the key for all societies because work and predation are two basic forms of human effort and non-violent predation becomes increasingly relevant as societies have turned more complex and violence has been brought under control. Hence, the focus on "commit to stop fighting" (p. 18) diverts our attention to the distributional predation in open access orders and leads to the negligence of the negative impacts of open political competition on economic growth and civic virtue.

4. The "endogenous pluralist approach" (p. 128) cannot refute the logic of collective actions and rent-seeking because it fails to see that the problem is not about "Schumpeterian incentives" (p. 141) or group "common interests" but about the cost, timeliness, procedural stickiness, and institutional rigidity of distributional adjustment. "The competitive process of rent-erosion" (p. 142) in politics is neither frictionless nor instant in the neoclassical way, especially when the ideology factor in the competition culture is taken into account. NWW's "idea of an equilibrium set" (p. 141) appears to be a new version of the neoclassical "complete competition" in politics. Here, institutional analysis is unfortunately downgraded into a non-institutional idealistic interpretation. What has been turned "on their heads" (p. 140) is not the logic of collective actions and rent-seeking, but the rigorous and realistic logic of the balanced ideas in North 1990 (North et al 2009 against North 1990). Open political competition becomes the universal remedy of all social order problems. Such a "total solution idea" (instead of a "part of the problem idea") eventually fails to see how political competition is fundamentally different from economic competition (the authors seems to give up an explicit "theory of double balance" for an integration of politics and economics appeared in an earlier draft). By the way, the ongoing worldwide financial crisis is exactly derived from this type of Darwinian "competition worship" ("animal spirits").

5. The most intriguing result from the unbalanced non-cultural treatment and non-institutional neoclassical inclination is clearly demonstrated in addressing the question of "why institutions work differently under open access than limited access"(p. 137). The authors take on an outcome-oriented rather than a process-oriented approach for open access and democracy, both of which are not only objectively measurable and conceptually identical to any observers, but also independently determined and irrelevant to any historical-cultural context. Using such outcome-oriented approach, they can easily draw conclusions that natural states' adoption of open access institutions in general and implantation of democratic elections in specific "are likely to work less well" and "may unleash disorder, making the society significantly worse off"(p. 265), all due to the lack of open access institutional environment. The problem of this approach is twofold: First, it falls into a contradiction between outcome and process when asserting that Britain, France, and the US (the first movers) made the transition to open access by mid 19th century (p. 27) and yet "the extension of citizenry" (p. 144) in the US were not completed until 1960s. Second, it fails to respect the historical fact that an open access institutional environment cannot be created before any incremental changes are allowed to happen. It is therefore problematic and unfair from an outcome perspective with the ideal end-result criteria to view all incremental policy advises for "pre-doorstep" natural states as ineffective. After all, if incremental changes did work among the first movers, how come it won't work for late comers? Is open access an imperfect process out of specific public choice or is it a perfect moral state that can be achieved once and for all? Should late comers do nothing (policy changes are not going to work anyway without an open access environment) before the doorstep conditions or an open access environment to happen first? Or is there anything seriously wrong with the outcome approach? The answer should be obvious. Hence, the separation of two development problems, one within the natural state and the other during transition to open access (p. 264), is not valid. The two real development problems are the "pre-open problem" of should political-economic access be open and how should it be open in natural states and the " post-open problem" of how to deal with the crisis and dilemma created by open access in open access societies.

6. But equally captivating is the assertion that transition to open access takes "typically about fifty years" and that "South Korea and Taiwan's experience seems to parallel that of Europe" (p. 27). Can impersonal and perpetual institutions be impersonally enforced perpetually under any cultural context? Here, the impact of culture on open access enforcement is completely abstracted away, leaving the problematic experience (especially in Taiwan) unexplained while thinking wishfully that the shared historical destiny of identical open access is inevitably happening. In the troubled case in Taiwan, the difference in the cost of losing in politics cannot be weighed only by political economy, but should also be weighed by cultural psychology (Chinese "cult of face"). "A deep understanding of change must go beyond broad generalizations to a specific understanding of the cultural heritage of that particular society" (p. 271) remains a lip service and not actually integrated into the framework. North appears to digress from his own "warning" in his previous... Read more ›

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Major breakthrough in socioeconomic analysis, May 23, 2009

By	Frans J. Kok (Chevy Chase, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Rarely does a book shine a bright new light on a set of social, political and economic issues. This book answers questions that we have all contemplated for a long time: why does only 15 percent of the world population enjoy the western standard of living and why did this standard only begin to emerge 200 to 400 years ago? Why did mankind attain almost no economic progress for the first 12,000 years after we changed from hunting and gathering to agriculture? And why has the model of economic growth not been successfully replicated by more societies?

When we grow up in a western society (and I include Japan here) we take our standard of living and our freedom to associate for granted. We do not connect the two. Nor do our collegues, our friends, or our children understand the connection between open access society and our standard of living.

North, Wallis and Weingast with their work "Violence and Social Orders" create a "eureka" moment. They took evidence that we all have been looking at and many have written about and assembled it in a coherent analysis that explains why economic prosperity is so rare in human history and in our world today.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An interdisciplinary look at the state and social order, May 12, 2009

By	Carolina Cavalcante "cmcavalcante" (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In this book, written with non economist authors, another perspective on the state and social order is suggested. In his earlier work North proposed first a limited view on the role of the state in economic development. In his book of 1990 North began to develop a more sophisticated theory of the state in relation to institutional evolution, therefore to economic development. Bringing theoretical news from other disciplines, in his book of 2005 North mixed some ideas from cognitive psychology to its institutional theory. Now in this book written with Wallis and Weingast, North's theory of institutions and the state are mixed with theories of social capital, which brings more complexity to a theory comprised with the realism of its assumptions and more theoretical power to to deal with issues relating to economic development.