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 dosoin different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence intoalarger social science and historical framework, showing how economicandpolitical behavior are closely linked. Most societies, which wecallnatural states, limit violence by political manipulation of theeconomyto create privileged interests. Theseprivileges limit the use ofviolence by powerful individuals, but doingso hinders both economic andpolitical development. In contrast, modernsocieties create open accessto economic and political organizations,fostering political andeconomic competition. The book provides aframework for understandingthe two types of social orders, why openaccess societies are bothpolitically and economically more developed,and how some 25 countrieshave made the transition between the twotypes.




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

1. "Political andeconomic development appear to have gone hand inhand" and "high incomeand good political institutions are closelyrelated" (p. 2-3). Thisconclusion is obviously falsified by the 7countries/regions (includingoil-rich countries) cited yet ignored bythe book. The relation betweenhigh income and good politicalinstitutions are simply not strongenough. The hasty conclusionreflects the fact that the authors are tooeager to establish a causalrelation between economic development andopen access in politicalcompetition while in fact rule of law and openaccess in economiccompetition are more fundamental (note that not alloil-rich countriesare similarly rich). Even if there is only oneanomaly, "good politicalinstitutions" will be out of the picture as the"common denominator"for economic development. In fact, open politicalcompetition canexplain neither the experience of rich countries, northe experience ofemerging markets.

2. "Impersonally definedaccess (rights) to form organizations is acentral part of open accesssocieties." (p. 7) Yet impersonalcharacteristics may be highlycultural. The discussion of impersonalcharacteristics in a non-culturalcontext demonstrates a regretfulshift of attention from"formal-informal rules-organizations" to"formal rules-organizations" inexplaining institutional changes, whichdeviates the balanced treatmentin the North 1990 framework. In fact,informal rules play a key role inexplaining why various social ordersprogress or regress in differentdirections. The choice of social orderis not only political, but alsocultural. It remains a challenge forinstitutionalists to carry thebalanced logic of their formal frameworkinto their substantiveframework.

3. "All societies face the problem of violence"(p. 13) doesn'tnecessarily mean that controlling violence is the basicproblem of allsocieties. In fact, predation is a broader and moreproper notion, andcontrolling predation (both violent and non-violentpredation) is thekey for all societies because work and predation aretwo basic forms ofhuman effort and non-violent predation becomesincreasingly relevant associeties have turned more complex and violencehas been brought undercontrol. Hence, the focus on "commit to stopfighting" (p. 18) divertsour attention to the distributional predationin open access orders andleads to the negligence of the negativeimpacts of open politicalcompetition on economic growth and civicvirtue.

4. The "endogenous pluralist approach" (p. 128)cannot refute the logicof collective actions and rent-seeking becauseit 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 distributionaladjustment."The competitive process of rent-erosion" (p. 142) inpolitics isneither frictionless nor instant in the neoclassical way,especiallywhen the ideology factor in the competition culture is takenintoaccount. NWW's "idea of an equilibrium set" (p. 141) appears to beanew version of the neoclassical "complete competition" inpolitics.Here, institutional analysis is unfortunately downgraded intoanon-institutional idealistic interpretation. What has been turned"ontheir heads" (p. 140) is not the logic of collective actionsandrent-seeking, but the rigorous and realistic logic of thebalancedideas in North 1990 (North et al 2009 against North 1990).Openpolitical competition becomes the universal remedy of all socialorderproblems. Such a "total solution idea" (instead of a "part oftheproblem idea") eventually fails to see how political competitionisfundamentally different from economic competition (the authors seemstogive up an explicit "theory of double balance" for an integrationofpolitics and economics appeared in an earlier draft). By the way,theongoing worldwide financial crisis is exactly derived from this typeofDarwinian "competition worship" ("animal spirits").

5. Themost intriguing result from the unbalanced non-culturaltreatment andnon-institutional neoclassical inclination is clearlydemonstrated inaddressing the question of "why institutions workdifferently under openaccess than limited access"(p. 137).
6. But equally captivatingis the assertion that transition to openaccess takes "typically aboutfifty years" and that "South Korea andTaiwan's experience seems toparallel that of Europe" (p. 27). Canimpersonal and perpetualinstitutions be impersonally enforcedperpetually under any culturalcontext? Here, the impact of culture onopen access enforcement iscompletely abstracted away, leaving theproblematic experience(especially in Taiwan) unexplained whilethinking wishfully that theshared historical destiny of identical openaccess is inevitablyhappening. In the troubled case in Taiwan, thedifference in the cost oflosing in politics cannot be weighed only bypolitical economy, butshould also be weighed by cultural psychology(Chinese "cult of face")."A deep understanding of change must gobeyond broad generalizations toa specific understanding of thecultural heritage of that particularsociety" (p. 271) remains a lipservice and not actually integrated intothe framework. North appearsto digress from his own "warning" in hisprevious work: "a word ofwarning--although explicit rules provide uswith a basic source ofempirical materials by which to test theperformance of economies undervarying conditions, the degree to whichthese rules have uniquerelationships to performance is limited. Thatis, a mixture of informalnorms, rules, and enforcement characteristicstogether defines thechoice set and results in outcome. Looking only atthe formal rulesthemselves, therefore, gives us an inadequate andfrequently misleadingnotion about the relationship between formalconstraints andperformance."

Institutional analysis ineconomic development appears to continue toremain in its more formaland diagnosis-driven stage. NWW's new attemptfor a substantive andprognosis-driven framework is a milestone thatseems to be unable topoint to a more meaningful direction. Yet, wecannot progress withoutthe type of high level thinking exemplified inthis book. We should allbe grateful to the authors' contribution.