【资料名称】：Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History
【资料作者】：Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, Barry R. Weingast
【出版社】：Cambridge University Press
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press

• Number Of Pages:   326
• Publication Date:   2009-02-26
• ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0521761735
• ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780521761734
  

Product Description:

All societies must deal with the possibility of violence, and they doso in different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence intoa larger social science and historical framework, showing how economicand political behavior are closely linked. Most societies, which wecall natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of theeconomy to create privileged interests. Theseprivileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doingso hinders both economic and political development. In contrast, modernsocieties create open access to economic and political organizations,fostering political and economic competition. The book provides aframework for understanding the two types of social orders, why openaccess societies are both politically and economically more developed,and how some 25 countries have made the transition between the twotypes.




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

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

2. "Impersonally defined access (rights) to form organizations is acentral part of open access societies." (p. 7) Yet impersonalcharacteristics may be highly cultural. The discussion of impersonalcharacteristics in a non-cultural context demonstrates a regretfulshift of attention from "formal-informal rules-organizations" to"formal rules-organizations" in explaining institutional changes, whichdeviates the balanced treatment in the North 1990 framework. In fact,informal rules play a key role in explaining why various social ordersprogress or regress in different directions. The choice of social orderis not only political, but also cultural. It remains a challenge forinstitutionalists to carry the balanced logic of their formal frameworkinto their substantive framework.

3. "All societies face the problem of violence" (p. 13) doesn'tnecessarily mean that controlling violence is the basic problem of allsocieties. In fact, predation is a broader and more proper notion, andcontrolling predation (both violent and non-violent predation) is thekey for all societies because work and predation are two basic forms ofhuman effort and non-violent predation becomes increasingly relevant associeties have turned more complex and violence has been brought undercontrol. Hence, the focus on "commit to stop fighting" (p. 18) divertsour attention to the distributional predation in open access orders andleads to the negligence of the negative impacts of open politicalcompetition on economic growth and civic virtue.

4. The "endogenous pluralist approach" (p. 128) cannot refute the logicof collective actions and rent-seeking because it fails to see that theproblem is not about "Schumpeterian incentives" (p. 141) or group"common interests" but about the cost, timeliness, proceduralstickiness, and institutional rigidity of distributional adjustment."The competitive process of rent-erosion" (p. 142) in politics isneither frictionless nor instant in the neoclassical way, especiallywhen the ideology factor in the competition culture is taken intoaccount. NWW's "idea of an equilibrium set" (p. 141) appears to be anew version of the neoclassical "complete competition" in politics.Here, institutional analysis is unfortunately downgraded into anon-institutional idealistic interpretation. What has been turned "ontheir heads" (p. 140) is not the logic of collective actions andrent-seeking, but the rigorous and realistic logic of the balancedideas in North 1990 (North et al 2009 against North 1990). Openpolitical competition becomes the universal remedy of all social orderproblems. Such a "total solution idea" (instead of a "part of theproblem idea") eventually fails to see how political competition isfundamentally different from economic competition (the authors seems togive up an explicit "theory of double balance" for an integration ofpolitics and economics appeared in an earlier draft). By the way, theongoing worldwide financial crisis is exactly derived from this type ofDarwinian "competition worship" ("animal spirits").

5. The most intriguing result from the unbalanced non-culturaltreatment and non-institutional neoclassical inclination is clearlydemonstrated in addressing the question of "why institutions workdifferently under open access than limited access"(p. 137).
6. But equally captivating is the assertion that transition to openaccess takes "typically about fifty years" and that "South Korea andTaiwan's experience seems to parallel that of Europe" (p. 27). Canimpersonal and perpetual institutions be impersonally enforcedperpetually under any cultural context? Here, the impact of culture onopen access enforcement is completely abstracted away, leaving theproblematic experience (especially in Taiwan) unexplained whilethinking wishfully that the shared historical destiny of identical openaccess is inevitably happening. In the troubled case in Taiwan, thedifference in the cost of losing in politics cannot be weighed only bypolitical economy, but should also be weighed by cultural psychology(Chinese "cult of face"). "A deep understanding of change must gobeyond broad generalizations to a specific understanding of thecultural heritage of that particular society" (p. 271) remains a lipservice and not actually integrated into the framework. North appearsto digress from his own "warning" in his previous work: "a word ofwarning--although explicit rules provide us with a basic source ofempirical materials by which to test the performance of economies undervarying conditions, the degree to which these rules have uniquerelationships to performance is limited. That is, a mixture of informalnorms, rules, and enforcement characteristics together defines thechoice set and results in outcome. Looking only at the formal rulesthemselves, therefore, gives us an inadequate and frequently misleadingnotion about the relationship between formal constraints andperformance."

Institutional analysis in economic development appears to continue toremain in its more formal and diagnosis-driven stage. NWW's new attemptfor a substantive and prognosis-driven framework is a milestone thatseems to be unable to point to a more meaningful direction. Yet, wecannot progress without the type of high level thinking exemplified inthis book. We should all be grateful to the authors' contribution.